The more time passes, the harder it is to wrestle with how weird this game is to recommend. I want to tell all my sweaty action gamers to start on Critical and skip all the cutscenes, and I sincerely believe it’s the way to play, but I also realize that’s not a realistic experience whatsoever lmfao.

That intrusive thought verbalized, it doesn’t change how I feel about the game itself. Not sure I have more to add on top of what I said in this video: https://youtu.be/RYdFpv9Ay7o?si=XKNPVk13CDzhNzn8

I started this game with a hater's killing intent, Final Fantasy simply does not mean anything to me, and I've tended to a garden of dislike for Disney movies from a young age that has blossomed into a forest of disdain as they evolved from saccharine and condescending children's films to emotional therapy for stunted millennials dragging their disinterested kids to watch their dad cry at a cartoon personification of an emotion wiggling it's eyebrows. I had often heard that a 'critical mode level 1' play through was a legendary action game on par with the greats, and had the full bad faith intention of saying this game sucked actually. Unfortunately my faculties are too objective and like the Casu Martz, just because something is conceptually and aesthetically revolting, doesn't mean it's not worth 100 dollars a pound.

Português: ESSE É O JOGO SUPREMO, o ápice máximo e absoluto de toda a ficção, de todas as mídias e de todo entretenimento. Esse jogo foi, é, e vai continuar sendo tão primordial, tão fundamental, e também tão importante na minha vida, que eu não poderia fazer só uma análise chata e cheia de texto, então é isso.
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English: THIS IS THE SUPREME GAME, the maximum and absolute peak of all fiction, of all media, and of all entertainment. This game was, is, and will continue to be so primordial, so fundamental, and also so important in my life, that I couldn't do just a boring, text-filled review, so that's it.

All the flaws surrounding the core game (minigames, narrative, decisions on difficulty, decisions on how to obtain essential movement abilities, and more) have been discussed or are already obvious enough to reiterate on them. The saving grace of KH2, and more in Final Mix, has always been its combat, yet even with some good ideas, it is so feeble that just a bit of observation would tear it apart.

The game has three different types of fights, typical of any melee action (3D) game: mob fights, boss fights and hybrids. The most interesting ones are usually the hybrids, since they are the ones where strategies cannot be so easily reused from battle to battle.

Mob fights start up being quite good, with a basic but effective enemy management exercise that is utterly destroyed by magnet and, especially, the Chicken Little summon. Anyone who has not played the game on Critical Level 1 may be surprised to read that Chicken Little is useful at all, just one of the multiple examples of the game in any other condition being so brainless that about 90% of the fights can be beaten on autopilot.

Boss fights follow your typical melee combat 3D dynamics from every action game since at least twenty years ago. You evade or block the enemy attack and, if done right, you are given a free combo, then repeat until over. Here, as usual with these types of games, both the defensive and offensive options are lacking. What matters the most is that you choose the correct answer from a very limited number of options in enough time, and then the job is done. The way to increase the difficulty is to reduce the timing window when you can respond to the enemy, which results in an empty real time Simon Says, but one that can be so addicting that recently made Sekiro to be wrongly considered one of the greatest action games ever.

The few particularities of the combat system are what demonstrate that the pillars where everything stands are not rigid enough. The most interesting part is the dynamic between magic and drive, two limited resources that can be regained while fighting and that are connected. When you lose all your magic points, you regain it with a cooldown, and in that cooldown time you gain more drive gauge when attacking. And also, drive forms restore your health and magic, so the dynamic is clearly there. However, both magic and drive are uninteresting to use.

Magic will be relegated to very rare conditional usage (aside from: magnet for enemy mobs, reflex for bosses, guess what two magics disappeared in KH3) with cure being the most blatant proof that the system is built into solutions that build on problems creating their own trouble in the way. Acknowledging that nobody used any magic in KH1 aside from cure and maybe aero (it didn’t make practical sense to do anything else), cure now uses all your MP left. In theory, this incentives using more aggressive magic usage, since you still will have cure available. In practice, it results in players running around the arena when permitted until the cure emergency button is available again.

