This is the greatest game of all time. Nothing compares to it. What other game can merge serious and philosophical themes in a disney kids game? Only one man: Tetsuya Nomura.

The first few hours of this game is some of the finest storytelling in gaming. You open up as this completely new character right off the bat named Roxas. Who is thi guy? Why is he important? Where is Sora? What is happening? Where is this town? What are those white heartless? Who is Axel? Questions just keep piling on and on without any sort of answer until Twilight Town completely deconstructs and reality crumbles down on Roxas as this mysterious boy returns to Sora. This is how you open your fucking game. There's so much mystery to rope you in and trap you. The more you play the more you want all the secrets of this game to be revealed.

The story is dumbassdere at its finest. Nothing makes sense, this game has not only thrown logic out the window entirely but has picked up its mangled corpse and beat it to a bloody pulp. Nomura doesn't even know what logic is, if Nomura thinks something is cool, he is going to shove it in the game, its some fucking Twin Peaks shit. I live for it. Nobody can explain what the fuck any of this shit means. Its beautiful. The game can still be really heavily emotional like Roxas vs. Sora being maybe the most heartbreaking boss fight in all of video game history. The themes in this game touch upon morality; is what Sora doing really right? Xemnas has no ability to process the consequences of what he is doing, his only motivation is to gain something that was ripped away from him. Themes of existentialism: the nobodies entire crusade to collect the drained hearts of the heartless to create Kingdom Hearts and free them all from their curse of existing while non-existance. It contains themes of depression as Roxas and Sora both go through their own internal conflict throughout. The story is perfect and I will not hear otherwise.

The gameplay is beyond fun. No game has ever felt this sleek to me. Everything I do command Sora to do, he does instantly; no clunkyness or unresponsiveness. The games fights flow so well- most boss battles can make 15 minutes feel like 4 with how fast paced and constant everything is. There is so much variety in boss fights with it forcing you to utilize every fighting style. and adapt. Bosses can be both extremely fast paced huge boss vs. Sora relying on using magic and killing the boss as fast as possible or slow methodical fights where waiting for openings instead of relentlessly attacking is preferred. The game has it all. Don't even get me started on Lingering Will. Every enemy and boss in this game is unique, they all have their own personality and abilities to learn and adapt to.

Overall this game fucks. I love it.

The game has a lot of great ideas: stamina, camouflage, and the cure system are all inventive and interesting ideas. They aren't a problem, at least until it becomes clear that all the cure system and stamina does is provide a huge inconvenience that gets more and more annoying as the game progresses. Get hit during a boss fight? Time to, in the middle of the boss, open 3 separate menus, do shit in a correct order, then go back to the boss having all its pace and intensity ruined by the fact you are practically forced to go into the menu and spend 3 minutes doing surgery on yourself. Stamina isn't a bad system except for the fact I can never quite figure out how the fuck the game decides when to deplete it fast and when to slowly. It starts to get in the way of gameplay and creates tedious sidetracks where you shoot a snake every few minutes and open another 4 fucking menus just to eat the fucking thing. I grew to hate these systems that were pretty good ideas. Surely the system would be better if say, you only had to choose what you needed to heal the injury the first time you receive it then you could bind a button or two to performing that surgery once you've gotten it again and it uses the supplies and takes some time to do while not forcing the player to pause. There, its easier, doesn't get in the way of gameplay, and actually increases the intensity since the player needs the time to heal. Was putting it under a bunch of menus really the best way to execute this?

The game story-wise is great, characters are great (especially para-medic), the scenery and level design is mostly fine. It even has some of the highest highs in the series like The Sorrows boss fight(?), the ending, and the motorcycle sequence. It's far from bad and while I don't think it even touches MGS2's quality; it still feels like the ideas and concepts presented in 2 were expanded upon and there was at least clearly an attempt to improve upon the games formula. The problem doesn't come from its ideas, but how they were implemented. There were also some very annoying hitbox issues and sometimes the level design got confusing but I can live with that. It's the poorly handled cure and stamina systems that dampened what was otherwise a great game.

It's not a bad game, far from it. It's not even the worst MGS. But is it the best? No. Not even close.