So I have a bit of a weird history with this game. The first time I tried playing through Kingdom hearts 2: Final Mix I was playing on Critical mode, the hardest difficulty, because the person who was walking me through the series told me it was the only way to play the game. This ultimately did not pan out and I put the game down for about a year where I then picked it up again and started a new file, still on critical mode because I was still being pushed in this direction. This scenario happened two more times until I kind of just, gave up and didn't really have a desire to play the game again. Then Sora in smash happened and I figured I might as well give the game another shot but on my terms (standard/normal mode), and oh my god I am so glad I did because this game is incredible.

To explain quickly, Kingdom Hearts 2: Final Mix is a game that mixes elements of Final Fantasy with classic Disney movies and then interconnects them with their own original plot. The plot of the series up to this point follows Sora, a boy from a place called the Destiny Islands, as he tries to find his friends Riku and Kairi after they all got separated and flung across the multiverse due to an invasion by the heartless, which are beings made of hearts corrupted by darkness that are trying to consume other hearts in order to make Kingdom Hearts; which is effectively the coalescence of hearts into an extremely powerful heart. After joining up with Donald and Goofy, Sora managed to stop the villain of the first game, Ansem, from creating Kingdom Hearts but unfortunately was not able to go back with his friends. Which lead to the events of Chain of memories where he got trapped in a castle and lost his memories prior to Kingdom hearts 2. From here on out I will be talking about spoilers for the general plot and one main plotline of Kingdom Hearts 2 so be warned if you care about any big plot spoilers.

The story of this game is something I was blown away by because despite how silly the game can be conceptually, it actually does a lot with its plot that I found really interesting and engaging. The game mostly follows Sora as he reawakens and has to set out with Donald and Goofy to find his friends, King Mickey, and stop a new group of bad guys knows as Organization 13 that are using new creatures called Nobodies (essentially the opposite of a heartless, where instead of being a corrupted heart it is a body without a heart that is created when someone who is strong of heart becomes a heartless) in order to defeat more and more Heartless in order to help their master, Xehanort/Xemnas create his own Kingdom Hearts. The game does a lot of things that I found really interesting with this premise and I enjoyed seeing how all these plans of the Organization members played out over the various Disney worlds plus the one Final Fantasy world. Though, nothing in the game stood out quite as much for me as the Roxas plotline did.

To explain, at the beginning of the game instead of jumping right in as Sora you play as Roxas, a young boy living in a place called Twilight town that is just trying to enjoy the rest of his summer vacation with his friends. Roxas later disappears as you awaken Sora, and throughout the game several members of the Organization refer to Sora as Roxas, which points towards an the idea of Roxas being Sora's nobody. This is of course later revealed to be the case. There are two really great scenes between Roxas and Sora that revolve around this plot; both before and after Sora learns of this and both of them are just downright incredible at portraying who Roxas is as their own person, even if they originally are just part of Sora. The moment that really solidified Roxas as an amazing character and the plot revolving around them as one of my favorite things about this game had to be the scene where Roxas and Axel talked atop the clocktower in Twilight Town. Not going to go into too much detail but this scene does such a great job of conveying who Roxas and Axel are as characters and how much their connection means to them even if they don't have hearts or emotions. It's such a well crafted scene that really lets the both of them shine and is way more emotional than I thought a game mixing Disney and Final Fantasy could be.

On that note, if there's one thing this game does shockingly well its its emotional beats. This is a bit of a personal thing but I am not usually one to get teary eyed over media. It has happened to me a few times but never more than once in most works. Somehow though this game got me to tear up four or five times which is surprising to me. If you had told me a month ago that I would have been emotionally messed up due to a scene of Winne the Pooh and Sora having a chat I wouldn't have believed you but here we are. Being a bit more serious though I do think this game does have a very good sense of how to do emotional scenes despite how silly the game itself is. For the most part anyway, the Goofy "death" scene was played weirdly straight for something that was very obviously not going to result in a death. That aside though moments such as the clocktower conversation between Axel and Roxas, Axel's death, and the entire ending sequence from the moment you hit the point of no return all just really hit me emotionally and I'm impressed with them for being able to pull off legitimately incredible emotional beats in a game where you watch Goofy get hit in the head with a rock and then "die" in a scene that's treated extremely seriously.

Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix is one of those rare games where Everything works in just the right way so that it makes a truly bizarre experience that doesn't feel like it should work become an insanely enjoyable experience. I've never been a big disney guy so a lot of that aspect of this crossover was lost on me, and I can't help thinking about how weird this entire thing is when I take a step back from it, but I think for me at least that does add a lot of the charm to this game. Like, having a realistic Captain Jack Sparrow next to some giant edgy heartless, a cartoony human Sora, and then just Donald and Goofy from the Mickey Mouse cartoons is so bizarre conceptually that I can't help but love it. However, besides the bizarreness of it I do think a large part of what makes me love this game is its combat system.

I feel like this game's combat is vastly improved over Kingdom Hearts 1's style of gameplay and basically refined what the first game did into something truly magical. Not only do actions and the abilities you unlock all around feel better to use and to chain into each other, but it all feels so much faster and more fluid in a way that made me really want to master combos and discover new ways to chain my moves together in order to get the highest amount of damage done to enemies in one combo. This mixed with a really nice chain of progression for unlocking and picking moves (which I will touch more on in a bit) makes a great basis for combat, that is also further improved by the things this game adds to spice it up.

