A Smashing Success - A Kingdom Hearts 2 Retrospective Critique

in 2002 the world was forever changed by turning an elaborate piece of fan fiction into reality with kingdom hearts if you went back even just a couple of years before this the world would have called you crazy for even thinking that an official game featuring a crossover between disney characters a distinctly western group of intellectual properties and final fantasy characters an angsty group of complex japan-made rpgs would not only exist but would become one of the most beloved franchises around for the next two decades it's hard to overstate how truly bizarre this game is at a conceptual level you wield a key as a sword donald duck is a powerful wizard squall leianhart is a mentor figure and you traveled through the cosmos on a spaceship made out of some kind of gelatin i'd love to say that you can't make this stuff up but someone definitely did and this is the end result as bizarre as it is though kingdom hearts really is loved by millions of players around the world and it's easy to see why a delicate combination of carefully weaponized nostalgia combined with an engaging gameplay loop makes kingdom hearts an incredibly memorable experience and just three years later we saw the release of the inevitable sequel kingdom hearts ii despite being only the third entry of this long-running series it's still regarded by many people as the pinnacle of the franchise even after all this time around 10 games over the course of 15 years and this little sequel still manages to sit comfortably at the top impressive but time has this funny way of warping our perspective on things is kingdom hearts 2 truly the best in the series or did most people simply play this sequel while they were growing up giving it a special place in their nostalgia filled hearts a couple of years ago i decided to do a retrospective review of kingdom hearts and was surprised at how much it holds up in many places but also at how much it feels dated and archaic my original intention back then was to quickly move on to making this video but one thing led to another and i ended up putting it off for a really long time in february of 2021 something unexpected happened the kingdom hearts series will be coming to pc at the end of march so i figured what better time than this to crank out a kingdom hearts 2 video to capitalize on this momentous occasion but you can see how successful that was by the release date of this video i had a lot more to say than i originally thought and spent a lot of time perhaps over analyzing the design and structure of this 15 year old game so how does this highly acclaimed sequel hold up to modern scrutiny there's a lot to cover here and a lot to think about so let's begin where the game begins by diving right into the game's story but first this video is sponsored by the ridge wallet are you tired of your boring old bulky wallet all it seems to do is collect a bunch of useless junk and then fall apart now here's the ridge wallet its minimalistic form 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protagonist this time roxas who is in the middle of summer vacation with his friends the moments begin pretty mundane but quickly devolve into relative chaos as some new enemies enter the picture the black robed humanoids of organization 13 and the semi-sentient shoestrings known as nobodies you see where heartless are creatures that are born from the darkness inside a person's heart particularly strong-willed people who are turned heartless leave behind their bodies these bodies begin to act on their own and are called nobodies most nobodies become warped vaguely human paper mache facsimiles of what they were while the strongest willed of them managed to keep their bodies but none of them have hearts since hearts are the proof of existence nobodies are said to not exist but not in the literal sense because obviously they do exist otherwise this is an extremely heavy introduction even by jrpg standards who roxas is his connection with sora and the concept of nobodies is all dumped onto you in the first three or four hours of the game which honestly doesn't sound like a lot with the way i framed it here but is always an extreme source of confusion for me whenever i played this game and likely will be for anyone else who chooses to dive into this game for the first time this is all further confounded by the fact that kingdom hearts 2 in spite of the existence of a big fat number at the end of its name isn't exactly a direct sequel to the first game in the way that you would expect although it's common knowledge by now i could still see somebody coming into this game without realizing that a sequel on the game boy advance came first chain of memories takes place in between the first two numbered titles and sets most but not all of the scene we're dropped into here chain of memories picks up right where the first game left off and ends about a year before the start of kingdom arts 2 with sora being put into a sort of coma while a nobody named namine fixes his memories and if that was a confusing sentence then congratulations you're on the same page as me now i have a lot more to say about all of this later on but let's move on for now because if you're anything like me this introduction has you very eagerly awaiting the reintroduction of sora and after a few hours with roxas that's exactly what we get the prologue with roxas introduced us not only to organization 13 but also to dis and ansem who seem to be working against the organization behind the scenes and are responsible for rox's own truman show obviously the introduction of ansem here comes as quite a shock considering everything we went through in the first game to defeat him but for now we're left with our imagination to figure out what he's even up to here after taking control of soro we're next introduced to pete who is now maleficent sidekick on the heartless side of things who is also back by the way and then yen sid who gives us that fat exposition dump that i mentioned a little bit earlier so before even leaving the first world it's hard not to get the feeling that not only are the stakes higher than ever with the introduction of new enemies but that much of the adventure to get rid of the heartless in the first game was pointless with many of the biggest players seemingly still in the picture a little frustrating but whatever this is a sequel and not really outside the realm of what sequels like to do anyway after getting sora some new clothes we make our way back to holobastian to catch up with some old friends introduce sora to the organization and the nobodies and finally get started on the world hopping adventure that we've come to expect from this franchise and this is where the storytelling structure of kingdom hearts starts to frustrate me a bit i think that there's a lot to critique about the overall plot itself and the inane way it's written but i think it's more important that i address how the individual worlds of kingdom hearts fit into the overall structure of the main narrative in the first game the worlds were for the most part directly linked to the plot of the game which was at its core a much lower stakes search for sora's friends for a majority of the quest between that search and the keyblade's role in combating the heartless threat each world managed to feel relevant to the plot even if it really wasn't as the first game of the series and with such an open-ended goal to begin with every step of the journey feels relevant sorry gaines new friends learns more about the greater universe he's found himself in and his role in it and slowly uncovers a larger conspiracy revolving around maleficent ansem and the seven princesses of pure heart all while learning how to effectively use the keyblade to protect people from the heartless threat that destroyed his home aside from kyrie and destiny islands three of those princesses are directly linked to a few of the worlds that are visited during the game increasing their significance to the plot and making it really feel like a journey of discovery all that's to say that the humble beginnings of kingdom hearts 1 left the story in the worlds free to do pretty much whatever the writers wanted to do with them and have it feel natural it didn't matter if they had no significance to the overall plot because neither we nor the characters really knew where things were headed at that time the relatively low stakes of the quest and the then naivety of the franchise and characters was turned into a strong glue that tied together the inherently disjointed worlds and stories of kingdom hearts and made this uncanny combination of characters feel surprisingly cohesive kingdom hearts 2 on the other hand does not and can not share in that strength while the plot is slowly uncovered by the characters over the course of the journey much like the first game the relative familiarity that the characters now have with the different worlds in the larger universe they inhabit have the unfortunate side effect of making the journey feel like a meandering waste of time for a significant portion of it in fact this is one of the most common complaints that i continue to see about this game that the worlds feel incredibly detached from the characters goals and overarching plot i'd like to compare the worlds in kingdom hearts 2 to shows like the cw's dc universe such as the flash or arrow or even the non-dc shows like supernatural if you've watched any of these or any stories like them i think you'll understand the analogy here these are long shows with long seasons and each season tends to have a grand overarching narrative between the monster of the week stories that each episode tends to follow for one of these shows early on in the season you're given an introduction and a tease to the season's larger narrative that it's going to tell throughout its roughly 25 episodes but that narrative is often never complex enough to come anywhere close to filling the long run time of any given season so what you end up with is a frustrating experience where a significant chunk of a season's episodes give no advancement to what has been established to be the most important and in my opinion at least often the most compelling goals of the season's stories leaving you to consume what feels like little more than cheap filler that exists only to meet the contractual obligation of the show to create a certain amount of content i mentioned a few specific shows but this tends to be an issue with many long-running properties across both television and video games anime fans can also probably relate to this frustration pretty well my point is this time around the worlds feel almost completely pointless from a storytelling standpoint the organization members who are well defined to be the central antagonists of this game don't even make an appearance during your first visit to most of the disney worlds and still only show up a few times during your second visit to them and even in the cases where they do actually show up their presence feels minimal at best in all but two of them with the peak of their involvement being zaldin's attempts to claim beast's body as a nobody by attempting to turn him into a heartless this is the only time during the entire game that the disney world and the nobody's plot line felt meaningfully connected enough for a world to feel like it's actually a part of the game and the story there are a few other times where the members of the organization cause some trouble in these disney worlds but their involvement feels superficial at best and never manages to reach the same level of urgency as it does during the visits to beast's castle what makes this segment stand out is how it portrays the manipulative and conniving natures of the organization and how if left unchecked they would be able to cause a lot of damage and pain to many people and ultimately that's what it feels like is lacking when it comes to the organization and their actions or lack thereof in this game's universe they are hugely important yet failed to feel properly imposing because of their absence which results in a lack of urgency with your tasks in the game and that feeling of aimless meandering that i alluded to earlier there are small plot relevant bits peppered throughout the game but they're fleeting and a lot of them are non-interactive and detached from sora in his party and it's not until the end of the game that the main plot really really starts to move but while the disney worlds as a whole feel like pointless diversions when it comes to the plot with the nobodies i do have to mention how tightly the subplots of each world are themed the duality of self at its core kingdom hearts 2 is about the nobodies which are in many ways the other half of the heartless the game even opens up with you controlling sora's nobody roxas until they eventually reunite as sora reawakens only to meet again near the end of the game in a climactic battle the two halves of sora doing battle with roxas even wielding two keyblades which themselves may represent light and dark and then there's riku who is spoiler alert inexplicably parading around an ansem's body i don't care that it's explained it's still nonsense which represents his willingness to give into his own darkness for the sake of fighting for the light and then there's kairi and her nobody there's axel's betrayal of the organization against what he once believed was his true nature as a nobody and that's just the original cast the main story of each disney world is drenched in these themes as well mulan is a noble