Using cure in level 1, or in more aggressive styles of play, doesn’t make sense, so here is the second real use of MP: limits. Limits consume all your MP in exchange for releasing a chain of attacks (which changes depending on the partner used with, but there is no reason to not abuse Donald Limits when available and the differences are usually of minimal impact) and, more importantly, turn you invulnerable during their execution, probably as a poor excuse of an advantage in order to force you to use them, knowing that the initial idea was not very good.

Drive forms face a similar problem to limits, they are used because they give back an important resource, but none of them are really useful or interesting in combat by themselves, causing you to revert the form as soon as you can (maybe getting in one combo at most). This is due to drive forms taking away your defensive options in most cases (blocking and dodging). The only exception is probably Limit Form, since it is still capable of both, but the only non-conditional useful form being a new addition to Final Mix seems like another patch in something already being recognized as faulty.

Either played more casually, blindly defeating most of the hazards without even thinking about the dangers without appreciating your tools, or in a more hardcore style, turning into an empty elongated reflex test when the go to exploitable strategy cannot be applied, KH2 is a clear failure at an action game, although, I must admit, a convincingly hidden one at first sight.

gameplay wise this is easily a 10/10, it improves the already solid foundation of the original's gameplay tenfold with drive forms, and overall making the game flow really smooth. there was a huge difficulty spike that fucked me up at the end but storywise it felt really slow and boring at the beginning, thankfully it picked up near the end but a lot of the worlds didnt feel as immersive as they did in the first game, and were a lot less interesting aside from the boss battles. everything else is perfect tho

So I replayed this one recently and yeah it's still peak and easily my favorite game of all time.
I could rave about this game all day but man I love it so much. I love everything about this game. The combat, the characters, THE SOUNDTRACK! like holy shit the soundtrack. It's all peak.

This is pretty much better than the first game in almost every way and it's really hard to go back to KH1 after playing this. The combat feels so fast, so fun and so insanely satisfying. Going through the Disney worlds is great and each world is the perfect length and they rarely overstay their welcome. The final world of this game is genuinely peak gaming man. One of the best conclusions to a game I have ever seen.

And I can pretend to not care about the stories of these games but I do ok. They might not be the most well-written games ever. Far from it in fact. But KH2 somehow manages to pull me back in every time. Following Sora's journey and seeing how he interacts and leaves a positive impact on the people around him just makes me happy. The story and overall vibe of this game just fill me with raw emotion in a way that no other game ever has before. Because despite its writing and sometimes convoluted story, something that this game indubitably has is ironically enough: "Heart". Despite how stupid some aspects of the game may seem it wears that fact on its sleeve and runs with it.

And that among other things is to me is what makes these games and this franchise so incredibly special to me. If you have not tried this game, I beg you please do. It's gameplay is fantastic and incredibly fun. And even if you don't care for the story I still urge you to play it because even if you ignore the story entirely these games give off an incredible sense of whimsy that you just cannot find anywhere else...

Kingdom Hearts II is a great example that a game can have several annoying aspects or sections but still be amazing based off of vibe and a good finale. Second visits to each world could be pretty annoying and yet it still never lost me, because the game never fails at feeling engaging in both gameplay and especially in its story and characters. A genuine, absolute joy from beginning to end even despite the annoyances I have with certain sections. Maybe one day I'll come back to fight the superbosses, but for now I look forward to seeing how the games progress from here for myself!

If Kingdom Hearts was about a group of kids who in their yearning to grow up - despite daydreams of a vaster world - had never once imagined a world without each other, Kingdom Hearts II follows up by painting a group of teenagers who have already learnt what departures feel like. As time trickles down, and your mind prepares you for the pain of goodbyes, you begin to already distance yourself before the end has even arrived; the memory of the last thing you ever said to someone being something insincere.
The type of shit that makes me wanna call Square Enix's engineers "Architects". If you didn't lose it at the spear cutting little strands of Axel's hair, you don't love video games. So many people had praised this prologue, but somehow I can't help but think I still underestimated it - this arc aims so high at bringing its evocative, teenage-angst ridden storyboards to life.

