Gamer Review - Kingdom Hearts

Feeling stuck on a small island, three faithful friends, Kairi, Riku, and Sora have high hopes for something more than what their island can provide. Though they live in every vacationer's dream island, the curiosity of what lies beyond their shores frustrates them, later tearing them apart. The simplistic life they start off with doesn't last forever.

Despite being broken apart, Kairi, Riku, and Sora go on adventure of their life. However, they do not make these travels forever. The lead hero, Sora, teams up with Goofy and Donald. Together the three travel between worlds, from swimming under the sea with Ariel in Atlantica all the way to flying across Neverland with Peter Pan. Kingdom Hearts is the complete formula of when Final Fantasy and Disney combine!

Graphics

Though Kingdom Hearts only has full movies at the beginning and the end, the game is not cut short on graphics. Often times, games are glamorized only by what their movies look like. Then when the game is played, the player is let down by poor graphics after the opening movie.

This is not the case with Kingdom Hearts. What you see is what you get. The graphics are always colorful, detailed. They fully animate battle movies, magic, and facial expressions beautifully. The screen shots you see are most likely not screen shots of just the movie, but the actual game. So if you like what you see then you'll like what you get.

Music and Sounds

Each town and world you enter has its own theme songs. No song overlaps the other from world to world. Still, if you listen close some of them sound close to the main Traverse Town theme as if it's a remix with a Disney twist. The music keeps the Disney feel as you can almost sing to, "Under the Sea" as you are in Altantica. Another great quality about this game is the character voices.

Although some of them do not sound quite like the originals from the movies, many of them are identical! Goofy, Donald, and Mickey sound just like the originals voices. Sora, (voiced by Haley Joel Osmund) is done very well along with Kairi, and Riku. You also get to hear Cloud, Yuffie, Aeris, (voiced by Mandi Moore) Tidus, Stelphie, Wakka, and Leon (Squall) from the Final Fantasy series.

Any of the other miscellaneous sounds of battle, footsteps, ect are also done well and do not seem to be overdone or reused. Overall, this area deserves a ton of credit.

Control/Menu Setup

Being an action RPG, the controls of battle become quite fun and addicting. When the player levels up, HP, MP, Strength, or other attributes is not always leveled up. Each time, one thing or maybe two things might level up, but the player does not get a choice of what levels up. To learn more combos and attacks, they can be equipped with the AP points learned through experience. Skills are also learned through experience.

Though Donald and Goofie are in your party, never do you get to control them. Sora is the only character that gets to be controlled. Even so, that didn't bother me as much.

What bothered me the most was while in battle or jumping to find my way around, or even going into the 360 degree viewing the camera view would go out of wack. This was extremely tedious during some battles or as I was jumping. The camera view should have been worked on more. The other complaint I had was each character could only hold a certain amount of potions during battle.

If you ran out of potions in your inventory, you constantly had to re-equip yourself one by one. Nevertheless, once more levels were increased, more items could be held in the inventory, and potions were hardly used...unless you're trying to beat Sephiroth!

Story

Basically, as I said earlier, the story begins with three friends, Sora, Kairi, and Riku. All of them want more than just what is offered on their island. Suddenly, things change and all the worlds are opened up. This allows Sora to travel to all the worlds once he meets up with Goofy and Donald and obtaining the Key Blade.

Together, the three are out to lock all the worlds with the Key Blade and destroy the Heartless. Sora wishes to find his other friends Kairi and Riku in the process when they got separated from him at the beginning. Riku takes another path and joins the Heartless, thinking that is the only way to saving Kairi. Sora is out to stop the Heartless.

The story of the game moves along with these quests in mind, however, the Disney movies come into play such as Winnie the Pooh getting stuck in Rabbit's house after eating too much honey. Though it's a simple story, it's still intriguing enough to keep me wanting to know more.

Enjoyment Level

Now the fun part! And I do mean fun! This is one of the most fun games I have ever played. At first I only wanted this game because it had Final Fantasy and Disney characters in it, (one of my favorite things) but I later found out this game had so much more to offer than that.

The battles were fun, the story was interesting, and many mini games and quests to enjoy such as finding all 99 Dalmatians, collecting items for the Ultima Weapon, defeating all the Cups at the Olympian Coliseum, or surfing the trees with Tarzan.

This game has much to offer, it would be a shame for any gamer to miss out.