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 The way the game is so eager to simplify itself for a cool setpiece, you can tell this game was originally made to let little kids feel cool.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.