Kingdom Hearts

Hello all!

I have to sadly inform you that both my PS3 and PS1 have broken down... but to balance out the situation I decided to purchase a PS2! In addition I got 15 games that included Kingdom Hearts I and II! I remember being 9 or 10 years old when I really wanted the first game in the series but now, over ten years later I finally have it! I'm so excited to own a PS2 because I know that my brother has some amazing games to recommend. I recently borrowed Star Ocean: Second Story from him but haven't had the time to play it again, since I've been too excited with Kingdom Hearts. Let me tell you a little about the game.

 To be honest the beginning of the game is quite confusing. You're not sure if Sora, the main character is dreaming or if he's awake but to me it was pretty weird. He's constantly falling from one place to another, then he's floating under water, back to falling and then floating and so on. The first cutscene's pretty trippy. Anyways, you get to choose between a sword, a magic staff and a shield. Defending is important but I decided to drop the shield and picked a sword and the staff. The sword was a must but I don't want to go on without magic either. You also need to answer a few questions and I suppose they're going to affect your gameplay somehow but I'm not sure yet how. If I remember correctly one of them was about what you're scared of and I picked 'growing old', which is quite accurate... and scary at the same time. 

The game begins in Destiny Islands, Sora and his friends' home world. Sora, Kairi and Riku have a plan to build a raft and explore the outside worlds which are still unknown to them. One night the island is attacked by monsters called the Heartless and during the ruckus Sora gets a hold of the Keyblade, a weapon with great power. Sora gets separated from his friends and lands in a foreign world where he meets Donald Duck and Goofy. To his surprise he's exactly who the two of them have been looking for! Though their goals are different at first they end up joining their forces in order to defeat the evil Heartless and whoever is behind them. The answer to all questions is the mystery Keyblade...

If anything, KH really depicts my childhood which was filled with both Final Fantasy and Disney. It's an old game but I must say that I knew very little of it before I started playing. I knew there was going to be FF and Disney but that's all. Even so, I keep on smiling to myself every time I encounter an old, familiar character. Some of them have their original voice acting, which is so awesome. I couldn't play the game if Donald Duck didn't sound exactly like supposed to. Wakka from FFX has a small role in the beginning of the game and I was pretty upset by the voice acting... but otherwise everything's a huge plus!

The gameplay is quite simple. You pretty much run around hacking away at monsters, casting spells and so on. What makes me most nervous is that despite the fighting being really easy, the fights itself have been quite difficult! I don't know about the rest of the world but I have had huge difficulties with a few fights (Clayton and that darned Chameleon...) I have googled my problems a few times and have found tens of forum posts asking about the same things I have questioned so I suppose I can't be the only one sucking at this game. I'm currently struggling in the Aladdin world where I need to fight against the Sand Tiger. But fortunately I had google on my side once again and now know what to do!

I'm in the beginning of the game but KH has already given me so many mysteries I can't solve. Firstly there are quite a few collectables, 101 to be exact *wink wink*. Secondly you can find pages of a magical book scattered all over the worlds. I don't know how many there are, but by collecting them you supposedly help out Winnie the Pooh, who is currently all alone in the book. Thirdly, you instantly find different colour paint stains all over the first world. I think I currently have the power to interact with blue and red stains, which usually reveal a new passageway or a treasure. It pretty much means that Sora, Donald and Goofy bump their heads against a wall where the paint stain lies. I'm sure that can't be all so Kingdom Hearts is definitely going to be a longer project.

What I don't like about the game is that Donald, being a hugely lovable character is in fact completely useless in battle. While trying to concentrate on a battle I can only hear the desperate quacking of Donald and at some point the ruckus stops, which means he has already passed out. Fortunately in some worlds you encounter characters, such as Tarzan and Aladdin who can replace Donald and join you in battle. Unfortunately this means that you can't interact with the paint stains I talked about earlier because they require both Donald and Goofy in your team. A friend of mine did mention that Donald makes up a good healer at some point of the game but since Sora is the only one with the ability Cure at the moment, Donald is going to keep on dragging me down. His squabbling with Sora is quite hilarious though!

I'm also a bit skeptical about the Gummi Ship system. In order to reach a new world you need to travel through space Star Fox-style with a space ship, shooting down enemies and obstacles. They drop different ship parts and by collecting blueprints you can build new, better Gummi Ships. Aaaaaand... I think it's a complete waste of time. I just got a new part which enables me to visit familiar worlds without going through the space fighting scenes, but I'm not sure how it works yet. But so far, if I wanted to visit Tarzan's world from my home world, I had to go through two sequences of space fighting... and when going back the same thing all over again. I wouldn't mind if the game was actually STAR FOX and the flying plus shooting was the whole idea but hey, I'm playing Kingdom Hearts... I want to kill monsters and level up my characters, not fly in space.

The storyline hasn't been that captivating yet. You just go from world to world, help the characters in that specific place and fight the Heartless monsters. On top of that, *SPOILER WARNING*, wasn't it pretty obvious that Riku's going to turn evil? I'm not 100% sure, but it had been heavily indicated in the game so far. I do not want to battle against him though. You can duel with him in the beginning of the game with wooden swords and I got my ass kicked at least thrice.

I wish I had more to tell but I have only played for 10 hours or so. But I think I got the most important details covered. I'm already looking forward to KH2. I don't have any complaints but I'm excited to see what they've done better compared to the first game. I'm probably going to play something else inbetween but at some point I'll return with Kingdom Hearts 2.