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To recap:
Kingdom Hearts is a disappointing game, offering experiences that can be had in many other places, some of them retailing for only $19.99 at your local Wal-Mart: for frustration in 3D battle, try Devil May Cry, which has substance to match its style; for a deep story with deep characters, just get Final Fantasy VII for PlayStation, or spring an extra twenty bucks for Final Fantasy X, a work of virtuoso development that I hypothesize might have gotten less credit than it really deserved.
Don't feel bad about not purchasing the game -- or its ho-hum original soundtrack, which allows us to clunkily spelunk black-ghoul-infested glowing red-and-purple sinister underwater caves to the bouncing tune of four seconds of "Under the Sea" sealed in an aluminum can (really, Yoko Shimomura, a thirty-second loop of Super Mario RPG's "Battle with an Armed Boss" would have set the mood much more nicely for the entire game); Utada Hikaru's kicking Kingdom Hearts' kicking theme song, "Simple and Clean," can be enjoyed best in Japanese, as "Hikari," following some careful manipulation of WinMX*.
[*editor's note: insert credit does not condone downloading pirated stuff. That doesn't mean we don't do it. We just don't condone it.]
What cramped environments the game offers look good, in a lazy sort of way, much as Disneyworld would look if you were alone, and none of the rides were working. Sure, the main characters are fluidly animated, and the voice acting is beyond admirable.
Still, there is a painful inconsistency present in each storyline sequence; the pauses between characters' lines give the impression of dead air, and reinforce that feeling of being Alone in a Nuclear Disneyworld; that a dialogue-rich sequence will fade out and into text-bubbles on silence is a frustrating reminder that you're playing a game that was designed to earn as much money as possible involving as few real ideas as possible. The gameplay and sidequests are half-assed in their pseudo-innovation, and even dip so low as to pander to its many genres' fans' completist tendencies to an insulting and blocky degree.
Yet, floating adrift in a sea of licenses that may, at some ungodly hour of some ungodly day, be made into games, Kingdom Hearts is not truly "bad." It is remarkably, painfully, deathly average. Given its pedigree, it could have and should have been so much more.
The licenses work to cancel one another out; Square's characters look like caricatures against Disney's wholesomeness; everything feels out of place. I've heard rumors that one of Disney's many guidelines was that Goofy not be allowed to use a bladed weapon, hence his attacking with a shield. When fighting a boss that attacks with a shotgun, this feels awkward. When dying several times in the process of beating such a boss, we don't think, "I want to do that again!" We think, "Maybe if Goofy had a sword, I would have been here an hour ago."
Finishing a Squaresoft game has, until now, immediately filled my head with thoughts of when and how and where I'm going to find the time to start another quest. I did not feel this with Kingdom Hearts, and that might be its biggest failure.
And there you have it. Noble, analytical words from a guy who had been, up until a week ago, hitting his IRC and bashing Kingdom Hearts in such a manner:
*SPOILER!*
AT THE END OF THE GAME SQUALL AND SORA ARE HIDING OUT IN UNCLE SCROOGE'S MONEY BIN AND SQUALL TELLS SORA THAT THEY USED TO LIVE IN THE SAME ORPHANAGE AND SORA USED TO CALL HIM "BIG BROTHER" AND THEY DON'T REMEMBER IT BECAUSE FLYING IN THE GUMMI SHIP ROBS THEM OF THEIR DREAMS AND THEN THE TIME-COMPRESSION BEGINS AND HADES APPEARS AND JUNCTIONS HIMSELF TO GENERAL HEIN AND THEY BOTH START TALKING AND THEY'RE LIKE, "WHOA, WHICH ONE'S THE REAL JAMES WOODS?"
Ahem.
I’d better stop now. I’m giving them fuel for a sequel.
tim rogers has just proven, many times over, that he needs a job or something already
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