now THIS is videogameing, baby! Practically every problem with the first game's presentation is fixed here; the characters are more expressive, there's more than five music tracks, and there's something resembling competent cinematography on display. It's really amazing what three years (and a corporate merger) can do.

Every element of KH2 has the confidence of a sequel, it's easy for me to forget that there was a time that the difference between a first effort and a second could be THIS stark. It's still not quite perfect, it really starts to drag in the middle third once you have to revisit all the Disney worlds and be subjected to just the worst boss fights on planet Earth (many of them subject you to very long "sit around and do nothing until the boss is vulnerable again" segments) but once you hit The Castle That Never was it picks right back up.

I almost dropped a star for that god awful forced Roxas fight that they added for Final Mix though, holy shit what an over-tuned piece of shit. All the Final Mix content is WAY too difficult, even on Standard, but it's mostly excused by being optional, and, therefore, usually post-game content. The only bosses I died to even once were the Roxas fight and the final Xemnas phase, and the Roxas fight alone took 7-8 tries.