woman masquerading as a man so she can participate in the fight against the huns to protect her homeland beast is in a constant internal battle between his unbridled rage and his humanity hercules is a bit harder to pinpoint but i think his focus is on how truly heroic and capable he is but is crippled by his own self-doubt pete used to be a relatively gentle hard-working individual and is now desperately seeking validation from the one person who even pays attention to him anymore maleficent ariel is a mermaid of the sea but longs to see and experience life on land even though to do so is impossible jack sparrow is e ew ew ew jack sparrow is a very reluctant hero there's also the whole undead curse thing which is a little more on the nose but it works aladdin's story is more about iago's redemption and everyone's reluctance of trusting somebody who used to side with evil jack skellington wait there are two jacks jack skellington is a creature made for halloween but is obsessed with the idea of christmas simba is caught between his birthright the responsibility of being a king and the carefree life of a drifter tron is computer code learning what it is to be human maleficent finds herself aiding the protagonists against a greater threat despite their initial differences and animosity towards one another and winnie the pooh exists even though his whole world should have been deleted from the game truly beautiful i have to admit i didn't even realize the thematic link between everything until i really started thinking about how i wanted to write about the worlds simply because of how disappointing they felt from a storytelling point of view and while i stand by that opinion i do appreciate the thematic consistency present throughout the game strong themes cannot be a replacement for a holy cohesive experience though and while i do appreciate the strong theming i'd trade that away in an instant if it meant having the worlds feel more connected to the main story it's interesting though kingdom hearts 2 is an rpg and most rpgs have plenty of these self-contained side plots in whatever town or region that the party is currently in so what makes kingdom hearts any different i don't know if i have a convincing answer to that question but i think that it comes down to the fact that most rpg worlds look a little more like this where kingdom hearts looks more like this when each location you visit is linked geographically and your travel ability is limited to primitive ground-based locomotion as opposed to the more disjointed tasks that you find yourself doing during the journey are much better contextualized within the game's world and cultures your next destination is always a place within the game's world always on the horizon and within your sight and often hinted at through the game's dialogue as a location that lies in the direction of the party's general destination and goals sora and company on the other hand almost never know what's just on the horizon these disney worlds exist in their own tight little bubble untouched and unperverted by other disney material so even if the worlds are this game's idea of towns or regions with their own mini stories their separation from every other world including the ones that are directly connected by space pads means that nobody you meet or interact with can directly inform you about where to go next or what's on the horizon you never have an obvious next destination informed by the narrative destinations just happen sora didn't decide to go to beast's castle to catch up with an old friend and warn him about the nobodies rather beast's castle just so happened to appear in front of them so they went it's always just hey what is this place hey what is this place it's huge and sort of gloomy don't you think i think what disappoints me the most though is how it didn't have to be this way even with all the separated worlds these worlds shouldn't have to exist in their own tight little bubbles disney movies are rich with fun and flawed characters to fill a universe with why can't hercules world trade resources with agrabah for example how about mulan as a noble woman or a knight visit beast's castle during a foreign diplomatic mission there are so many fun and interesting possibilities and potentially fun character interactions between disney's ridiculous cast of characters that it feels like a crime that it's also so safe and it's not like the game hasn't set a precedent for that already sora's little club of good guys is a hodgepodge group of disney animals and final fantasy heroes with the main town in each game housing characters from all sorts of squinix and disney properties hell even after you meet geppetto inside monstro in the first game he moves to traverse town to help sora and sets up a shop where he designs gummy ships that is cool that's cool it's just cool that may be the only real example of something like that in kingdom hearts that i have but it's still exactly one more example than freaking kingdom hearts 2 has this is the kind of stuff that i wanted to see more of in the sequel lean into the power of crossovers instead of keeping everyone rapunzeled away in their own little tower away from everything this alone would go a very long way in stitching together the more individualistic elements of this game's universe which could only have a positive impact on the cohesiveness and direction of its storytelling i've got quite a bit more to say about the story but for now let's take a little detour and examine the gameplay of kingdom hearts 2. [Music] kingdom hearts had some incredible gameplay it truly was one of the greatest action rpgs of its generation and kingdom hearts 2 manages to remain faithful to its predecessor's roots while expanding on it in all the ways you would want from a sequel more responsive combat expanded ability selection more friends a better gummy ship and more oh cool that's awesome wow cool there's just more to do more to unlock and more to strive for but with the evolution to the first games formula comes a few de-evolutions that harm the overall experience and add some unnecessary frustrations to many aspects of the game that made me question the sanity of the designers we have a lot to talk about here so let's get started with what i perceive as the game's biggest weaknesses and work our way up from there [Music] kingdom hearts is at its core an action rpg a lot of the time what this means is that the game expects a healthy balance of skill and dedication from you at various points of the game on the rpg side level ups items and other character advancements can make up for skill that the player doesn't have and likewise players with a higher amount of skill can find some excitement and challenge through low level challenge runs in general this is a good thing that allows some amount of player freedom to stretch out the game's fun and replayability by allowing players to get better at controlling the systems that the game presents them with for this sliding scale of balance to be achieved the combat systems within the game need to have some amount of depth and complexity baked in to allow player exploration and mastery in a way that isn't completely blocked by the more numbers based rpg systems different games aim for a different type of balance with that scale too for example more loot oriented action rpgs like grim dawn or path of exile place far more emphasis on numbers and stats than player skill such that trying to fight things too far above your level will result in a completely unwinnable match kingdom hearts on the other hand places some importance on numbers and stats but cares way more about the player's ability to press buttons well it shows just how much it cares about skill by building in an ability that prevents sora from gaining any experience points and as a result from being able to level up optionally of course a built-in challenge run if you will sure kingdom hearts has other ways to power up the character during the course of the game that makes these no experience runs more feasible but that risks getting off topic my point here is that kingdom hearts as an action rpg has a fun and relatively deep combat system that is enjoyable to learn and a blast to engage with as you mow down hordes of heartless and nobodies and the reason it matters is because despite how fun the combat system can be i can't help but get the feeling that the developers didn't have a whole lot of confidence in it i realized that might sound a bit harsh but hear me out kingdom hearts 2 has a very enjoyable combat system with a lot to explore and discover and learn and while it definitely has its warts i believe it's good enough to easily carry players through the game and beyond through just how fun it is on its own the game's combat is something i look forward to each time i play each iteration of the franchise and it frustrates me to no end when the enjoyable combat is cut or hampered for the sake of an unnecessary gimmick seriously gimmick after gimmick after gimmick after gimmick after there was originally supposed to be a quick musical interlude here but it got copyright claimed by disney so there's gonna be a link in the description below and possibly even the pinned comment to uh so you can go take a look at it it's a gimmicky song about gimmicks i think it's really funny please go check it out it drives me crazy and every time i play through the game again these gimmicky segments become all the more frustrating just let me play the game man not this half-baked one-off wasted code that i dread every time i reach those points of the game i want to engage with the combat but so often the game prefers to sidestep the core of it and insert something that either takes away player agency or completely disrupts the flow port royal is lousy with small gimmicks that make combat become a slog during the story undead pirate enemies appear that are completely invulnerable to damage unless they're in the moonlight so have fun corralling them so you can actually do something then there's this weird gambling enemy that can turn you into a mostly helpless d6 or a playing card and then there's this boss at the end of the second visit with a gimmick around magic and coin collecting that i'll cover a little bit more later when i talk about magic the entirety of pride lands is a gigantic gimmick that takes away your ability to go into various drive forms that you've been accumulating and leveling up throughout the game and changes the core of the action just enough to be unfamiliar not that it doesn't make sense from a story perspective just that it takes away enough for it to be less fun 100 acre wood is little more than a bunch of garbage mini-games that really aren't worth anyone's time and should be thrown straight into the nearest furnace this whole magic carpet section in agrabah feels super weird to control because of how insanely fast it is and the combat on it is frustrating and imprecise and this world is capped off by a boss fight using the same stupid gimmick that makes me hold my breath in frustration as i hope to god that i don't get killed when i've almost got it beat it's awful your first visit to olympus happens right after you unlock summons or at least depending on your path but you can't use them or drive forms while in the underworld for a majority of the visit why give me a new mechanic and then immediately restrict it even temporarily this usually causes me to forget about summons completely the gummy sections while much improved from the first game are still a lame travel gimmick that i believe most people blow through as quickly as possible it is imprecise and spammy and doesn't feel like there's much to really engage with despite how much is going on on the screen the light cycle in space paranoids is a mistake and the atlantica world was downgraded to friday night funkin status but somehow infinitely worse i told donald duck not to sing anymore but i can't really stop him [Music] and that's just what i consider to be some of the bigger gimmicks there's plenty that i missed but there's also something that i need to talk about that has infiltrated nearly every aspect of kingdom hearts 2 reaction commands reaction commands are basically a feature that allows any enemy or encounter to have a specific and specialized gimmick use these fatboys as a baseball by pressing triangle swing these bat creatures around like a club by pressing triangle steal this thing's weapon and use it for yourself by pressing triangle dodge and counter-attack these soldiers by pressing triangle go on a roller coaster ride with these lance wielders by pressing triangle confuse a shoelace by press and triangle every single one of these reaction commands are contextual abilities based on what the enemy is and what action they're using or about to use on the surface it may look like these are strictly positive additions to the game they're flashy they look cool and they're powerful except they're very often powerful to the point of becoming a non-choice what makes action oriented games like this fun and engaging are all the micro decisions that you make throughout the course of any given encounter dodge jump move swing combo extend cast use item you may not realize it but your brain is calculating each of these options as you play and weighing their potential usefulness against your personal skill to bring you to what you hope is the correct decision every step you take as you hold down that control stick to move your character in a direction during a combat encounter is its own micro decision each turn each jump each hesitation in your