Kingdom Hearts
I am the Keymaster

Review by Chi Phan

How does Kingdom Hearts stack up amongs other Square games? Better than most but not as good as the new FF games with the exception of FF9. The thing that hurt this game overall is probably it's storyline. So as always I'll break it down to what I like and don't like about this game. Remember to send all hate mails to kiss my ass.com.

Do you believe in love? Where's Mickey? The story starts off on a little island called Destiny Island. Here a group of young kids about 6 of them seem to be hanging out. There don't seem to be any other adults or other people on this island at all. Other than the name of the island, we don't know much about this world or the island itself. Anyways here 3 kids named Sora, Riku, and Kairi, out of the 6 kids in total are preparing for their trip off the island. See these kids have been wondering since their childhood what the rest of the world is like out there so finally the day has come that these 3 kids decide to built a raft and go exploring. As the night before the trio decide to set sail, the island was invaded by strange dark creatures called the Heartless. These creatures came out of small black wormholes that are appearing everywhere throughout the island. The Heartless began attacking Sora who was awaken during his sleep. Sora then venture outside in the night looking for his 3 close friends. Sora couldn't find Kairi but he was finally able to find Riku during the night attack. As the 2 friends quickly reunited, they were then dragged into a black wormhole by the Heartless. Sora soon awaken after the night attack to a new surrounding. In fact a new world and place called Traverse Town. Again the Heartless seem to have taken over this town and are attacking everywhere. But to Sora surprised, a weapon mysteriously appeared in his hand allowing him and giving him the means to destroy the Heartless. What is this mysterious weapon? It's called a Keyblade. During the fight against the Heartless in Traverse Town, Sora met up with Goofy and Donald. During the meeting, Goofy and Donald explained to Sora that they are on a mission from their king, Mickey. The mission is to seek out and accompany the bearer of the Keyblade. Guess who's the bearer of the Keyblade? Sora. See, in the Kingdom of whatever Goofy and Donald are from, their king, Mickey, has discovered a problem in the all mighty cosmic. Gateways from different dimensions to different worlds are opening up and creatures known as the Heartless are coming through these gateways. As well as people from different worlds are being pulled out of their worlds and trapped in other worlds. Sora is one of them. This is not good for the universe. King Mickey has disappeared on a mission of his own to find a solution to stopped the impending doom. In the meantime, Mickey has left an order to Goofy and Donald to find the Keyblade and one who can wield it. As you see the Keyblade is the tool needed to locked the Gateways of different worlds. So with Sora being the bearer of the Keyblade, Goofy and Donald decides to team up with him to help search for the missing King as well as to lock the different Gateways. Sora on the other hand is lost in a different world with his 2 friends being lost out there as well. And with the help of Goofy and Donald, he set out to find his 2 missing friends and to seal the open Gateways. So in essence, the plotlines and quest is to search for Riku, Kairi, and King Mickey as well as to seal the open Gateways. Now the basic plot and quest seem to be pretty good. Unfortunately is stops there. The overall story is stuck in some muddless quicksand. The story have a very hard time defining what the Heartless are and where they came found. They also fail to explain the overall universe of Kingdom Hearts and the different worlds. You tend to get more confused by the story as the more you get into it. It's almost as if the story was poorly concieved just so Square can find a way to bring the different worlds of Disney together with the different FF characters. In the end, I wasn't interested in Kingdom Hearts story at all. Maybe because the game didn't care to explain much about the worlds that you travel around in. It's great to see the various Disney worlds and characters making cameos but it's more dressing than anything with solid substance. Easy to know the plot but hard to follow the story.