Then something strange starts to happen. You just finished a three hour trek through existentialist melodrama, and now you're playing as Sora and friends on another Disney adventure; forget about that other stuff for now. I'm not here to discuss if Kingdom Hearts as a whole is stupid - we've all gone through that already, and I truly do love this series - but it's clear to me that we're growing out of its blueprint here. I wouldn't like to romanticize Kingdom Hearts 1 - the way it implements the storyline into the Disney worlds has always been teasy - but even its emotional scenes fit into the disney-shaped mold of tones better (remember the forced smile scene?). Cashing in on three years of loose ends had a steep price on the series' cohesion.

II's fractured feel doesn't end at the storytelling. Critical Mode - a post-release addition - has this lustrous reputation behind it as a pinnacle-of-the-genre action game. But as someone who decided to follow that fable and play through the game for the first time through critical, it couldn't be less apparent that the game wasn't designed around this difficulty. The way the game is so eager to simplify itself for a cool setpiece, you can tell this game was originally made to let little kids feel cool. The average character action game fan would lose their shit at the amount of distractions at play here; its new core mechanic is advertised as a QTE button. We all saw something special sparkling in its stitched together identity, though. But why?

The Roxas fight was a bit of an eye-opening example for me: shortly into the fight, he uses a desperation attack: shooting instant-death spheres at you for about five seconds straight. I just couldn't figure out how to dodge it, so I searched for runs of the fight on google, and found:
-Using movement options that I hadn't yet unlocked in my playthrough
-I found one video of a dude walking horizontally into the wall to move at slightly less than regular speed, but couldn't replicate it. unserious
-...most of the videos force the game to skip the phase entirely by doing a tight combo sequence that I wasn't skilled enough to replicate either
And so, the solution I ended up using was to simply use an attack that made me fully invincible for ten seconds at a time. Most intelligently designed game's balancing would crumble under the weight of a single move that functions like that even existing. Sora's toolkit has this irresponsibly large volume to it, so something like a Limit being able to exist, and be a well-balanced creative response is a testament to its design.
Just in my experience playing a lot of action games, putting too much emphasis on parries tends to consume more organic, multi-applicable systems - like positioning, or whiff punishing - and place all the weight on memorization. But Final-Mix-on-crit marries it all together with such finesse!! Long-ranged attacks and safer defensive play are both provided via slick management of your remaining Magic, so when you're burnt out of magic, things gets volatile. Dodges and parries gain equally important weight; every second shaved off your magic burn-out is a grasp to pull the momentum back in your direction. While fighting a boss, I'll form an ideal winning run of actions in my head; but there's always some unforeseeable scenario that'll force me to adapt to a different playstyle on the fly. Sometimes overwhelmed by my own range of options, sometimes the invisible numbers of a boss escaping a combo, sometimes literally just RNG. This is the truest definition of the label "Action RPG"

Anyways, it was like 4AM in the morning - it took me all night to finish the final boss sequence - and I'm sitting here, watching that final cutscene. I realized that any cynicism I had in my body had left it at this point. Unremarkable memories wash away as you get older, and sometimes, you don't return to the source of those memories for a long time; most of the longtime Kingdom Hearts fans I've spoken to seem to be perfectly comfortable discarding the "kinda joyless disney story retellings" part of this one from their minds. You could probably call that a "bias", but as I played this, I realized it's only natural to want to reward a project for trying to shoot as high as this one does.. Kingdom Hearts II itself feels like the type of project where everyone on its staff stared at the budget they had been handed to make a Disney game, and realized that if they managed to sneak it in there, they could shove every special idea they ever had into it. Everyone on the staff eventually became in on it. And by the time it was all over, I too, was in on it.