step you get the picture these countless options all contribute to the amount of depth and engagement that the combat in these games allow and have a lot to do with keeping the action fun ideally each of these micro decisions comes with a positive and negative consequence to them moving away from an enemy may pull you out of attacking range and stop you from dealing damage but it may also protect you from some hits so you can triage a bad situation attacking with a slow combo finisher will do a lot of damage if it hits but may leave you wide open at an inopportune time casting thunder will do some aoe damage but is somewhat slow will drain your mana and may leave you open to be hit i could obviously keep going but i think you get the picture even the most minor actions that we take for granted in these games are inherently interesting and engaging because they always come with some sort of payoff good or bad and while you may not actively think about something as basic as movement in this way your brain almost certainly does as it weighs the potential payoff for everything you do as you play it's all risk versus reward and therein lies my issue with these reaction commands for a significant majority of them using it as soon as it pops up is hands down your best option and very often with absolutely no negative consequences they usually do high amounts of burst damage in a large area of effect both much higher than sora's abilities afford him on their own and will grant him invincibility as an added bonus there is no decision to be made just a button prompt to react to huh i guess the term reaction command is a bit more on the nose than i thought and sure this is not the case with every single enemy that has a reaction command the reaction command of these samurai enemies for example carries a lot of risk in potentially failing the mini-game which will do a massive amount of damage to sora the weapon stealing ability i mentioned earlier as much as i hate it at least has some timing and positioning elements and a lack of invulnerability that at least make it a little bit interesting even if it's almost always the best option when it appears but these are exceptions i think if every reaction command in the game had a more interesting design like those two that i mentioned then i'd have less of an issue with them if all of the reaction commands became a risk versus reward decision that added options that you might choose not to take as opposed to a press triangle to win feature there could be so much more depth involved with encounter design and how each reaction command would work against different types of enemies and i realized that i'm sitting here and writing about how cool it would be if you increased the level of gimmickiness for each enemy in a section purely devoted to tearing down the gimmick heavy design of this game but it at least would be gimmicks that serve the flow of the combat and increase the skill ceiling in interesting ways pressing triangle nearly every time you get a green flash on the screen does not make the combat more interesting it just makes the combat end quicker by giving you a silver bullet i have to admit though as far as individual non-boss enemy design is concerned while i do dislike the implementation of reaction commands from an analytical and critical point of view they're really not quite as bad as i make them sound here the reason i went into such depth with them though is because they're important to understand as i move on to the gimmicks as they relate to this game's boss design because unfortunately they play a heavy part in this game's bosses before i continue though i feel like i've gotta clarify something i don't think that gimmicks in themselves are bad in fact countless games from countless franchises make use of gimmicks at various points through their run time especially during boss fights after all without some sort of unique mechanic or something different to overcome bosses especially might start to feel very samey or worse like they're just bullet-spongy normal enemies the difference here is in how well disguised the gimmicks are relative to the core features of the combat or gameplay and how positively or negatively they affect the flow of battle in my mind a good gimmick is one that forces you to rethink the way that you approach a situation and they can even be very simple take the shadow of yharnam fight in bloodborne for example this is a boss that consists of something that i kind of condemned just a minute ago three enemies that aren't exactly your normal fare but close enough that's the gimmick though three strong and somewhat bullet spongy normies each with a different moveset that can cover the weaknesses of another forcing three enemies on you like this in a boss arena ensures that you can't flee and makes you learn each of their moves while constantly keeping track of all three of them as you fight it's a simple gimmick but it doesn't even feel like a gimmick you play the game as you always have but your strategies are forced into an unfamiliar situation we can also look at the ghoul boss fight in the final fantasy vii remake this boss has an ethereal and a physical form weak to magical and physical attacks respectively again nothing changes about the way that you play just the choices that you make during battle in both of these cases the game leans more heavily on the base systems of its combat with confidence and rarely if ever strays from that base ultimately that's where my issues with kingdom hearts 2's more gimmicky systems lie they screw with the core combat too much and end up becoming roadblocks for players who are excited to engage with it on a deeper level it's obvious how some of these larger gimmicks get in the way but how do the reaction commands get in the way i've already mentioned how powerful most of them are and that will inherently shorten the length of any encounter but more than that they're a wild card in sora's moveset that would otherwise be completely under your control it can be fun learning the specific tell each enemy has that triggers a reaction command but rather than being a part of your combos and your flow they instead interrupt it with something that you can never use at will it's always at the whim of the enemy and it's never your choice which move sora uses in other words a reaction command might be a useful tool that can help you in a fight but it's never explicitly part of your tool set if that makes sense you can't strategize and choose the best time to whip it out it's always just when the game says you can and that's just kind of lame and because they're so ubiquitous you can bet they're present in many of the game's boss fights the hydra boss in olympus coliseum is my favorite and probably the most egregious example because it turns a boss fight that has some moments of dodging and strategizing into a joke with one press of the triangle button multiple times you gotta press triangle to vanquish a neck every time you deplete its health bar instead of i don't know just letting it be cut off at zero health i think even an automatic mini cut scene would be preferable to this non-choice you can press triangle to get a free stun during the three head phase with a timing window so wide that i think it's actually impossible to miss i mean look at how i struggled to even reach the trigger point here and it was still available this would be so much cooler as a real-time skill check where phil i don't know throws the pot and you have to hit it yourself for a big advantage if you reacted correctly and quickly enough that's a way to do this style of gimmick in a way that complements the core of the combat rather than circumventing it and then at the end of the fight you're given the pegasus run i mean geez this part can't even be considered gameplay you literally literally just spam triangle for massive damage what pains me about this fight is that there's some small strokes of really fun elements here like the area of effect head bash or the need to constantly avoid small projectiles or even the tail swipe in phase one i mean it could be a lot more aggressive instead of just looking around for a target for 30 seconds at a time but what is here is a really good base for what could be an incredible boss fight but is constantly undermined by reaction commands that break the flow of the fight break the challenge or both like i said the hydra is one of the most egregious examples of this the reaction commands and boss fights are not all nearly this bad but they're still pervasive and even in the fights where their reaction commands become a legitimate part of your strategy such as the fights against many of the organization members they most often feel like a requirement for progress rather than a bonus for doing well at this point i think i've whined about gimmicks and reaction commands more than enough but i want to at least leave this section with my favorite use of the reaction command in the game because i don't hate them all and it's in this fight against marluxia marluxia has two reaction commands on the same trigger and it depends on where you are relative to them when you initiate it one does a lot of damage while the other refreshes your gimmick counter honestly learning how to bait out that attack and then move in for the counter attack felt like the most legitimately fun use of the reaction command mechanic in the entire game and that's because even though you never want to skip the reaction command due to its damage potential it at least has both a narrow timing window and a choice to make the reaction command more difficult to pull off and more interesting and fun to use why couldn't we get more of that i think if you ask many people who are in love with kingdom hearts 2 about its magic system they'd either tell you it's fine or incredibly powerful and honestly yeah they're not wrong kingdom hearts 2 improves upon the first game's magic system in many many ways for one magic can now seamlessly be woven into combos and used as finishers to your normal combos effectively turning it into another tool that you can quickly weave into your strategies as needed some spells were removed like gravity and replaced with others like reflect the general utility and strength of magic has grown significantly from the first game but you'd be forgiven for not even realizing it for one simple reason managing your mp in this game is miserable kingdom hearts 1 has a pretty unique way to refill your magic bar taking and scoring hits with your keyblade in combat will fill this orange bar on your magic meter which will keep growing until it fills the length of one pip past the amount of magic you already have at which point it will regenerate a part of the bar and start over this had an interesting effect of making it so that the more magic you held onto the longer it would take to regenerate it wasn't a perfect system but it at least allowed some flexibility in your choice to stockpile your magic to blow it all at once or constantly deplete your mp so it'll refill faster to allow for a relatively quick reuse again the system itself wasn't perfect but at least it felt like you always had magic available and if you didn't you had an actionable path to work towards its regeneration it was a system that at the very least felt like it was always in your control kingdom hearts 2 on the other hand gives you this really ambiguous looking bar that doesn't tangibly change from the beginning of the game to the end i mean it does get longer but i only realized that after looking back at my own footage and comparing the two ends of a single playthrough it's a minor thing but i just kind of prefer knowing how much of a limited resource that i have remaining when i'm making decisions about how to use it you know but taking the ambiguous mp bar into full context with the way that it actually works illuminates why it looks like that and is the central reason why i really don't like the magic in kingdom hearts 2 the cooldown system in general i'm a fan of cooldown systems and games they're a really simple way to limit the use of powerful abilities and can be relatively flexible between number of charges and supplementary systems that lower the cooldown all of that technically exists for this game's magic but instead of for each individual ability it's for the entire spell list the ambiguous amount of mp is your number of charges and once you expend your charges your entire magical arsenal is on cooldown for a period of time there are a few ways to speed up the recharge but without analyzing exactly how long it takes with mp rage turned on or off for example the only way to really feel the difference is through hundreds of hours of experience so once you spend the last drop of your reserves you're left without magic until this bar slowly finally fills back up and that's just never felt fun to me and there's a few reasons why first i've already mentioned it before but magic is actually really good and really fun in this game and really impactful it's hard to resist blowing your entire load on the first shoe string to pass your gaze but it's also too easy to fall into the opposite pattern consumable item syndrome you know that awkward situation when you play some kind of rpg and you in the game with roughly 3000 different potions that you could have and probably should have used at any point during the game but you didn't because you were low-key afraid of using all your expendable resources on something that you knew you could do without them but it might be a little bit harder but because you know that you can you