CLASSIC GAMING
Kingdom Hearts
Developer - Squaresoft/Disney Interactive
Publisher - Squaresoft
Genre - RPG
Year - 2002
System - Playstation 2

Crossovers in terms of fiction have always become a controversial matter, mostly with the meeting of two production teams of different companies working side by side with their own individual creations in such a strange encounter and trying to pull off something that's plausible, or failing that, so damn entertaining you don't give a damn who the Punisher's with.  Sometimes, particularly if the creations are in the same medium such as comics, it has a better chance of working.  Other times, it can fail very badly.
This videogame has become famous for one of the most unlikely, tenacious and unholy crossovers ever made, yet one that has gained such immense popularity as to defy possibility for some.

Story - The story of Kingdom Hearts has as much childish grandeur and adventure as Final Fantasy, with as much depth and wisdom as Disney, minus any psuedo-Christian overtones (and not in that Narnia "Jesus Christ is a lion get on the cart" kind of way).
It all begins on a small group of islands called Destiny Islands, where a 14 year old boy named Sora is planning a big adventure with his best friends Kairi and Riku.  After awakening from a very strange dream, they are almost finished making a raft but the night after this, the island is invaded by freakish shadowy creatures, stealing away Sora's best friends as well as his home off to another world.  In this time, Sora obtains a very strange key-shaped weapon.


At this same time, in the Castle of Disney, the royal court magician, Donald Duck, finds a letter beside the empty throne of King Mickey, speaking of the king's finding of the stars in the sky disappearing one by one, which means a great disaster is coming.  Donald reports this to the leader of the castle guards, the ironically pacifistic Goofy, and they are instructed in the letter to find someone with a "key" who will be their only hope.
It's not long after this that Donald and Goofy travel to Traverse Town, a humble sprawling thriving town filled with people who have left their worlds, also disappeared by strange creatures.  Sora is among them as he soon learns of not only the Heartless (the shadowed main enemies of the game) but also the importance the Keyblade, his new weapon, has in defeating them and saving the remaining worlds from being swallowed literally by darkness.  Donald and Goofy accompany Sora (whose original quest is to find Riku and Kairi) on orders from their king.

Graphics - The graphics are splendid to view in terms of scenery and the Disney characters.  Thee worlds feel like living breathing Disneyfied worlds that will surely make you feel like a child once again by their cartoon-with-extra-dimension appeal, which have been reproduced very nicely, way more than even Disney themselves can do (and anyone who caught sight of Playhouse Disney's shows will say the same when Disney make their characters look SO GODDAMN CLEAAAAAAAAAAN in 3D, which is just a bit too sterile for my tastes).
The Disney characters are the best thing in terms of the game's graphics.  It's quite challenging to bring in normally 2D characters into 3D without them looking awkwardly unlike themselves.  But in this game, they look marvellous.  Donald and Goofy don't even look different from their original flatter selves and even their movements don't feel different.  This holds true with all the other characters of Disney origins.  Some surprising creations appear in the game that will make you gasp at least in surprise of the world being there and in excellently transferred condition.


Sadly, the Final Fantasy characters (really, all the non-Disney human characters) have not been given as much thought.  Due to the fact the game leans heavily on the Disney side of the partnership by terms of involvement, the cameo appearances from Final Fantasy games do not look as vivid.  In all honesty, while they look great by terms of body and overall appearance, the face suffers from not a lot of animation, making them look quite stilted, like a watered down form of the facial animations of Final Fantasy X.  I'm talking whole acres of face not moving, acres the size of Thunder Plains.  However, the main three humans of Sora, RIku and Kairi, are better animated, since they required more flexible expression as vital parts of the story.

Gameplay - Kingdom Hearts plays a lot like a free-form Final Fantasy in terms of field and battle.  Let's start with the field.  You can move around and jump, but you have a list of commands that you must first select with either the directional pad or the right analog stick.  This isn't really a handicap for the game though as the menu is easy and smooth even in battle to use.  In the field you have save points that allow you to not only fully reheal your characters, but also save and change your party and at some points, exit the world you're in.
Items are in the Final Fantasy format of potions, ethers and elixirs and can be either put in the bulk stock of all your items, or in your characters' individual inventories, so that they are easier to access and can be used in battle, since the main menu (which is the full menu by pressing Start and not the mini-menu explained before) cannot be accessed during battle.

Battle in Kingdom Hearts is very simple.  When a battle begins, Sora can wield his keyblade to smash enemies with a 3-hit combo either on land, or upwards at an airborne enemy within striking range, or even do a quicker combo in the air.  Sora can also deploy magic (three spells will be given a shortcut for easier access to while other spells you must access by the mini-menu itself).  Another easy thing of battles is Sora can lock on to an enemy up to a certain distance from it, allowing almost always visual contact with your target.
While this is simple, it does tend to suffer from becoming too repetitive.  You have your health, which is HP once again, your MP being blocks that each spell takes up a different amount of and you recover in battle by being hit.  If your allies lose all their health, they merely are knocked unconscious and recover with half of their health in a certain amount of time.  if Sora loses his health however, the game ends and you either continue at the place where you last fought, or from the last place you saved.