One such thing is the reaction command system, which are effectively quick time event counters that give you really cool cutscenes as rewards for pulling them off. What I think really works about these are two main factors, those being the sheer number of them and also how balanced they feel in terms of how they function. On the first point I think the fact that almost every single boss, heartless, and nobody in the game has special reaction commands that are just for them and can only be done on them really adds to the experience because it makes each of them feel unique. It really makes it feel a lot more special to use than a standard "press square to counter" type situation and I really appreciate that. Now as for the second point, I think with almost all of the reaction commands they balanced the amount of cool cutscenes versus player having to get involved and press something just right as to where it keeps you waiting for the next chance to push the button but still gives you more than enough time to see something fun over just spamming buttons continuously the entire time. I'm kind of surprised this isn't something that caught on with other action games, since this seems like a perfect way to balance quick time events and make them feel enjoyable for the player in my opinion.

Part of this game's combat that also really shines through in my opinion is the drive form feature, which once you get enough points in your meter allows you to enter a form using either Donald, Goofy, or both in order to boost an aspect of your stats; or just all of them with some of the later forms. There are five selectable forms that you can get throughout the game, known as Valor, Wisdom, master, limit, and final forms. These really add a lot to combat to make the player feel strong while also allowing you to choose which stats to boost depending on the situation you're in. The thing that I find really cool about these is that while you do get better and better forms as the game goes on there is still a sense of balance to them that keeps them from being an instant win button. The most readily apparent part of this balance is the inclusion of Anti form, which unlike the other forms activates on a hidden meter depending on how much you use the other drive forms (minus final form) and will have a chance to activate instead of the form you select at higher parts of the anti meter. It adds a really cool risk and reward system to the drive forms for most of the game and keeps you from just abusing the drive ability to plow through every fight. That being said anti form isn't a push over either, since in that form you still do massive amounts of damage easily; you just have to be careful because you don't have access to party members, healing or reaction commands in that form.

The other neat way of balancing these movesets was how they function in terms of moveset. Each form has a different combat moveset for Sora to use that I found were more useful in some situations over others, such as Valor form being more useful for one on one fights over Master form which felt like it was much better suited for fighting groups of enemies. This balance is kept throughout the game between the four forms you get throughout the main story and I think it does a good job of incentivizing using the different forms in different situations. The only one that kind of breaks this is final form, which is pretty much just better master form and better than the rest of the forms at pretty much everything while also removing the anti form penalty entirely. However I don't hold that against the game since its something you have to go out of your way to unlock and isn't possible to unlock until right at the very end of the game, so at that point its more or less just a fun thing that you can use to bring some real carnage to the final area of the game.

Another really cool aspect of the drive forms is that you unlock better versions of movement abilities for normal Sora, which brings me to this game's level up system. So you have traditional level ups based on exp like in most rpg's but you also get a really cool feature where even when you unlock new abilities you have to manage which ones you can use based on how many ability points, or AP for short, that you have. The AP system feels really interesting to me because it really makes you weigh your options and choose the skills and abilities that would best fit your current situation or plan out how you're going to spend your limited points to build out Sora. It feels like a really unique way of doing a skill tree type unlock system but in a way that isn't just following branches down a path and more just letting you full pick and choose how you want Sora to feel and play with his moves as you gather more over the course of the story.

Speaking of the story again because I couldn't find a good place to put it otherwise, but this game included the plot of Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar which I find extremely funny because I never thought anything would reference the shitty direct to dvd sequels a lot of the disney animated movies got so this game is perfect for that alone.

One other thing I did want to point out that I thought was really well done was the aesthetics of each world. Something that I think is nice about the game's format of traveling between several Disney worlds is that you get so many different aesthetics and designs for areas and I think its really cool how the game ties them all together. A subset of this that is super cool to me is when Sora and the rest of the gang get specific designs that coincide with the world. Like them getting halloween and christmas outfits in Halloween town and Christmas town, or their animal forms in the Lion King world. Another aspect of this that I really enjoy is the keyblade design. Since each world has its own keyblade that you can acquire through finishing stages of the quests there you get world specific keyblades along with a few other story specific ones. I got to say I do really appreciate them making Keyblades that are based entirely within the aesthetic of that world while also making them still look like keys somehow. Not really much more to say on this aspect I just find it neat.

A final note before wrapping things up, this game's soundtrack is killer. So many incredible songs play throughout the game like Sanctuary, the 13th Reflection, Sacred Moon, Rage Awakened, The Other Promise, Fate of the Unknown, Darkness of the Unknown, and so many more are just absolute bangers. This is one of those games where even if you don't end up playing it at least check out the soundtrack, it has some amazing music.

Ultimately I'd say this game feels like a passion project. There is so much love poured into every aspect of this game that I was not expecting to find in here. I also wasn't expecting to like this anywhere near as much as I did after my initial repeated struggles with the game but I'm glad I came back to this and gave it a fair shot. Who knows, maybe I'll even go back and try it on critical mode now that I understand how the game works and have played it fully. This game definitely lives up to the hype and acclaim its built up over the years and I can't wait to check out the rest of the franchise at some point now that I'm done with this. Seriously, go play this game. Anyway, that's enough rambling from me. Hope you got all this memorized.

10/10