should so you just in deporting them yeah me too and unfortunately the way the cooldown works with this game's magic system kind of turns it into a micro form of that phenomenon and that ties into the second reason cure is dumb you can dig into forums about kingdom hearts and everyone will tell you how hilariously overpowered cure was in the original game and that something needed to be done to tone it down that may or may not be true i don't really know but it seems like the developers agreed and the solution that they came up with was to make it even more powerful but instead of consuming just a little bit of your magic it consumes the entire magic bar regardless of how much magic you have left it's the same strength whether you have your full bar or one little tiny little bit of a sliver left it's ridiculous and for the type of magic system that this game has where depleting your bar imposes a nasty cooldown on your ability to use magic at all it definitely works as a means to rein in the power of cure but at what cost i think what's most interesting about these quirks of the magic system that make me dislike it is that the more inexperienced you are with the game the more of a problem they are for you as a player like i keep saying if you ask somebody who's got a lot of experience with this game what they thought of the magic system you'll likely hear more about how expressive it can be because of its interactions with the combo system the flexibility of each spell and how they each excel in different circumstances the general power of them and how broken reflect is but the problem is that a more casual player on their first or second playthrough likely won't have that experience unless they start grinding against the more difficult optional content of the game mostly because the main portions of the game really don't demand too much from the player beyond just spamming the x button just like the first game but now with a little bit of triangle my typical strategy was to burn all my magic down to the final sliver and then save that for an emergency cure i expect most people's first playthroughs or two would be pretty similar the reason i always did that is because i wanted to use magic but i wanted to use it as quickly as possible because if i ever needed to use a cure it felt bad to use my entire mana bar on one ability so at least by burning as much of it as i could before finally using cure i at least felt like i was getting my mileage out of my mp bar the magic system can be the coolest thing in the world but without any actual demand from the game for the player to implement it it becomes too easy to use it as a cure battery and with the way the system exists with its restrictive cooldown that locks you out of magic for its duration there really couldn't be any meaningful demand from the game because it has to be made so that you can clear encounters easily enough without having to wait for your magic to come back i mentioned this boss earlier but there is a single boss in the game that ends the second half of port royal that actually requires the use of magic to get through its gimmick and every time that i play it it's an absolutely miserable experience because of this cooldown system sure this boss drops a ton of bubbles to help you regenerate your spent reserves frequently throughout the fight but it never feels like enough it just feels more like a cheap band-aid placed on top of the fight to make the gimmick actually work without making players just want to put the controller down for good and even with that band-aid though you're likely going to find yourself running around helplessly as you wait for your magic to regenerate because you and i both know that ethers are meant to be hoarded not used i've put this near the top of my list of the game's biggest weaknesses because i find it exceptionally frustrating there is so much potential and power to pull out of kingdom hearts 2's magic as demonstrated by players who have mastered it like speedrunners and challenge runners and the people who have been playing this game constantly since their childhood but the restrictive nature of its cooldown systems and the way your emergency button of a cure completely demolishes the bar prevents the player at least in a more casual setting from feeling more free to experiment with it leaving that potential completely out of reach for most players i just i don't know i guess i just don't believe that this is the best way to balance the magic i can't help but wonder if the development team had another year or two between the release of the first and second games would they have landed on a different way to balance these systems it's hard to say but look magic systems can't be easy to design for an action rpg in the first place there are so many variables flying around so much to think about and an incredibly fine line to tune the balance on i guess i should just be happy that the magic exists in the first place and that it's at least fun and functional while you at least still have some mp left but i just think it could be so so much better you know anyway here's hoping that between kingdom hearts two and three the development team will do away with this system and land on something that's better than both one and two combined a man can dream right if there's one word that my mind immediately goes to when i think of an adventure it's exploration combat is fun and all but that combat usually needs to be accompanied by a world to do it in in the case of kingdom hearts though it's usually many worlds but hey we're not here to argue semantics having a world to explore makes sense though the story requires a destination and those places will naturally be filled with enemies to defeat challenges to overcome items to collect and hopefully secrets to discover along the way and as an action rpg kingdom hearts 2 has a pretty hard requirement for all of these things fortunately squeenik seems to have met all these requirements but in the same way that this lunchables technically fits all the requirements of being pizza it works but you know you've had better all the components are here but it's sterile and flavorless and really just makes you wish for something better the worlds of kingdom hearts 2 are the lunchables pizza they're functional as a vessel for the combat and the story but not much else your travels through these worlds will be an extremely linear affair with a few notable exceptions and when i say linear i don't mean that in the way that implies that most action rpgs aren't linear from an overarching progression point of view because they really are and kingdom hearts doesn't really need to be any different but what most other games manage to do that kingdom hearts 2 doesn't even seem to attempt to do most of the time is supplying the player with interesting and meaningful side areas to explore or even mistakenly travel to during a playthrough anything from minor dead-end paths with treasure inside to puzzles or meaningful side quests or even optional bosses or encounters that feel overwhelming at the current power level with very few notable exceptions kingdom hearts 2 is almost entirely devoid of this kind of exploration based content on its own i don't really know if that can be considered an objectively bad thing people often get frustrated by dead-ended paths especially if the reward you get for exploring it is worthless but they can also be fun to just discover if they're cleverly hidden and found through observation or puzzle solving but i'd argue that these quirks whether they're useful or not can help breathe more personality into the areas you explore offering more opportunities for environmental storytelling for example a forest could have winding and intercrossing paths making it easy to get lost in such an untouched landscape or a mountainside can have well-hidden little caves littered with supplies left behind by climbers as they sought to escape the treacherous weather i don't think there's really much harm in a straightforward approach to level design though and i think both styles have their strengths and weaknesses but i feel like kingdom hearts 2 kind of gets lost in trying to decide which it wants to be i can't help but wonder if the worlds were made so simple because of a tight production deadline but what we ended up with feels confused by its own identity the game wants you to feel excited by finding treasure but realizes that the worlds aren't detailed or complex enough to hide them properly so you end up with many areas of the game where multiple treasure chests are just dumped near a checkpoint for you to collect as soon as you arrive it's like hey congratulations on reaching the next milestone here's a few ethers and a map that's not to say that you won't find treasures while you're out and about but even those are most often placed in a spot where you can't possibly miss them and as a result these treasures never feel earned they're just thrown at you as an appeasement as you walk in a straight line to your next destination often among these freebies you'll also find the area's map like i just mentioned as if the level design were complex enough to even warrant it as a necessity and perhaps insultingly are in a much bigger chest than most of the others you find which makes you think you actually found something kinda cool maybe but no it's just another stupid map it even has this ridiculous fanfare compared to the smaller chests i don't care about a stinking map dude give me a strength up most areas of the game simply don't warrant the existence of a map and even the most complex of them don't offer any sort of navigational challenge after you've been there for even a minute so i don't know why they're even here i did mention a few notable exceptions regarding the level design and i'll just blow through some of them here beast's castle is in my opinion the height of this game's exploration simply because it straight up allows you to go the wrong way from the start that can be a little bit annoying but it at least lets the player learn the layout of the castle in a more organic way there's not really anything to discover that's out of the way but the ability to make the wrong choice immediately makes it feel more complex than many of the other worlds the olympus underworld is a close second but only the fog canyon side of the level just before you get to the olympus stone this area is slightly confusing because of the fog and how similar each of the more open areas look and there's a secret entrance back to the previous room to get a secret treasure that you probably got baited into jumping for off of the top of my head this is the only instance in the entire game that i can think of where you're shown a treasure that you can't reach immediately and have to figure out how to get to it it's a pretty satisfying little moment the pride lands is kinda neat with a bunch of large areas with little treasures halfway hidden in slightly out of sight areas and winding pathways that really take advantage of the lion form but the lion form still kind of sucks so two steps forward and one step back the city part of agrabah has multiple connections between its two major areas and a lot of space to run around in giving it at least some of that feeling of exploration but other than a few chests it's really just window dressing and doesn't serve much of anything as far as the general gameplay or that world's story is concerned i'm sure there's a couple more but they're few and far between and never really enough to make the levels feel interesting beyond whatever initial intrigue that the setting might provide but what really kills me about this approach that kingdom hearts 2 decided to take for world design is that kingdom hearts 1 did it so much better i could paraphrase what i said about the first games level design in my video about it but instead i'm just going to steal a minute or two of my old content surprisingly each world is actually very small consisting of a small handful of rooms where usually just a bit over half of them are relevant to traversal the rest are just drop-off points from a one-way gate a small treasure room or simply just the world's starting room but even with as small as the worlds are they're more complex than they let on this is because of two big reasons first the world is often somewhat non-linear with branching paths and different ways to get the player from point a to point b second the basic architecture of the worlds are more often than not completely insane if you were to try and lay out the rooms from each world on a map where their connections make sense enough to build a bigger picture of that world you'd find that they just don't the physical architecture of most of the worlds simply doesn't make logical sense from a spatial point of view i'd call that a negative point of complexity but i feel that the raw exploration potential granted by the non-linearity of the worlds more than makes up for anything that's lost to the chaos of nonsensical door connections these non-linear connections allow the world to unfold in a slightly different way with each of the world's story beats and do a pretty decent job of keeping the adventure from feeling too repetitive as you work through it but more importantly to me it allows for some neat ways to hide some treasure throughout these worlds and because of that it truly feels like you've found something fun when you manage to uncover one of these slightly out of the way treasures even if it is just another gummy ship piece it almost feels like a little easter egg hunt within the game and