replayed this a while ago but w/e, here's some scattered notes from then:

- don't mind the simple combat system so much (I'm a ys-enjoyer) and I def appreciate the modifiable combos. i like the systems too! think the synergy btwn mp / drive forms / limits and how it restricts your ability to heal is neat

- don't like how much of the combat boils down to abusing limits / summons / reaction commands to deal damage while invulnerable. the former two are particularly egregious thanks to the amount of (nearly) free damage they put out, and when you throw magnet in the mix, most of its encounters become basically nothing. sticks out enough that it's hard for me to understand the appeal when some fans list this as their favorite action game. genuinely curious to know if there's aspects that I'm missing or not considering here

- reactions and limits can be fun tho.. rly love the bit of spectacle at the end w the lasers that I won't describe since this isn't spoiler tagged, but its length is so amazing

- locking movement options behind drive forms was a silly decision and I'd maybe encourage PC playerz to download the mod that unlocks them all from the start, albeit it can supposedly softlock you so be careful... a better mod would unlock each option when you receive its corresponding form. frankly tho, if you're capable of making a simple web search they do not take nearly as much time to grind out as some suggest

- a take on the command menu I saw is that it's basically "realtime atb" and that skillful play is about being able to quickly navigate the menus. for what though, idk. didn't find enough of the magic useful to have to go into them ever, beyond the four slots you can allocate to in the shortcut menu. i'm probably wrong here

- it takes a while for the 1-on-1 fights to get going. have to assume it's for kids first, but I wasn't vibing with the combat until demyx (pt 2), who's about maybe halfway through @ ~20 hours. the few absent silhouettes placed before him seemed to be too early relative to my level at the time of finding each

- boss highlights were: twilight thorn, shadow stalker (& dark thorn), oogie boogie, demyx, xaldin, the experiment, roxas, saix, the blue haired guy

- the intro really is the single narrative highlight. features a better cast than dorky sora and his dorky friends (except for donald and goofy, because they are my friends). funny that the bits immediately after address sora not knowing what an education is as well as him having hit puberty

- fuck port royal

- why is that mickey mouse bullshit in critical mode. kept triggering it on accident. "sora, my turn!" die

- also, since I'm not going to put down anything for kh1, the simple and clean cue when sora breaks off from kairi at the end kicks so much ass. could not stop laughing

- soz to the gummi-heads but PC playerz can also skip the gummi segments (change offset to 0x56454E): https://github.com/S0nzero/KHPCSpeedrunTools/blob/main/2FMMods/scripts/2fmNoGummi.lua

IT'S. PEAK. Absolutely peak. No wonder it's my favorite game of all time, it's a amazing game that i just...can't describe how amazing it is and feels. Everything about it is just perfect. Comparing to the first two kingdom hearts (KH1 and chain of memories) It's a absolute monster and upgrades every aspect possible, the combat is smooth and fast, you feel satisfied as you lend combos and use magic, you can do a lot of tricks just with magic itself, not just swinging your keyblade, the story is easily the best of the series, the only thing i dislike about this masterpiece is the gummi routes, because i'd prefer be playing a shooting than a shooting on a JRPG game, but it's amazing. I absolutely love it!