I'm looking for a girl.. Quantity does not equal quality. That phrase comes to mind. This game presents to us a large varieties of various Disney characters from their popular line up of animation movies released through the century. Pretty much all key Disney characters are present in this game. If that's not enough, the game will give us some FF characters from the new generations of FF games. FF7, FF8, and FF10 all have some characters representing them in this game. With the exception of FF9 who's characters are totally absent in this game. Then you have the 3 new original characters name Sora, Riku, and Kairi. So quantity is there. And now for the quality. Of the three new characters, the game pretty much focusses on Sora and Riku. Kairi hardly have much of a role in this game at all. Of the Disney characters, Goofy and Donald are up front and center. The FF characters are present but they don't have much of a real role in this game. I'll discuss the FF characters later on. Now in terms of characters background developement. There's really not much at all. We know who Sora is but we don't know anything about his parents or the place he's from other than the name of his island. We know that Sora seem to have a crush on Kairi and is good friends with Riku but that's about it. You basically have 3 kids growing up on an island all by themselves? How's that possible? Where are the adults? See what I'm getting at. Then we come to the key Disney characters like Donald and Goofy. We know who Donald and Goofy are but what kingdom are they from? And anything about their famous King, Mickey Mouse. Again there's a lack of developement there. The main characters do have personality but they just lack the background developement on who they are and where they are from to make them really good characters. And now with the FF characters. Developement for the FF characters are so vague and they play a role in this game to the point of pointless. Yes despite all the hoopla surrounding a cross over with Disney and FF characters. The FF characters themselves really serve no point in the game at all in terms of storyline. Case in point. Tidus, Wakka, and Selphie have really absolutely nothing to do with the game at all. You can erase their names from the game and it will have absolutely no effect on the game or story. The same can pretty much applies to the other FF characters. Another point and misconception is that even though they have the same name and looks of their counterpart, these are not the same FF characters in the FF games. Despite what you may hear or believe. Kingdom Hearts pretty much borrow the looks and name of the FF characters from the FF series but not the actually character themselves. Yes Cloud looks like Cloud but not the real Cloud of FF7. I hardly think you can beat Cloud on the first meeting if that was the real Cloud. The same can be said of Squall. While Selphie is young, I hardly think she's looks like 13 year old. The same can be said of Tidus, Wakka, and all the other FF characters. Every one of the FF characters look like teeny bopper with the average age of 12 or 13 with the exception of Cloud and Squall. It's too bad that they aren't the real FF characters from the FF games. And if they are then the game doesn't give us enough details for us to make that assumption. Again back to the lack of developement. Overall, a large good selection of characters but lack of developement on all of them.

Hi-five Genie! The graphics are very good. It's a blend of 3-D smooth polygon FF world mixed in with a Disney animation world. The rendering of the world is done very beautifully with a rich array of excellent colors borrowed from the Disney world. The character designs of the Disney characters are done very smoothly and nicely through animation which makes them truely looking like the way they looked on the Disney animation movies. The FF characters are a little bit different. While the FF characters are done nicely, they are made into looking too much like Disney characters which I disagree with. All FF characters in this game look like a bunch of teeny boppers with the exception of Cloud and Squall. Again this is only a disagreement with the character design and not with the actual graphic. The entire game pretty much looks like a beautiful Disney animation movie. And for that, great points as I believe that's what this game was trying to achieve in the visual department to begin with. And have achieved it excellently.

Sephiroth has nothing on me! Music wise I'm not into this game as much. Don't get me wrong. There's lot of unique musical scores but none of them really appeal to me except for Sephiroth beehoven/opera theme. The main theme is called Simple & Clean which is a Japanese pop tune. But to me the song is annoying and doesn't fit the game. There are of course numerous tunes for different places and characters. Some good and some are okay. Nothing that is spectacular in the line of the FF games though. But that's just me. Now don't get me wrong. The music is better than most rpg games out there but it's not one that is on par to the FF series. The sound in this game is excellent. From the sound of water dripping in the sewer to the sound of the jungles. And finally the voice acting is excellent. Of course you can't expect any less when you have season actors from the big movie screen to the tv screen providing voices for some of the characters in this game. Some key names providing voices include, Haley Joel Osment (A.I & Sixth Sense), Mandy Moore (MTV), Lance Bass (N'sync), David Boreanaz (Angel) and many more. To simply put, probably the best voice overs in any rpg game. You can clearly tell that this is an rpg made for the american audience. I would rate the music a 7 or so but added 2 extra huge points for the voice acting for a 9 out of 10. I still think the overall music could be better. Especially when you are using Disney trademark theme and characters. And we all know Disney can make great music as seen in their movies. Why Square didn't ask Disney for some help in the music department is beyond me.

