Kingdom Hearts is good family friendly fun.
Kingdom Hearts is an easy game to get into. The original characters and story didn't exactly grab me, and the Battle system wasn't all the hot either but visiting Disney worlds and finding all the sidequests was really fun and a good challenge. If you're wanting alot of Final Fantasy out of this, then you'll be sorely disappointed. Despite some small dislikes, the game was pretty fun to play.
----------Battle System----------
The battle system is pretty shallow action hack and slash. Anyone can get into this since all you do is hit attack over and over again and occasionally jumping or switching target. The only magic I ever used was Cure, and I rarely had to use Items in battle. From the outside looking in, it might look like a Zelda clone, but this is closer to a platformer than an adventure game like Zelda. The puzzles are simpler, the levels are shorter, there's alot more platforming elements to it.
You fight in a party of 3 the entire game. You control the game as Sora, the keyblade master. Goofy and Donald the Duck are your two other characters, Goofy is strong with a good defense, and Donlad is a great magic user. When you visit other worlds, for example, Nightmare before Christmas, you get the option of subing out a character (either Donald or Goofy) with that character from that world, for this example, Jack from Nightmare before Christmas.
The AI of Donald and Goofy is really good. You'll never have to babysit them or escort them anywhere. They'll heal themselves if they're in trouble, but that can be a problem. They'll heal themselves to much wasting potions. Goofy is the worst about this, he can't keep items in his stash for long.
I had a ton of issues with the camera and targeting system. The camera seems to always give you the wrong angle at the right time. The Target system rarely gives you the enemy you want to target.
Like most RPGs your team gains experience for everything you defeat. Once you gain a level, you'll either raise your Attack power, Defense, Hit Points, Magic Points or Ability Points. Every once in a while you'll also gain an ability. The abilities are a mix of status boosters, combos and new attacks. There's only a few magic abilities in the game, but they can be upgraded about 2 times. The Fairy Godmother will grant you summons aswell, like Bambi, Dumbo and so on. I never had to or wanted to use them.
The sidequests are the best thing about this game. There's a TON of them. You can collect the 101 Dalmations, many Trinity Marks, 4 optional bosses, Ansem reports, 100 Acre Woods (Pooh), Gummi parts, plus many many more.
Overall the game is super simple, that is until you unlock the 4 optional bosses. They might not be on the level the Ultima Weapson in Final Fantasy 7, but they are extremely tough compared to the rest of Kingdom Hearts.
----------Characters / Story----------
The dialog can get totally cringe worthy. The story is a little hard to believe that a 10 year old with a Key for a weapon, and a talking duck and dog can take on Leon (Squall), Cloud and Yuffi from Final Fantasy in battle. This game was mostly Disney with a dash of Final Fantasy tossed in at the last minute. Out of the few Final Fantasy characters in the game, they only used the ones from 7, 8 and a couple from X. The only Disney complaint is; where's the Seven Dwarfs? Snow White is in the game, but the Seven Dwarfs isn't? Doesn't make sense.
I really hated the original characters, they're everything I despise about modern RPGs. Baggy oversized clothes? check. Spikey hair? check. Annoying love interest? check. Arrogance? check. Metrosexual pre-teens? check.
----------Graphics----------
The graphics are just short of being amazing. All the characters are perfectly designed, the enemies look great. There's no slow downs or any bugs I've noticed. The worlds are small, but they have the most important aspects of the worlds and everything looks great within them. The Gummi Ship however looks worse than Star Fox for the SNES. I have no idea why they dumbed down the graphics so much on the Gummi levels. There's only a couple pre-rendered cutscenes, the game is mostly all told with in-game cutscenes.
----------Sound----------
The music is perfect, pure Final Fantasy goodness here with some of the best Disney has to offer. Most of the dialog is voiced over. The Disney characters are great, James Woods does the best job with Hades though. The original characters like Sora, Kiari, and Riku really grate on my nerves. I didn't like the Final Fantasy voice overs, maybe because it's not what I had in my head over the years of what they should sound like.
----------World Map----------
The world map is a dot to dot collection of world in space. To travel to another world, you fly in your Gummi Ship from planet to planet. You manually fly the Gummi Ship to the planets, but it's always a straight line dodging rocks and other ships that rarely if ever shoot at you. You can upgrade your Gummi Ship later into the game to have better defense, offense and speed, but I didn't bother since it took to much time and it was simple enough to complete on my original Gummi Ship. Later on in the game you can warp to the worlds without having to manually fly them, so that makes the game flow alot easier.
There's only one real safe town in the game where theres shops, people to chat with, houses to walk in and monsters won't attack. The rest of the worlds have safe areas and an important house to visit, but no actual shops or people hanging around.
----------Time to Complete Game (second run through, last save before final boss)----------
41:01
The game is roughly about 25 hours long if you rush through it, but if you do everything the game has to offer then you'll get a great experience out of it.
If you beat the game in expert you get to see your final stats. If you beat the game with all the sidequests completed, you get a secret ending.