truly one of the best sequels ever made. kingdom hearts 2 improves massively on every aspect of it’s charming but flawed predecessor. at least on critical, the combat is polished to a sheen, with a really refreshing balance between straight-forward inputs and nuanced resource management. combos are dead simple, but kh2 isn’t really about combos in the first place. instead, the player is forced to consider their resources moment-to-moment, and how to get as much as they can out of everything. a lot of these battles are very tight squeezes (or at least they were for me, as i’m a bit inexperienced w action games), and it’s extremely satisfying to win because of a perfectly timed drive form or clever choice of summon. in this sense, i think KH2 gets a lot of mileage out of its fusion of character action and JRPG mechanics. it’s very approachable on a basic mechanical level, but still offers enough nuance to where players can feel confident that they truly learned a lot about the game’s inner workings over the course of their playthrough. a great rpg is balanced by the player’s knowledge of the game, and a great action game is balanced by the player’s muscle memory of the game, but despite these goals seeming completely adverse to each other, kh2 really manages to combine both into a package that i’m confident would please any fan of either genre. i’m not sure how true this would be on the other difficulties, since critical felt almost exactly perfectly balanced to me, but the good side of this is that the combat fundamentals in kh2 are enjoyable enough on their own that you could really just combo trash mobs for a few hours and have fun. there’s still some fights i think are poorly handled (the final boss being by far the worst fight in the game seems to be a kingdom hearts tradition at this point), but when 95% of the game is THIS fun, i really cannot complain. outside of the combat, i’d still say kh2 is an improvement on the original game, but a more marginal one. gimmick sections don’t run as long and control much better than in kh1, but i wouldn’t really say they’re a highlight. navigating worlds is much less obnoxious because of the increased linearity, but this does come with the trade off of many of these areas feeling like themed hallways. i could see people being turned off by just how direct this game is about what it needs you to do, but honestly, i don’t play these games for environmental gimmicks or platforming, so it just doesn’t bother me. the tighter level design also comes with the benefit of creating more controlled pacing for each world without making each world feel rushed or lacking in content. enemy variety is also very good for the majority of the game, though i did feel that enemies reliant on zoning (mages, snipers) didn’t feel as different from other heartless/nobodies as those enemy types did in kh1. these are very small nitpicks though, the majority of my time in KH2FMCM was an absolute blast.

when it comes to storytelling, i’d also say KH2 is mostly an improvement on KH1, though maybe a little less focused than CoM. the concept of nobodies is a really interesting one, but i think they were either written in a contradictory manner by accident, or the narrative is just unwilling to interrogate their existence. we’re told nobodies are essentially monsters imitating the appearance of humanity, but with the information we get within the narrative, that simply can’t be true. we see time and time again that nobodies are capable of feeling emotion, and are very capable of having human flaws; in everything but name they really may as well be humans, and xemnas makes a fairly strong argument when he questions why sora even cares. sora has a personal connection to the events, sure, but he isn’t aware of that until very late into the story anyways. the organization’s goals are, in my opinion, deeply sympathetic. we know from playing as roxas for the intro how unfair their nonexistence is, we can tell that they’re “real” people in many ways, we see several of them get actual development. it’s strange, because i can’t really tell what they’re trying to get across. if nobodies are really emotionless zombies filled with malice, why go through the effort to make us care about roxas and axel? if they’re human in all but name, why have sora spend the plot trying to kill them mostly just because he was told to by some old wizard? the meaning to sora’s narrative is similarly confusing to me; considering KH1 and CoM were such strongly focused around the development of their main characters, it felt odd to me that I couldn’t really think of a definitive statement KH2 was trying to make when it came to sora. is it about self-acceptance? is it about sora conquering nihilism? i really couldn’t tell you. on the bright side, the disney worlds are far more interesting, and the hints at a greater lore are all really cool. just wish it felt more coherent as a single story.

It's almost impossible to describe the intensity of the pre- Chain of Memories/KH2 hype era. There was no other game I was looking forward to more than this back in '02/03. However, when KH2 finally released, the experience was anticlimactic at best, if anything because of my own unrealistic expectations. The narrative didn't feel as cohesive, the dialogue felt really stiff, and it just didn't have the same charm.

Make no mistakes though, in terms of gameplay and combat, this is the strongest the franchise has ever been. Never has a Kingdom Hearts game's combat felt as fluid and buttery smooth, and if I were a speedrunner type or someone who didn't place emphasis on a game's narrative, it would have hit harder. It didn't help that the original NA release had an almost nonexistent postgame with any real incentives either.

KH2 Final Mix fixes so many of the original's issues in terms of pacing and content, and while KH1 will always be my favorite installment, this version of the game is much more adequate successor.