Is this a dream? I will find you again. Game Information    Genre: Action Rpg    Publisher: Squaresoft    Disc: 1 Disc DVD    Memory: 132 KB    Players: 1 Player Mode    Vibration: Yes    Dual Analog: Yes    Digital Control: Yes    Rating: Everyone    Release: September 2002 Gamplay wise..one of the best and addictive action rpg game that I've played in a long time. There's some unique stuff as well as some stuff that have been feature in other action rpg games before. Like with most action rpg game, it's a hack and slash style of game. It's not random battles but enemies do start to popped up as you enter a specific area. Once the enemies appears, you can just run by them or hack and slash to kill them. Each time an enemy is killed, they burst into either HP, MP, Mummi bubbles. Hp bubble replenishes your HP bar, MP bubbles replenishes your MP bar and Mummie bubbles replenishes your money. By defeating enemies, you gain experience. Once you reach certain levels, you will learn different fighting skills. You can then equiped these fighting skills to help you in battles. Of course equipping and using fighting skills will eat up AP. So what fighting skills you can equipped depends on the what your AP max is. You can also learn different fighting skills by defeating certain bosses. Such an example is learning Sonic Blade by defeating Cloud. Next to fighting skills, you have elemental magic. The usual suspects are fire, ice, wind, ect. As you progress deeper into the game, your magic level will rise. Another unique thing is Summon spells. Summon spells are base on Disney characters such as Dumbo and Genie. You can gain summon spells as part of the story or by acquiring them through certain items and then releasing the Disney characters. The basic glist of the gameplay is to use your average hack/slash move, magic, summon, special moves, and items. It's quite addictive and fun. And depending on what game mode, it can be easy or hard. Donald and Goofy are your party members. Depending on what Disney World you are at, you can also get guest star Disney characters as party members. You can't control the action of your party members directly but you can assign them the type of action they will commit more to. Whether that action is to be more of an offensive attack or a balance attack. To my surprise, the computer controls your party members quite well and they are quite helpful to you. Battles take place in a 3-D environment world. In fact the gameplay is a 3-D environment so when you move around the world of Kingdom Hearts, everything is 3-D. Unfortunately when you have a 3-D environment, you have to provide good use of camera angles to make movements more better and manageable. Something that this game fail to do. The only drawback is the crappy camera angles that makes jumping and running from platform to platform very annoying at times. Still it's a small annoyance at best. Now each stage or clearing of each stage is base on a Disney movie world. You clear the stage by defeating the boss of that stage and then sealing the keyhole of that stage. Once done, you progress to the next world. Traveling to the next world is very easy. You can just warp to the next world or fly to that world in your gummi ship. Your basic Gummi ship is really the ship and Goofy and Donald came in. When you fly to a world. You basically have this screen where your Gummi ship is made of blocks. And as you travel through space, you are confronted by obstacles such as meteors and alien ships flying by shooting at you. Your objective is to fly to your destination with your ship intact. You can do this by avoiding the obstacles or by blowing them away. This is like a little mini game. Fun at first but get's boring after awhile. The gameplay also involve building your own Gummi ship out of blueprints or from scratch using various blocks. Unfortunately for me, I found out that I really suck at building Gummi ships so I just plain skip it. Good thing is that building Gummi ships have nothing to do with the storyline and you don't get any good reward for it. So I didn't really care for the creating your own Gummi ship feature. Lastly a key feature is synthesizing weapons and accessories. You can buy your weapons and items from shop but to get really rare and good items and weapons. You need to synthesize for them with rare materials. You can only get these rare materials when you defeat monsters and they sometime will drop them. This is so annoying but can be really worth it. While synthesizing can result in getting the best weapon for Sora, trying to collect all the rare materials needed to is so hard and will take literally hours to do. Something that will frustrate most gamers. Even me. I'm not an instruction book but I have listed and detailed the main concept of Kingdom Hearts gameplay. I find the game very enjoyable to play and I didn't mind fighting all the times cause it's actually fun to fight. I would give a 10 but I minus 1 point due to the crappy camera angle.

Score: 9/10

The journey is only beginning.. In terms of extras, this game got alot. There are mini games throughout the game that you can play over and over to win prizes. There are extra hidden bosses to fight. Up to 4 hidden bosses. There's also numerous various tournaments that you can take part in to get rare prizes as well as some more hidden bosses. So there are extras to keep you busy for sure. You can also get and view a rare FMV video of a sneak peek at a possible Kingdom Hearts 2 Replays? Well sure there's replay value. You get a normal mode which beginner gamers can tryout. Then you have the expert mode. Now after finishing the expert mode, you can also get the expert mode plus which is even harder. So the replay is there. Overall great extra and replay value.

In the end, a very enjoyable game to play and a good time all around. The only major disappointment comes from the lack for a truly solid compelling storyline that uses Final Fantasy characters much better to go with the great gameplay and characters that are featured in this game. Another downer is that the game is quite short outside of the sidequest, mini games, and hidden bosses. If you're in the holiday shopping mood then Kingdom Hearts is a game that should be on your shopping list but don't expect it to be a major FF cross over. Buy it for a good Disney rpg game as that's what it really is. Final Score: 8.8/10 Time to complete: about 40 hours game. Difficulty: normal to hard Favorite character: Donald Coolest guest character: Cloud Best music theme: Sephiroth Waste of good character: All the FF characters Most useful magic: Cure Spell Best fighter: Sora Worst fighter: Donald Best summon: Genie Useless summon: Simba Best advice: Pick the staff as your weapon Also try: Final Fantasy X Up next: Grandia Xtreme

STORY A complex and sometime confusing story that didn't explain about the world of Kingdom Hearts and the Heartless. 7 CHARACTERS Excellent features of numerous Disney and Final Fantasy characters. But most of them lack key character developement. 8 GRAPHICS One of the best 3-D Disney animation graphics by far. You truly are in the world of Walt Disney. 10 MUSIC/SOUND A good number of tunes followed by excellent sound effects. Not to mention the best voice acting in any rpg game ever. 9 GAMEPLAY A cutting edge hack and slash action rpg gameplay that is just plain fun and addictive. 10 EXTRAS/REPLAY Extra bosses, side quests, mini games, and different game modes. Everything you can ask for. 10