Kingdom Hearts (PS2) Review

Date purchased: May 15, 2012
Price paid: $0.00 -- free game in Buy 2 Get 1 Free sale
Dates played: June 22 to Sept. 1, 2020
Playtime: 46h 40m
Date reviewed: Sept. 1, 2020
Date posted: Feb. 19, 2023
Rating: 5/10

Beat it on Normal difficulty.

There are very few ARPGs or Action-Adventures that I've liked, and this did not add to that number.

Other than having to fight with the camera in places, and the completely pointless Gummy Ship aspect, there really wasn't anything bad about this game. I just couldn't really find anything good about it. Having characters that look like Disney characters didn't do anything for me (when I think of Goofy, I think of those Goofy Sports short films and the like, and nothing about him in this game encapsulates what I think of when I think of Goofy; and the same idea with Donald Duck). I've never seen about half of the Disney films referenced in this, so those locations and characters had no connection for me. The Final Fantasy characters are from the games I can't stand or haven't played, so again, no positive for me there.

For probably 90% of the game, the battles were basically mashing the attack button. After running around Traverse Town right at the beginning for a couple hours unsuccessfully finding the boss, I resorted to a walkthrough (and found out that I hadn't entered a specific door in the town to trigger an event) and just followed that through to the end. I highly doubt I would have stuck through to the end otherwise. I found several of the doors/openings you have to go through to be almost impossible to spot, being black on a black background, with the only indication being the name of the next area appearing when you're basically on top of them. There was only one boss that gave me any trouble (I didn't do any of the optional bosses at the end since after 2+ months, which included over a month where I had zero desire to continue playing it, I just wanted to get it over with), and that was because it's a one-on-one battle, so I had to actually do more than just mash attack with a heal spell thrown in here and there. Maybe Expert difficulty is much different, but I have no desire to try. Thankfully, the end boss is extremely easy as the entire battle took me over an hour. Having unskippable cutscenes gets atrocious when there's several minutes of it before boss battles, and you have to sit through it EVERY time if you lose that battle, even after choosing to Continue (I could see it if you choose Load Game, since it would be considered your first time watching it). I understand the re-release made them skippable.

Do people actually enjoy the Gummi Ship space shooter aspect? Except for realizing that I needed to steer around a wormhole to get to one world, after the first couple trips, with the exception of the second trip to the Hollow Bastion where I actually had to avoid a handful of enemies and asteroids, I literally didn't steer and just held down the shoot button and hardly ever took any damage, and no where near enough to where I was in any danger. And that was without ever modifying the ship or building a new one. The only time I spent in the Garage was trying to add Warp Drive, which I gave up on after probably 10 min of not finding the part only to discover that it automatically gets installed.

Another turn off for me is, much like just about every Squaresoft game from this general era (PS1/2) that I've played, their near obsession with mini games. Thankfully, I don't think any of them are necessary to beat the game.