i actually had quite a bit of fun with it especially since some of the treasures are locked away behind abilities that you don't have yet enticing you to come back later and fully explore the world when you're more capable going into writing this script i knew that the world design was going to be a big point against kingdom hearts 2 compared to its predecessor but i haven't really looked at that game since i finished that video and what shocks me about the footage we just watched and likely recycling yet again behind this voiceover is just how lively and interesting the worlds look in just these few clips when compared directly with its own sequel kingdom hearts one's cave of wonders had this interesting curved path with elevated platforms and a pit that you must avoid if you don't want to be sent back one or two rooms with environmental traps to avoid as you fight and a small treasure in the distance teasing you from the safety of its small and out of the way platform two's cave of wonders has these multi-level platforms but in a straight shot linear room with minor platforming challenges if they can even be called challenges for an extra treasure or two with the only way to go being forward to the next room until you reach the end no maze no wonder this doesn't feel like an environment or an area or a world it's just a hallway the first game's wonderland was full of weird perspective tricks and figuring out how to navigate it was almost a puzzle on its own monstro the whale was a disgusting labyrinth of tubes and tunnels with many different paths to explore any one of these worlds had more life and more secrets to discover than perhaps the entirety of kingdom hearts 2's levels put together and that's extremely disappointing i often see people talk down kingdom hearts 2's world design and exploration gameplay as the absolute worst in the series so i know that what i've been saying here isn't exactly a hot take but it still always manages to surprise me at just how bare bones it really is especially compared to how interesting it was in the first game at least theoretically there's nothing to get in the way of the combat except the story itself i mean this is mostly tangential to this specific topic but since the worlds are so small and lack any sort of complexity there's very often only a very small handful of combat encounters before you're interrupted by the next story beat or cut scene i would love to see a breakdown of just how much time is spent in conversations and cutscenes compared to actually fighting and playing the game in an average playthrough i'm sure it's not so bad if you skip everything but still i believe more complex world design could have left the combat shine even brighter by allowing the player to actually play for more than 5 seconds between the story's constant interruptions all in all world exploration extremely bad next topic [Music] i've always thought that the big ideas and the overall story of the kingdom hearts franchise were completely ridiculous and nonsensical but for the most part i've really come to accept and even enjoy them for what they are every new character and concept introduced increases the insanity exponentially and while i can't always follow it i'm here for it at this point in the franchise's life i mean you gotta know what you're in for right being only the third game in the series at the time understanding the lore up to kingdom hearts 2 isn't really all that demanding but as soon as the game starts everything gets thrown out the window to fall down 16 stories onto the pavement below and the resulting mess is now the new lore and it's all roxas's fault like i said i'm here for all that kingdom hearts lore may be an entangled mess that doesn't want to be understood by mere mortals but that in itself and roxas's inclusion to it are not my main gripes of this section rather it's the gameplay surrounding roxas and the forced tutorial that the game shoves in your face every time you dare to start a new file and boy is it a heavy-handed tutorial press triangle to speak to npcs move with the control stick you lose hp when you take damage did you know that one thanks game i couldn't have figured out any of that on my own now don't get me wrong i understand the importance of accessibility when it comes to games and a lot of us take for granted the language of gaming that we've learned over our years of playing not to mention the reflexes and familiarity we've gained for using our thumbs to press buttons on our little plastic toys for a significant portion of our lives probably it's entirely reasonable to expect that someone who's never played a video game in their life might get their hands on kingdom hearts 2 and not have any idea what's going on and for someone like this the heavy-handedness and glacial pace of this tutorial may be a godsend that allows them to actually understand the game but even so video games are about playing and experimentation with the capabilities that you're given within the boundaries of the game's rules that includes discovering what buttons do how it feels to control a character and what combinations you're able to pull off with the moveset you're given i don't think that it's a lot to ask for a player to discover the more basics of these on their own regardless of their familiarity with video games it's a video game for crying out loud you're going to press buttons on your controller and you and your brain are going to figure out what does what especially for the more basic one-button commands like attack jump and speak to npc save the handholding for more interesting or complex things like summons or drive forms or aspects of the game that you can't be reasonably expected to figure out on your own by simply experimenting with the controller like you're supposed to do in this medium or even skip the tutorials entirely and let people figure things out on their own discovering optional tech on your own always feels really really good overall though i'm not against the concept of a tutorial but i think that most tutorials in most games should be less handholding in general my favorite tutorials if i had any would be the ones that plant an idea in your mind and then let you discover how to do it instead of giving you an exact numbered list of tasks to do leave that for training missions in fighting games like guilty gear play guilty gear guys i know this seems like a very minor thing in the overall scheme of kingdom hearts 2 but the big reason that i'm harping on this whole roxas tutorial thing is unless it's your first time playing the game or you just want to absorb the story again it's it's painfully and frustratingly slow this section took me three hours on my most recent playthrough with paying attention to the story and knowing generally how to navigate the city and where each objective is if i didn't know what i was doing it probably would have taken up to two hours longer and skipping everything it would still probably take the average player around an hour or so which really is a lot for a section of the game where there is very little going on most of the time other than the constant interruptions for story beats that slow the game down and the near worthless gummy ship sections of the game getting in the way this roxas bit is one of the big things that gets in my way if i ever think that i might want to start a new save file of kingdom hearts 2. replayability would be improved significantly by being able to either skip this entire section or if this section was designed in such a way that it's not terribly boring for somebody who's on their third to 50th playthrough but hey now that kingdom hearts is on pc there's actually a mod to let you skip the roxas tutorial in this game incredible taking the time to write this all down into a script made me realize that it really is a minor complaint a couple of hours worth of tutorial for what is more than 30 hours worth of gameplay really isn't that much in the grand scheme of things but i think the reason that i had it elevated so much in my mind as a this actively makes the game worse is that some part of my mind for some reason blames this tutorial for things that i dislike about the rest of the game the forced mini-game sections when you're asked to collect some cash for the trip to the beach always leaves a bad taste in my mouth the hunt for the seven wonders is such a slow and gimmicky search around town the fact that you can barely even take two steps during gameplay before being interrupted by something else happening in the story in my mind this section is a microcosm of the absolute worst elements that kingdom hearts 2 has to offer things really do improve once you get back into sora's gargantuan shoes but they're always there the aspects that make up this section are always in this game they're everywhere at least until you reach endgame and dry up all the superfluous story events and proof of concept minigames that were probably created by an unpaid intern in about three hours and unless you're really invested in tackling all the post game content then this really is the game at a smaller scale it's not really fair of me to blame roxas for the issues that i have with the rest of the game though he's more of a victim than anyone [Music] and finally we've crawled our way out of the gaping maw of what i consider kingdom hearts two's biggest weaknesses and into the heaven that is its biggest strengths but while every section up to this point was loosely ordered by how significant i thought it was as a weakness to the overall game the rest won't be because now we're talking about the fun stuff i know i know it took us long enough to get here but here we are the combat i spoke quite a bit about the combat earlier when i was talking about gimmicks specifically the reaction commands so i won't be talking about those much here because aside from those kingdom hearts 2 has some surprisingly deep and technical combat that many people might not initially experience during their playthroughs that's mostly because and i mentioned this earlier too the game doesn't really try to challenge the player like 95 percent of the time most encounters can be cleared pretty quickly with judicious use of the x button but this time around the reaction commands as much as i don't really like them are there to help add some spice to the combat and break things up just a little bit that along with the improvements made with how the magic system interacts with sora's combos means that there is a lot to explore and experiment with in the game's combat especially since the ap system from the first game makes a return special moves combo boosters emergency buttons movement powers defensive buffs magic recovery quality of life things that really should exist outside of this game's ability system and so much more if you were overwhelmed by the list of the abilities in the first game the second game will make you cry in the corner with how many options it gives you like the first game though it offers perhaps a bit too much customization i mentioned in my previous video that i hate being forced to run around and collect the things that enemies drop after i defeat them it's one of my pet peeves and games and unfortunately kingdom hearts 2 brings back the stackable draw ability which is a quality of life improvement that brings the traps to you in an ever increasing radius also returning is guard and dodge roll and high jump and glide everything costs ability points and it feels really bad to have to figure out what abilities to drop for a few extra points when you learn your third draw or when you learn any of the various very useful movement abilities all of these make a very good case for being added to sora's baseline as a thing he can just do now like i get the schtick of being able to remove all abilities and be left with sora as he was at the start of the game but why things like scan guard draw and the movement abilities are all such non-choice choices that it makes me wonder what the point of them existing what the cost is at the very least they should probably be free if you want to retain the ability to turn them on and off but no guard costs two each draw costs three all the movement abilities are two or three and scan is just two but between all of them it's over 20 ability points that you'd probably rather use somewhere else but whatever that really is such a minor complaint because even though you may end up juggling abilities on occasion you end up with so many ability points by the end of the game that you can equip just about anything you want anyway the real strength of this system though lies in just how much you can use it to customize sora's combos and moves while things like guard dodge roll and aerial recovery are vitally important to the action they're not very interesting you expect to have these anyway so acquiring them is basically putting sora in a spot where you expect him to already be but what is interesting is that you can equip in unequipped special moves almost like a dnd magic user preparing their spells for the day and you can increase or decrease the number of hits in your base combo these are things that appeared in the first game but they've been refined for this installment first off the percent chance to use certain finishers from the first game is just gone which is a huge improvement in action-focused games like this it's always better to know exactly what's about to happen as you press your buttons especially for some of the harder fights of this game and second there are a nice handful of attacks that you can activate by pressing the square