Kingdom Hearts Member Review for the PS2

Kingdom Hearts is one of those games you have to play if you own a PS2. Now notice that I didn't say you have to buy it, just experience it, just a little. The visuals are great, combining Final Fantasy and a plethora of Disney characters. This was the real selling point for me, not being the most RPG crazy gamer. Fighting with Goofy, Donald, and other famous Disney characters was fun at first but after a while, it just wasn't enough to keep the ball rolling. The game was overly linear, many a time I found myself totally devoid of any idea of how to finish a level only to later realize that all I needed to do was pull a switch I thought I had already pulled 45 minutes ago.

The music gets a little repetitive, especially when it changes to tell you an enemy is near. Thanks Kingdom Hearts, I didn't realize that 15 floating Heartless just materialized around me and are proceeding to shoot fire, ice, and lightning at me. One thing to note about the voice-overs is that when a character is silent, it does not mean they have nothing to say. The game just couldn't get the right voice actor. I found it very awkward, watching a seen full of talking and action only to see one of the characters on the screen remain silent the whole time. A game with this kind of production level cannot leave stuff like that out. 

The part of this game I really could have done without was flying from world to world. This was something I did not have time for. Also, what about finding over 26 million gummi pieces throughout the game? The only thing I did to build up my ship was to add guns and even that failed to amuse me. Seriously, Gummi ship = way lame.

Fighting was pretty fun; I can handle pressing the attack button 700 times per second. For me it was much more fun than the turn based fighting found in the Final Fantasy games. Buying, upgrading, and creating items was a nice touch, but seemed too shallow of an element; they could have added many more weapons instead of power-up items.

I could go on and on about the little things I find retarded about this game, but in the end I must admit I played it and had some fun doing it. So steal a copy of this game from your friend and experience the world that is Kingdom Hearts