Your allies are a different matter.  Out of battle and in the main menu, you can configure your allies' battle strategies from the very simple choices ranging from Frequently (CURESPAM CURESPAM) to Occasionally (I'll use Firaga when I damn well want to!) for the various kinds of attacks.  While this sounds good, it is actually not that effective and only offers a slight change in your allies' behavioural patterns in battle.
Donald is an absolute idiot in battle.  I never expected him to be clever other than being a wise-ass but he never learned an olde rule of RPGs, in that all mages, sorcerers, warlocks and magically-inclined participants, must NEVER be near enemies until absolutely necessary and desperate.
Donald ALWAYS rushes into battle, which can only be because of his natural impatience, in which case he should never have been a mage in the first place, and is the most likely ally in the whole game to lose all his health constantly, being the one with the least amount of HP in the game but with more MP.  So when he gets Cure, he may actually start looking after himself and you don't have to constantly run over to him to keep him awake like some sort of lame relay race of "pass the potion".  He also has the least item capacity but he does become more useful when he learns more magic later in the game though.  Honestly, unless you're a big fan of Donald, he's just a cure backup.  And that's bad.  Remember who else was a cure backup?
Aeris.

Goofy is an entirely different affair.  To quote himself in the 1937 Disney cartoon The Lonesome Ghosts, "I'm brave but I'm careful", Goofy is a much more defensive ally and is more helpful than his feathered counterpart by hanging back a little more and attacking only at intervals with defence on the front.  He also has more health with higher strength and defence, making him a little more formidable than Donald or Sora.  Not only that, but Goofy has the highest number of item capacity, so he essentially becomes the support character in battle.
The other allies, who you will only have in most of the other worlds, range from being in every enemy's face and getting jabbed to exhaustion, to those who hang back and smack out some magical powers.  Eventually you'll find a fine balance of defence and offence with those you fight with.


That's not the only part of gameplay to contend with.  There is also the matter of the Gummi ship.  Donald and Goofy travel between worlds with the use of a Gummi ship, a multicoloured blocklike craft.  There are two stages of the gummi ship.  First there is the travelling through space, which you must avoid and shoot down various obstacles while travelling to another world, including the ships of the Heartless who leave behind gummi blocks after being destroyed (which you can use to upgrade your own ship or sell to a certain character in Traverse Town).
This portion of the game is the weakest part of the game, playing like a colourfully bad imitation of Starfox.  The other part of the gummi ship, which is arguably a bit more fun, is the gummi garage, where you can upgrade or even redesign your ship in any way you want.  You will eventually have to upgrade the ship when you are travelling to worlds later in the game, since the enemies in space get more tougher further on.

But let's be honest, WHO likes the Gummi Ship?  The worst thing is you can't skip this part, EVER!  You have to ALWAYS fly in a slow pissy motion while in a pile of Lego blocks.  At least the game's sequel actually let you only have to do the sections ONCE and then you can choose to do them again if you ever wanted to (really the only improvements the sequel has over the original is a better Gummi Ship system and better voice acting, but in exchange FUCKING HORRIBLE RHYTHM GAME ATLANTICA DEAR GOD MY OTHER EAR IS DEAF!).

Music/Sound - The music is wonderfully performed with the conducting talents of Yoko Shimomura, composer of the music for Super Mario RPG and the recent Mario and Luigi titles.  There are two classes of her works in the game.  Those mimicking Disney and those that are original.  The Disney-mimics are wonderfully composed and serve only to greater illustrate the worlds of Disney's creation as a revival of that famous atmosphere, making you certainly relive the movie of that world in all its fantastical imagery.  The battle themes of each world are original yet give a great remix almost on the world's theme, merely adding to the fantasy of the battles within the worlds.  The original worlds (those not inspired at all from Disney films) are even more wonderful by the talented work of Shimomura, dealing a lot more with the orchestral kind of music, choirs included fantastically so.


As for sound, well....here comes the biggest controversy of the game.  The voice acting.  There is a lot of debate of whether the voice acting has been done well enough as well as the script of the game.  Firstly, the script is quite good with everyone, keeping them well in character (especially the Disney ones, being the more carefully planned with) with a slight TOO much overemphasis on the phrases of "heart", "light" and "darkness", but then what is new with a Disneyfied script?  It's gonna use such generic words to avoid anything even SLIGHTLY religious after all, always has been.

Voice acting for the Disney characters has been dealt with rather well, most of the characters even having their original voice actors (or at least the current official voices) booked to do the script, of which they perform perfectly in character, especially Donald and Goofy.
The non-Disney characters is when it gets rough.  Due to the fact the game has almost no leaning into Final Fantasy territory in terms of story, the characters don't even seem that important and not even giving much of an appearance by voice.  Nevertheless despite this somewhat carefree handling, the non-Disney characters still play okay and give some semblance of what they would sound like (since most of the Final Fantasy characters had no voice in their original games).  But it may be best you don't find out the actors, as some controversial choices are made for some of the most beloved of them.

This is a game that has been steeped in confusion since its birth of an idea, and spawning into a crossover that in all likelihood should never have worked and should really die away as nothing more than a failed ambitious, almost fanfiction-potential project of two major companies.  But somehow it succeeded, and burst forth as a famous game that has grown with more love in the Disney fandom than the Final Fantasy fandom, and rightly so.
The game gives practically nothing to the Final Fantasy franchise other than the potential to spawn a few thousand crossover fanfics on the Internet.  But with Disney the game is giving spades of it away.  This is a game that has very much become like a Disney movie.  It's almost magically disbelieving to think it would ever become popular, maybe with the same disbelief of when Walt Disney made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the first animated film, or Fantasia as the first animated musical.
You can't deny it.  This is yet more proof that Disney, even when they're a dying company that have pretty much handed over the crown to Pixar, have still managed to replicate more magic within our own hearts.

Fun and Innovation - 4
Replayability - 3
Gameplay - 3
Presentation - 5