button either during or after your combo to extend it and do even more damage and while you could probably get away with just spamming x from start to finish the higher the difficulty setting you choose the more you're going to want to take advantage of these combo extender moves as a means of pumping out damage and controlling the battlefield unfortunately even on critical mode there isn't that much in the game that requires that level of precision or execution in your combos most enemies will be taken out within one or two messy combos or reaction commands not forcing you to master or even really learn how to use many of the skills you have or combo strings they offer i don't know about you but unless i'm actually being challenged by an enemy i tend not to go out of my way to learn the true depths of the game or stop doing things that i know have been working even if there is a more efficient path and if kingdom hearts 2's combat system has any weaknesses it's that it really doesn't challenge you in a meaningful way for a majority of the game's run time very little need to properly optimize my ability point usage very little need to learn more than a simple combo or two that has consisted mostly of pressing x and then sometimes pressing square or triangle and very little need to worry about items and very little need to actually engage with summons or limits i'm completely convinced that the only reason people pay attention to how good kingdom hearts 2's combat is is because it actually does give you the means to challenge yourself with it but not until end game there are a couple of hints of brilliance throughout the playthrough though the fight against the prison keeper in halloweentown comes to mind as a particularly good example of what i would call a well-designed early game boss fight it has just enough help that the fight isn't over in an instant and it has a changing pattern of attack that asks you to employ many of the abilities you've gained over the course of the game up to that point and no reaction commands that trivialize the fight or change it significantly from a normal encounter the second visit to beast's castle ends in a fight with zalden which ends up being the largest difficulty spike in the game for me at least until you approach the end what makes this fight so difficult comes down to a few things first this guy hits extremely hard second he has extremely long range attacks with his spears and teleports across the battlefield third the fight includes a stackable reaction command that replaces your main attack and adds to the cognitive load of the fight fourth at around half health he'll enter a phase change which includes a set of attacks where he is completely invulnerable and is liable to combo you to death if you're not careful and fifth and perhaps most importantly revenge value revenge value is a hidden mechanic that most bosses have that prevents you from being able to stun lock them to death with your combos put very simply after a certain number of hits against a boss that is stunned or staggered it'll forcefully break out of that combo with a retaliating attack obviously since it is hidden you're not going to be aware of this mechanic going into the game or these fights so chances are very good that you're going to be suffering a lot of painful beatdowns until the stars align in the galaxy brain of yours to realize oh hold on i get punished if i combo too hard becoming aware of this mechanic and learning how to work around it is the first step in unlocking the potential of kingdom hearts 2's battle system and understanding it is a requirement if you want to take on the hardest bosses this game has to offer i'm honestly not sure if any of the rest of the game's enemies have revenge values but they honestly don't have enough health for it to really matter if they do and even though most of the other bosses before zalden have revenge values in my experience they were also relatively easy that they don't force you to really understand what's going on when they forcefully retaliate during your combos and that includes both fights with demix in hindsight zaldin is an excellent boss and a lot of fun to fight but my initial reaction was that he was unfair garbage it's almost shocking to me that as much as kingdom hearts 2 tries to hold your hand at the beginning of the game and at various points throughout a playthrough it throws this boss at you with very little training or means to prepare for the specific challenges these types of bosses present to you there is close to nothing in the game up to this point that will prepare you for the way you're expected to fight this boss because nothing until this boss is significantly challenging in a way that will teach you of course when i say that i'm speaking only about the main path of the game at various points up until you fight zeldan you'll come across these optional bosses hidden behind some portals called absent silhouettes you may even attempt to fight them but chances are pretty high that you'll get bodied a few times and then decide to return later when you're a higher level and better equipped or just skip it all together a pretty reasonable reaction for most players so unless you're one of the mad few who decided to grind against these optional bosses and defeated them as soon as you encountered them you're probably not going to understand how to fight this guy properly for a while he's got so much to learn and so much for you to deal with that it can be pretty overwhelming if you don't know what you're doing which means you're gonna die a lot at least that was my experience when i played the game a couple of years ago on proud mode and then again for this video on critical mode this guy represents some of the best this game has to offer but the game doesn't prepare you for it this guy may represent some of the best this game has to offer but it also represents some of the worst things this game does because of how it doesn't prepare you for this situation despite my general distaste for this game's overuse of gimmicks and reaction commands for making fights different or interesting i'm not so close-minded as to say that every single instance of them is bad and should be removed that's thankfully far from the case and some of their best utilization is within these fights against the organization with triggers and side effects that represent and complement and counter their individual fighting styles using sayax's own weapon against him in a berserker fury deathly dodging marlouch's scythe and giving it back with a swift strike merging larxian's clones into one easy to pummel package and that's just a few of them each of the members of the organization have their own set of gimmicks and reaction commands and while some of them are frustrating and really really annoying psyx most of them fall much closer to the line of the good type of gimmicks that i talked about earlier in the video where they're well integrated into the core of the action and serve to elevate the fight and make it feel unique as opposed to making it feel like something else entirely or worse just not fun these organization fights are important to single out from a gameplay perspective because they are the best combat this game has to offer the apps and silhouettes zaldin at beast's castle roxas at the end of the world that never was which is absolutely another incredible difficulty spike by the way and the handful of organization members leading up to the final boss are legitimately some of the most fun and exciting fights you'll get out of kingdom hearts 2. it's just too bad that once you plow through those that's all you get [Music] except wait that's not true back in radiant garden there's a big honkin hole in the wall with a post-game dungeon with its own pseudo-boss fight in the form of this absolutely relentless set of very high level enemies that just won't stop spawning creating what is probably the toughest fight with normal enemies in the entire game and once you finish that you're in the garden of assemblage this is the home to the by now infamous data fights where you fight a super powered version of every one of the 13 members of the organization that you fought previously during the game's story and from the apps and silhouettes i'll be honest once i got here i threw my face at data lark scene for about i don't know five minutes before i decided that i didn't feel like doing that grind for this video it is my understanding that unless you're going for a specific challenge run the recommendation for these fights is to be max level going in and i ended the game at around level 61. so not only would i need to grind out those last 28 levels but i'd probably also have to spend quite a long time learning each individual fight and dying a lot especially since i chose to do this playthrough on critical mode and while i'm not against the concept of dying over and over and over and over again for the sake of practicing interesting boss fights kingdom hearts 2 makes that process kind of unbearable for me it doesn't seem like a lot but each death from killing blow to the moment you can act again when retrying is 25 seconds of death animation selecting continue loading back into the garden moving over to the fight entrance on your own confirming the fight and then the pre-fight animation before you can finally skip a part of the cutscene and then finally begin trying again again 25 seconds is not a lot but it definitely becomes annoying when you get bodied in 15 seconds and then have to go through all of that crap again just a lot of little tedious movement and pointless button confirmations that will add up significantly over the ridiculous amount of deaths that i anticipate experiencing during this content there's also a fight with sephiroth who i'm told should be fought before the data fights and lingering will who is the absolute greatest challenge in the game and i've been told is very frustrating they're all very hard in a modern retry system that simply restarts the fight without any of the extra crap would go a long way in making these grinds way more palatable for someone as lacking in patience and spoiled by more modern games like myself the harder something is and the more you're expected to die and retry the more i think quickly being able to restart is important to a positive experience with the grind i'm not expecting anything as quick as kaizo mario hacks for example but something as simple as this would make a world of difference it's really a shame that they didn't think to add this during the final mix upgrade because some of the sequences to retry these bosses are longer than others i'm looking at you roxas in the world that never was and it gets really old really fast when you're riding that struggle bus i can't judge it too much though since that was definitely the style of the time that this game was released but it's definitely a mark against how it feels to play today but hey if this video does well enough and there's enough demand for it i'll definitely consider pushing all of this optional content for a follow-up video to this one kingdom hearts has a bit of a reputation among more casual players as a game where all you gotta do is spam attack and sometimes press triangle and you just win and while that's not necessarily true the games don't really seem interested in proving that point wrong unless you choose to engage with it past the main story and unfortunately for kingdom hearts that's just not how most players tend to engage with their games in my perfect world the game at least on proud mode or higher would be far more demanding on the player from start to finish in terms of the difficulty and the requirement to actually learn the game's deep systems at a level that makes the combat and all of its elements truly shine from start to finish but hey speaking of other elements of the combat i've been talking for a really long time here and somehow have barely mentioned the existence of one of the most important and coolest additions to kingdom hearts 2's combat the drive forms these are transformations in which sora temporarily consumes the soul of one or both of his best friends in order to gain new abilities and fighting styles for a brief period of time these were hands down my absolute most favorite part of the game when i first played it as a teenager and even now they're still a lot of fun to use and play around with each drive form has a different set of abilities and as such different strengths and weaknesses they're all also capable of leveling up individually each with a different method of gaining experience points leveling up a drive form grants the form new abilities and a longer duration but most importantly sora's movement abilities are tied to the progression of these forms rather than the progression of the story like the first game there are five forms that you collect throughout the game valor form is the first form you unlock and consumes goofy for a high-strength dual-wielding physical form that is incapable of using magic it moves quickly and gives sora the ability to unleash a finisher move at the press of the square button but is unable to use guard it is a highly aggressive form that lacks defensive options making it a risky form to use in some fights leveling up this form gives sora the high jump ability and experience is gained by just simply landing attacks wisdom form is the second form unlocked and consumes donald for a magic oriented form that replaces the main attack with a rapid fire magic gun that fires from sora's keyblade its ability to zip across the battlefield