I can now safely say that I understand the frustration of being a Kingdom Hearts fan. The first game was harmless enough sure, a pretty good time, as is the majority of this, but my god do Square know how to shoot themselves in the foot. For every great new addition they add, a questionable one is also made. Some of the more ambitious story points are interesting and mysterious, while others make my brain ache and require an additional few spinoff titles to fully understand. Some characters and worlds are built upon in a natural way, whilst others are either a complete rehash or an absolute fucking disgrace (we’ll get to Atlantica). Despite all I’ve said and will describe, I really, really enjoy this game, even with its many faults.

Right, explaining the plot could be long so I’ll try and condense it to the basics. After beginning with a 3-hour long prologue where you play as someone who’s somehow connected in both appearance and storywise to Sora… Sora, Donald, and Goofy are back! A mysterious group known as Organisation XIII is causing some trouble and at their disposal are the new enemies known as the Nobodies. Fighting both this new threat as well as the returning Heartless, you travel to new and returning Disney worlds searching for Riku, King Mickey, and answers to all the complex mysteries the game presents.

Although the original game’s Final Mix (enhanced version) has a ton of content, Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix often succeeds as a fully realised version of the first. With its larger scope comes more ambitious plotlines with a large roster of established and new characters. The addition of Mickey’s old nemesis Pete into the KH universe is brilliant, Axel becomes an easy fan favourite, and you have the late Christopher Lee providing his iconic voice to Ansem the Wise. Each world has its own set of events and missions, giving a reason to come back to them later on, and a lot of the problems I had, have been fixed or completely overhauled, most notably, the gummi ship section. The complex UI is more or less improved and is also entirely avoidable as you’re given ships that are ready to go after every level you complete. But the craziest change by far to the Gummi Ship sections is that they are actually now fun! Something I thought I’d never say, but thanks to a new Arcade machine-style “On-Rails” shooter, you’re constantly being moved around aiming at new targets at an engaging pace.

On top of the Gummi Ship now feeling pretty badass, the satisfying combat has been expanded upon in the best possible way, bringing new attacks and special moves, along with the new Drive Gauge feature, which allows Sora to access various new forms, giving him an entirely different set of moves. The best addition by far is undoubtedly the Reaction command. What an incredible use for the Triangle button. When fighting an enemy or boss, a unique (often cinematic in nature) command is available that allows Sora to creatively extend his combat abilities. Whether It’s grabbing onto an aerial enemy and swinging them around, or initiating a large-scale quick-time event to knock a boss down a peg, these varying moves are so much fun to use and extremely gratifying. With the combat system feeling so refined, I optionally chose to go back to previous worlds, just to grind some more enemies for fun, as well as levelling up the Drive Forms for additional abilities.

That being said, Square Enix isn’t good at keeping a good thing. After building up your Drive Gauge, instead of activating one of your cool new Drive Form that you specifically chose, there’s a random chance of becoming a heartless version of Sora Instead. Now, other than the fact that it looks cool, this form really sucks and is there exclusively to fuck you over. This is especially crap earlier in the game, when the drive gauge takes a longer time to fill, wasting even more time just to get this useless power-down. Dick move Square, dick move.

The worlds visited in Kingdom Hearts 2 fall under two categories, those being brand new locations and returning ones from the first game. Some new ones like Mulan, Lion King, and even 1982’s Tron are incorporated seamlessly and fit pretty naturally in the games’ already established universe. A major standout of this game is when you get to visit Timeless River, a world inspired by old-school 1920s Disney animations like Steamboat Willie. Visiting this world was an absolute joy, as it’s both an enjoyably designed section of the game and also pays homage to Disney’s earliest works in a beautiful monochromatic colour scheme. While a lot of these new worlds fit, I’ll tell you what doesn’t. Pirates Of The Caribbean. What the hell were they thinking, having a realistic-looking Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, and Keira Knightly next to the very much animated Sora, Donald, and Goofy. It’s extremely jarring, especially when they decide to recreate an entire scene from the film within the confines of a Playstation 2 game. I will admit that I preferred this world when it wasn’t trying to recreate Curse of The Black Pearl, but you only get to experience that later on when you revisit the world.

When I say revisit, I don’t mean going back and searching for any of the many collectables scattered throughout each level. This installment adds Episodes to each world, typically meaning there are two rounds of visiting each world. This not only allows for more exploration, world-building, and character development but also, as previously mentioned, gives both the opportunity to tell their own story as well as follow the general plot of the given movie. I much prefer when an original story Is presented, rather than stumbling through a film with Sora tacked on to the side. I also think that Beast’s Castle perfectly walks the line, by following on from Beast’s interactions in the first game, while also playing into the general plot of Beast’s (and his servants) curse, without having to retell Beauty and The Beast.

