Kingdom Hearts II
Lightning strikes twice.
Published: May 30, 2006
When people first heard the idea of Disney and Square characters inhabiting the same world, most were initially incredulous. Thing is, though, Square's development teams are perhaps the most qualified to make a game like this. They have the talent, and the Final Fantasy games, even with their more realistic look, have always felt like something of a Disney cartoon. That Kingdom Hearts II looks like a digital cartoon is no small complement, but it's absolutely true. This is a game that, despite being simplistic in overall look, is absolutely gorgeous, and one of the best looking games ever to grace the PS2.
Part of it comes down to the detail in characters (most of which are voiced by the original cartoon voices, but more on that in a bit), but there's more to it. Lip synching -- both in the admittedly gorgeous CG cutscenes and the in-game stuff, is great. It's not quite Jak and Daxter quality, (then again, no game is), but it is very, very good. The cartoony look means texture detail isn't a major concern, but the models are dead-on in bringing cel-based animation into 3D. If only all conversions could go this well.
I did have some nitpick issues with stuff like the Tron world, Space Paranoids, being way, way too colorful, but then that's just the 80s nerd in me wishing it could be perfect. All this was outweighed by the sheer scale of some of the battles. Though the worlds themselves are usually no more than a dozen or so areas chained together, the number of enemies that can be put on the screen at the same times numbers in the hundreds. There's actually a part in the game where you fight one thousand enemies, and while I'm not stupid enough to think they were all drawn on the screen at once, you can see hundreds of them at a time, and the framerate rarely -- if ever -- stutters. It's a monumental accomplishment, and one that shows Square Enix still knows how to code things in that other developers could only dream about doing.
The audio is a little more mixed, partly because some of it is so familiar. The menu chimes are the same, and most of the sound effects will be familiar (Square's sound libraries are filled with tons of amazingly soft, almost silky plinks and whooshes, and they're used liberally here), but in the one area where I'd wish things were a little more consistent, the voice acting, they weren't.
This is pure nerd rage here, but hearing Cid turned into some kind of country bumpkin was a bummer, and knowing the original voices for most of the Final Fantasy characters were replaced with the celebs they got to do the Advent Children dub bummed me out a little. Still others were almost painful to hear; getting Cam Clarke to voice the older Simba made him sound like a huge wimp, and there were times when the other fill-in voice actors couldn't quite cut it.
Still, as a whole, if you heard the characters in the Disney movies (or, more accurately, the TV show versions), you'll probably hear them in the game. It's just a bummer to not hear some of the guys that did the voices in the first game coming back to reprise their FF characters.
Kingdom Hearts II is an amazing technical feat, a vast improvement in key areas of the last game, and just a bit too much forced rehashes to keep it from being perfect. As a whole, it doesn't quick have the same impact as the first game, but then that's because the first game was so amazingly good in the first place. It is a very worthy sequel, though, and if you do a little studying on the storyline for Chain of Memories, you're likely to get totally sucked into where the storyline takes you.
After all, that's what RPGs are supposed to do.