paired with its ability to keep up the pressure from a long distance makes it relatively safe to use in many scenarios but feels pretty weak after running out of mp leveling up this form gives sora the quick run ability a sort of dash that can be done across the ground and can also double up as sort of a dodge roll until you get that and experience is gained by defeating heartless limit form is a representation of sora's abilities from the first game and doesn't significantly change sora's basic combat or movement capabilities magic is locked but replaced by limits that sora had during the first game which heal him on hit limit form is the only form that does not cannibalize sora's friends meaning it can be used during solo fights or without making your allies disappear leveling up this form gives sora the ability to dodge roll and experience is gained simply by using limits master form is a fusion of both valor and wisdom form and consumes both friends it excels in both magical and physical combat and doesn't seem to have any glaring weaknesses but does have a focus on aerial combat as opposed to grounded combat leveling up this form gives sora the air dodge ability which is kind of misnamed because it's more like a double jump and experience is gained by collecting drive orbs from defeated enemies and whatever other source that happens to drop drive orbs final form is sora's ultimate and most powerful form and is unlocked randomly while using other drive forms at the end of the game this form drastically changes all of sora's movement and combat abilities and sora's keyblades even seem to have a mind of their own as they'll spin and attack even while sora is doing other things while this form is extremely powerful it can be difficult to control since sora seems to be sliding everywhere all the time during combat leveling up this form gives sora the ability to glide and experience is gained by defeating nobodies all of these forms are great fun to weave into the normal gameplay and to play with and feel like a nice little bonus that you can engage with whenever you want while they do change a lot of what sora can do the core gameplay remains the same you're still pressing x a lot and casting spells but in a crazy and enhanced way it's a blast to dive into a different form and change your flow chart for a minute or two before going back to your normal move set remember though all of these forms can level up but because this is kingdom hearts it's got to do it in the most asinine way possible the restrictions on how a form is able to gain experience points is a type of design decision that i don't think i can ever get behind as something that is fun and worth including at least in the way it's implemented here since leveling up your forms is the only way you're able to acquire all of sora's movement abilities players are directly incentivized into using the forms as much as they possibly can so they can unlock these abilities along with the other bonuses that drive form levels can provide but the problem is these same restrictions impose a sort of reluctance to use the forms at the same time valor form is the easiest form to level up you can gain experience anywhere against any type of enemy as long as you just hit them but unless you have some solid game knowledge from previous playthroughs or are following a guide or take the time to study the levels you're exploring to know what enemies you're fighting and how many it's far too easy to accidentally waste your drive form on a set of encounters that gives the form very few if any experience points for example it doesn't matter how many enemies you defeat in master form unless those enemies are dropping drive orbs then that form is not leveling up did you want to use wisdom form but the only enemies around you are no bodies too bad wisdom ain't growing hopped into a final form to defeat enemies quicker whoops all heartless and no experience because of this i found myself having a hard time getting myself to use a drive form i actually wanted to use because i wasn't sure if the next room was going to be full of heartless or nobodies or if they dropped drive orbs or whatever maybe the next rooms had relatively few enemies with larger rooms so even valor form might have been wasteful i spent a lot of time second guessing my drive form usage because i wanted to be sure i wasn't wasting my gauge for no benefit because if i wasn't clear in the previous section i most often didn't need to use the forms at all to help me clear the encounters i wanted to but at times it felt kind of like the game didn't want me to even with the weird incentivization structure around the concept of leveling up your drive forms i will admit that this feeling is more of an implicit restriction of form usage that i created myself as a side effect of the way i play games and try to be reasonably efficient with them but unfortunately there are a couple more explicit ways in which the game seems to fight against the concept of drive forms in the first place the first is one of the main story elements in the olympus underworld zone on your first time through this happens relatively early in the game and usually by the time you get here you're still having a lot of fun playing with drive forms and trying to level them up but unfortunately you spend an inordinate amount of time stuck in this world with your drive gauge completely locked which means you can't even think about using your fancy little forms until you pass the story beat that unlocks that restriction it's kind of a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things because it really is one and done as far as this restriction goes but i really wanted to mention it because i found it to be so poorly placed for the overall game right before visiting olympus coliseum for the first time you're forced back to hollow bastion to receive your first summon charm instead of using mp this time though the summons share a resource with your new drive forms so unless you do something fancy you've usually got to choose between one or the other the trip back to hollabaston to receive chicken little is really a short detour with no real encounters to speak of and you're likely to head immediately back to the coliseum to continue the story unfortunately because the drive form is locked here you spend a majority of your play time in this world with the complete inability to experiment with your brand new game mechanic sure it's possible to skip either land of dragons or beast's castle to go to the coliseum instead and then do those one of those other two later but if you're following the recommended level order as displayed on the world map itself which i'm convinced most players will do you're definitely going to be in the coliseum right after unlocking summons finding yourself completely unable to play with them my first time or two playing this game this caused me to forget about using summons almost completely because usually one of the first things i like to do when i unlock something new is play with it so i can understand how it fits into my toolbox but unfortunately kingdom hearts 2 completely prevents that from happening in this very very common scenario that's on top of the fact that i receive clear and usable benefits from using and leveling up my drive forms as opposed to leveling up my summon gauge on top of drive forms generally having a clear use case being less confusing and generally a lot more fun to use overall and i'm not saying summons are useless because you can tune into any speedrun and immediately prove that assertion wrong they are in fact incredibly useful if you know what scenario they're good in how to best utilize them and when to use them over just gaining experience for one of your drive forms i did manage to by complete chance find this hugely useful application for chicken little during the visit to disney castle but because of those clear long-term benefits to leveling of the drive forms i opted to ignore summons for the entire rest of the game and spent all of my drive gauge on forms instead and still had to spend a significant amount of time grinding them to max them out at the end of the game it's not like the game really punishes you for not using summons either because as i keep mentioning it's just not challenging enough in that way unless you're going out of your way to make it challenging through either speed runs or a level 1 run and the second explicit way in which the game disincentivizes a portion of its own game mechanics with the drive forms can we all agree that anti-form can get sucked into a black hole and never come back randomly when you use one of your drive forms sora will instead transform into a beast-like heartless with incredibly high mobility super fast attack speed and a complete inability to defend himself in theory this is super freaking cool like a super secret form that has its own abilities and powers and maybe gives you a new kind of growth ability related to the heartless somehow which would also be really cool because sora's past experience is a heartless which this is supposed to represent except no it's just there to punish you for using drive forms too much man i keep mentioning how this game isn't quite hard enough to force you into learning to use all of your tools or learning to use them at a higher level of efficiency but it is hard enough to kill you a few times usually what will stop that from happening is your teammates or your heals or your defensive options or even something as simple as knowing how sora moves and reacts when you press the buttons on your controller well enough to avoid hits or stop certain enemies from using their moves anti-forum throws all of that out of the window turning sora into an almost literal whirlwind of claws and shadow that can't take very many hits before forcing you to reload your game this is a style of movement and fighting that players won't understand very quickly or even after a few different instances of going into this form you're rarely ready for it to show its face in the first place because it's random and the lack of experience with using it combined with the lack of defensive options it provides means that you're probably going to get murdered if there was at least some benefit to this form if there was some cool optional content hidden behind it or if it was a form you could level up as it randomly pops out causing sora to learn how to control the darkness that is clearly still present inside of him it would be a really interesting mechanic that you could apply yourself into stopping it from screwing you over at the most inopportune times as it tends to do but instead it's a frustrating mechanic designed solely to prevent you from using drive forms too much there's a hidden stat built into this game that determines your probability to enter this anti-form that can be managed if you have a lot of game knowledge and choose to use your drive forms at specific times but other than that and master form which resets that hidden stat but isn't unlocked until the end of the game and never explained anywhere you're going to be stuck with the fear of knowing that your next form use might cause you a lot of problems hey here's an idea instead of trying to discourage me from using drive forms too much in a way that's really frustrating how about you instead design them so that there won't be a possibility for overuse this crazy concept right as they are the fun in using these forums and the relatively high requirements to level them up almost demands constant use so other than being a neat tie into the first game i don't see any reason for this form to exist at all complaining aside though drive forms are an excellent addition to this game and are wonderful and a lot of fun to use it's just too bad that the design around them seems intent on frustrating the player and making them not want to use them as much as possible there is so much more gameplay to talk about and so many more minor systems that we can go over but if i did that this video would be way longer than it already is and it's already probably too long so let's move on to the final section the rest of the story [Music] i think that to describe the overall plot of the entire kingdom hearts franchise as confusing is probably well accepted by now with so many characters at so many worlds and so many interconnected character stories it was probably inevitable the first game of the series left a lot of hanging questions by the end of the game but kingdom hearts 2 really sent the confusion into overdrive why are the heartless back in full force why do people speak in this weird metaphorical sense about nobody's not existing even though they really do why do nobodies seem to have emotions and personalities when much of their own dialogue states that their emotionless shells why is ansem alive and seemingly a good guy now is yin sid secretly just a racist against nobodies why is diz of course there are answers to all of these questions but most of them aren't answered in this game and even if they are it's so easy to feel completely overwhelmed by the barrage of it there are also the ansem reports that might answer some questions but i'll confess i never bother to read those i'm not super interested in critiquing the story itself more the way it's told more complicated plots than this can make perfect sense if it's written and structured in a way to assist that understanding instead of trying to shroud itself in too much mystery you know like that one kid we all knew in high school who were all black and too much eyeliner and acted all mysterious