Returning to worlds from Kingdom Hearts 1 gives more opportunity to tell original stories in a given film’s universe, or incorporate parts of a film not used in the first game. An example of this is seen when returning to Halloween Town, where now you visit Christmas Town, something that had not been explored prior but is a major part of the original Nightmare Before Christmas. Similarly, you visit the underworld when returning to Hercules’ Olympus Colosseum, and along with Meg, Pain, and Panic making their in-game debut, you now fight tournaments in a new Hades’ built stadium. I was initially a bit disappointed with how much of this game is returning to old locations, but once I realised it meant a chance to further explore and fully develop those already established settings, I began to appreciate the justification for bringing them back. Agrabah now feels as big as a city should, Hollow Bastion is now a completely different world and acts as this game’s Hub-world in many ways, but that doesn’t mean all returning worlds get positive changes. There are two in particular that are baffling to me.

The first of which is the return to 100 Acre Wood, that being Winnie The Pooh’s “book-world” from the first game. After collecting missing pages from this book in Kingdom Hearts 1, you got to reunite classic A.A. Milne characters in what was a heartwarming interlude from the combat-driven base game. In this game, the entire thing is rehashed, except this time for some reason, Pooh has amnesia. That means, missing pages again, mostly the same locations with a lot of similar story beats, with the only improvement being the minigames aren’t as bad as the first. This feels like an enormous waste of potential, especially as Sora’s established relationship with all these characters was a nice change of pace and a really enjoyable part of the original game.

But my god, the rehash on Winnie and his friends has nothing on what they did to Atlantica. The Little Mermaid’s world surprisingly worked in the first installment because it didn’t follow the plot of the film and was built around the unique underwater combat. But in this game… It becomes the single worst, cringe-inducing aspect of what is otherwise a solid game and is demoted to a mind-numbingly mundane rhythm game. The gameplay is tedious, the music accompanying it is tone deaf, and they decided to butcher some of the actual songs from the classic film, by changing the lyrics and having Sora sing them. The icing on the cake, however, is that if you pause during these awful songs, you have to restart from the beginning, as there is no resume button. Seriously, what the actual hell were they thinking?

An aspect I really appreciated amongst the shitstorm of strange decisions was the variation in all the members of the secretive Organisation XIII and the boss fights that accompany them. You fight pretty much every single member of the black hooded gang, even the ones that died in the GBA spinoff that preceded this game, and each has their own defining personality traits, weapons, and even gameplay gimmicks that make the fights stand apart from each other. You have Demyx who controls water minions with a sitar, Luxord who gambles with luck, attacking you with cards and dice in a battle of not HP but time, and Lexaeus, who increases his power level significantly throughout the fight and needs to be dropped down a peg in order to attack him. While a lot of the optional fights (not required to progress) are hard as hell, they were still fun, especially coming back to them later on, I just wish they had a suggested level next to them, as you unlock a lot of them really early on, when they’re basically impossible to survive. You also get the chance to fight each member again in a post-game state where they are all infinitely harder. I didn’t mention it in my KH1 review but that is par the course for these Final Mixes to have hard-as-nails, barely beatable, post-game bosses, that are entirely optional and I think as they are endgame and available to those who want to grind, I can’t fault them for being as hard as they are.

The game culminates in a similar fashion to the first, with a multi-phased grand spectacle of a boss fight that mixes many different gameplay styles. At the point of the story’s conclusion, I’d pretty much wrapped my head around the heavily convoluted name-game that is this game’s storyline. It involves a lot of retconning the first game, alternate versions of pre-existing characters, and some overexplaining of things unseen (or that are present in any number of spinoffs), but after being a bit lost for a while, the end cleared things up for me pretty well, regardless of how dumb elements of this series’ storyline very much are.

A clear head and an incredibly satisfying and badass ending (a lot in part to that sweet sweet reaction command) left me with a good impression of this game, on top of the fact that I really enjoyed most of my time playing through it. That is not to say that it doesn’t clearly have its flaws, because it very much does. It builds upon the original’s abstract concept, introduces brilliant new elements, and is an overall better experience than the original Kingdom Hearts. All of this is true, but it’s difficult not to also take into account the bad decisions that hold this game back from truly being an extraordinary game. Exposition dumps, rehashing of old content, questionable choices, and oversights, all add up and are a real stain on the overall product you get, which is a shame because as I say, It’s a game I had a really great time with.