you know who i'm talking about that's not to say that stories shouldn't be written in a way that requires a bit of analysis and digging to understand but kingdom arts 2 especially feels like it's not just trying to set up a bunch of mysteries but also kind of trying to prevent you from solving them or understanding the story in the first place nomura had this to say about kingdom hearts as a whole when we were kids we always thought there's not enough things to imagine from this when reading manga watching anime or playing games and i thought that is strange whether it's game anime or manga there should be a place where you can speculate things i have that feeling so i wanted to make a game that gives you space for your imagination that's why i don't like revealing everything and say this is the answer just like when i was a kid i want to make something that can allow people to let lose their imagination with with that in mind i think it's fair to say that kingdom hearts in general is at least somewhat deliberately written to be obtuse to allow for fan theories and speculation and at some level i completely agree with the sentiment of creating something that can allow people's imaginations to run wild with the possibilities i almost want to say that it went too far but i don't think that's quite true it succeeds but in a way that doesn't feel satisfying or even approachable to people who don't want to write their doctoral thesis on the complex story and plot within kingdom hearts and overall i think it's the moment to moment writing that makes the mystery feel unsatisfying namine she's a wonder she wasn't born like other nobodies she can interfere with the hearts and memories of sora and those aligned with him what's this gadget for it's a device to reclaim kingdom hearts and encode it as data not sure i get it his eyes couldn't lie lie and just who were you trying to fool huh huh myself riku an empty vessel whose heart has been stolen away a spirit that goes on even as its body fades from existence for you see no bodies do not truly exist at all roxas are you really sure that you don't have a heart is it possible that we all have one you me her or is that just wishful thinking i don't know you're fading away well that's what happens when you put your whole being into an attack you know what i mean not that nobody's actually have beings right i'm what's left or maybe i'm all there ever was our are gone what all are gone huh huh you can't say why not but you do understand what i'm saying right our are gone stolen and not just the the word they stole it too wait a minute how would that even be possible we don't exist remember what you're saying goes against the laws of nature then perhaps he bet his non-existence i have the right to know a nobody doesn't have a right to know nor does it even have the right to be but what is a nobody this we're out of time too many nobodies a lot of it has to do with the weirdly cryptic and sometimes overly flowery way the characters speak but that by itself could be a vessel for the imagination to go crazy with the real problem goes back to what i mentioned earlier about how the story of each world and the larger story of the organization are too disjointed in kingdom hearts 2's writing and since each individual world's story takes up an extremely significant portion of the game's run time with very little interjection by the overarching plot the main story dumps can feel dense and confusing especially since a decent chunk of time passes between those dumps with an average play time of a little over 32 hours and with so much of that spent on stuff that doesn't really matter it means that there isn't a lot of time dedicated to fleshing out the characters their plans or the direct consequences of each person's actions i've harped on enough about the disjointed nature of the disney worlds so i'll just leave it at this if the main plot was better integrated with these worlds then the increased time allowed for characterization of the actors who really matter to the plot would have made the story and mystery even bigger than it currently is and would have likely made the story and its mysteries feel more satisfying and more engaging that said i don't think any amount of time is going to make dizzy's heart-powered full-die virtual reality that can generate real-world money make any sense or his computer turret thing that he made that's meant to encode the organization's version of kingdom hearts to seal it away whatever whatever that means that's some techno hyuckery if i've ever heard it but hey what do i know this is the universe in which my favorite candy growing up would be a sick upgrade for an interplanetary spacecraft another really important way the storytelling in this game managed to feel unsatisfying is the apparent lack of consequences in any of the actions taken by anyone in the story there are very few instances in the game where the story feels like it has any effect on the worlds or the people within it a few notable exceptions are zaldin's manipulation of beast which again i'll praise as a high point in this game's storytelling in the completely superficial name change of holo bastion to radiant garden even with those though the worlds seem entirely unaffected by the goings-on in the story if there's one moment in the game that exemplifies kingdom hearts 2's dedication to a lack of consequences and stop me if you've heard this one before it's that goofy yucking dies in this game look out goofy for five glorious minutes you're treated to a scenario where kingdom hearts has consequences for its characters and its worlds goofy takes two tons to the face in brave service of king mickey and goes down heroically while the crew loses their collective cool and heads out to twist some necks goofy is removed from the party all of his equipment is returned into your inventory and you mow through dozens of heartless immediately afterward with the help of your final fantasy friends in hollow bastion this entire scene is played extremely seriously emotions are high but donald in classic donald fashion forgets to cast cure like he always does and nobody in the group even thinks to check for breathing or a pulse you know some of the first things that you might want to do when a beloved party member is gravely injured as an aside here i love that i was apparently in valor form just before reaching the scene as if goofy's soul is now forever soros on its own the implication of this scene are huge at least potentially goofy's gone how will that affect sora donald and mickey on an emotional level will darkness be allowed to fester in their hearts and risk pulling them away from the light goofy is one of donald and mickey's oldest friends what subtle character changes will they go through will a new party member take the place of goofy who has the ability to grant sora his valor form so many interesting questions and directions to take a monumental story beat like this if it was real barely three minutes of fighting and an extra 20 or so seconds of cutscene is literally all it takes for goofy to come marching back into the scene no worse for wear gosh i get hit on the head all the time there's a brief happy reunion followed closely by everyone forgetting that it ever happened hell i'd want to forget too because the first thing people would likely do is laugh at me and ask why i didn't check for a pulse any tension or interesting consequences from the scene are completely wiped away by a fear of committing to anything that'll shake up the status quo i wish i was exaggerating about how short this time period is between goofy's supposed death and his return but i have the footage to back it up three and a half minutes whatever i had to say about the rest of the games storytelling and writing at least it's not trying to pass itself off as something more than it really is in the way this scene does it's such a frustrating bit of missed potential and i get it we can't kill off one of the original disney sweethearts and whether or not that was the original intention disney probably wouldn't allow it anyway but what if man what if kingdom hearts was filled with complex character moments and universe changing consequences what if this ambitious crossover project made the effort to truly cross over kingdom hearts 1 gave us a taste of that with gepetto becoming a refugee in twilight town and beast's invasion of hollow bastion and the plot revolving around the seven princesses of pure heart it's just such a shame that the sequel dialed way back on everything that made the disney world's presence in this universe interesting so i've been pretty harsh on this game for most of this video and about most aspects of it as well but please don't take that to mean that i don't like it please kingdom hearts 2 is one of those games that i will always remember fondly despite any problems that i have with it it's a game that exudes charm and is further propped up by an overdose of nostalgia and the excitement that accompanies it when you see these characters interacting so naturally the themes of optimism hope friendship and personal growth in the face of seemingly insurmountable darkness are timeless and uplifting and all of that comes together to form the full package of a game that's just fun it's just fun whatever flaws these games have can't erase the magic that they carry and it's only because of that magic and how much i enjoy these games that i am able to think about them this deeply unfortunately that magic does not negate all the missed potential that i see here either sure i believe the gameplay would be better without all the low effort gimmicks and the dozens of weird reaction commands or if the magic system was less restrictive but as much time as i spent on those aspects comparatively i think the disjointed nature of the worlds and kingdom hearts and the lack of any tangible consequences in their spaces are where the biggest missed potential lies i've already gone into enough detail about that but one of the reasons i'm so hard on kingdom hearts is because of the company that made it square enix formerly squaresoft is the studio behind so many of the greatest rpgs and stories in this entire medium final fantasy chrono trigger secret of mana and more i know they're capable of so much better storytelling and world building than what we can observe in these first two kingdom hearts games they've proven it with so many of their own games that came before and plenty even that come after and as i've mentioned before even the first kingdom hearts game gave us a little taste of what these games could have been with more interplay between more franchises from disney and square as much as i enjoy these games i can't help but see all that missed potential with every moment that i think about and play them and ultimately i think all of that is because kingdom hearts 2 tries to do too many things and frustratingly does too little with so much of it this was an incredibly ambitious game but great ambition all too often comes at the cost of some kind of sacrifice which we can clearly see in this game's barren worlds which are a step down even from the first game in the series we could dig around and likely find more points that were sacrificed to the gods of progress and release windows but even with those sacrifices kingdom hearts 2 still manages to improve on so much over the previous titles while expanding the universe and with it the possibilities so even though many parts of this game feel underbaked due to the sheer breadth of what it offers that breadth also feels somewhat at home in this series because well kingdom hearts is kind of a lot it fits but despite that ambition kingdom hearts 2 also feels safe with characters rarely leaving the strictly sanitized bubbles of their own worlds which stifles the creative potential of all these worlds colliding in this one universe again this potential i think it's important to recognize how incredible this game was for its time and how accomplished it was compared to many of its peers but it's also important to realize how nostalgia can blind us to the flaws of some of our favorite things a concept i'm personally reminded of every single time i even think about the secret of mana series in my mind this game deserves so much of the praise that is thrown at it but it's not quite the masterpiece or the perfect game that this praise might make you think it is it is however undeniably an incredible and unforgettable experience that is full of a special kind of magic that only kingdom hearts can pull off and especially now that the series has made its way to pc with the possibility for modifications to potentially iron out some of the more egregious quality of life issues that plague this 15 year old game i believe that kingdom hearts 1 and two are long-lived classics that every fan of video games should experience at least once [Music] you

Channel: ingeniousclown Gaming

Views: 21,267

Keywords: ingeniousclown, ingenious clown, kingdom hearts, kingdom hearts 2, sora, smash, a smashing success, the perfect sequel, kh2, kingdom hearts switch, kingdom hearts pc, kingdom hearts critique, kingdom hearts 2 critique, kh2 critique, kh2 review, kingdom hearts 2 retrospective, kh2 retrospective, kingdom hearts retrospective, retrospective critique, sora smash, smashing, retrospective, critique, kingdom hearts ii

Id: eZ6nNuOXz4c

Length: 105min 13sec (6313 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021

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I didn’t make this video, the YouTube channel ingenious clown made this video