Kingdom Hearts II
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 The Story Is Not Over
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Kingdom Hearts II is an action role-playing video game for the PlayStation 2 developed and published by Square Enix in collaboration with Buena Vista Games. It is the sequel to the 2002 game Kingdom Hearts. It was released in Japan on December 22, 2005, and in America on March 28, 2006.
There is also an updated version of the game known as Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix, which adds additional content that was released in Japan and wouldn't see a release in the West until it was included in Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix along with the Final Mix version of Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep for the PlayStation 3 on October 2, 2014, in Japan and December 2, 2014, in America.
The Final Mix version of the game was later re-released along with the Final Mix versions of Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, and Kingdom Hearts: Re: Chain of Memories in the PlayStation 4 game Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 Remix.
Why It Needs More Affection Than You Know
- Sora gains the ability to use Drive forms, such as the Anti-Form, Valor Form, Wisdom Form, Limit Form (only in Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix), Master Form, and Final Form. Each form changes Sora's combat patterns and requires and removes either Donald or Goofy from the fight while active, or both (except for Limit Form, which can be activated at any time). These forms make Sora much more powerful, and when activated completely restores Sora's MP and HP. You can also upgrade the forms by repeatedly performing tasks to gain experience while the form is in effect, which increases the amount of time Sora can stay in the form and also allow you to use the ability of that form without requiring to activate it (although it's more powerful if you activate that ability's form)
- Reaction commands are also introduced and are a new way to defend against or counterattacks from enemies.
- Characters from classic Disney movies and franchises crossover with characters from the Final Fantasy franchise. A different selection of franchises is included, including debuting franchises such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Beauty and the Beast, and the old Disney cartoons.
- Soundtrack is still awesome, courtesy of Yoko Shimomura (who had also composed for games like Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, Street Fighter 2, and the Mario and Luigi series, and has composed for every game in this series since). The music is also remixed in the PS3 and PS4 versions of the game for a less MIDI sounding soundtrack.
- Abilities enhance Sora, Donald Duck, Goofy, and other characters by giving them additional abilities. You can increase Sora's combo length, for example. Additional abilities can be obtained by upgrading Sora's Drive forms.
- Each Keyblade keychain now has an ability associated with it.
- Many Disney characters have their voice providers reprise their roles, such as Jonathon Freeman as Jafar, Jim Cummings as Pete, Paige O'Hara as Belle, Zach Braff as Chicken Little, Glenn Shadix as The Mayor of Halloween Town, Bruce Boxleitner as Tron, Tate Donovan as Hercules, and Ming-Na Wen as Mulan.
- Fight against various Disney Villains, both new additions to the series and old ones too.
- Customize your own Gummi Ship to travel to other worlds.
- Great Gummi Ship battles which are improved from the first game
- An optional super-boss is Sephiroth, the main villain of Final Fantasy 7 who returns from the first game and it has been made a little easier.
- The synthesis system from the first game returns and is changed slightly, and is still accessed by talking to Moogles, which are now found in most of the worlds and sell and buy items as well. The most powerful Keyblade, the Ultima Weapon is made by doing this as in the previous game.
- Sora is able to work alongside several Disney heroes like the Beast, Jack Sparrow, and more.
- A good story that follows up from Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories.
- The CGI opening cutscene is amazing for the time and it still looks nice today.
- The problem with the character that is not being in the party not gaining abilities on leveling up is fixed, meaning that you can now safely swap out Donald and Goofy of the party without requiring the use of the EXP Zero ability to prevent being locked out of abilities. In fact, throughout the game, the characters are swapped out and you're not allowed to swap them back in until a certain event occurs.
- HP and MP upgrades are not obtained by leveling up and now are only obtained by defeating bosses, which will give bonuses such as upgraded HP and MP, magic spells including upgrades to already obtained ones, abilities, and additional Drive power levels for Sora, instead of giving experience points.
- You can now change party members during gameplay instead of choosing while in a menu.
- Lots of great and unique boss fights.
- Mickey Mouse now revives Sora if he gets knocked out in some boss fights.
- Limit attacks are introduced. Party characters can help Sora out in battles giving him the ability to activate a Limit attack to damage the enemy. Limit attacks use all of Sora's MP (except if he uses one of his Limit Form Limit attacks, where he instead uses attacks), usually protect Sora and the other party member from all damage, and gives Sora or the other character a powerful attack which can be used repeatedly which then leads up to a final, very powerful attack that does massive damage but ends the Limit.
- Chicken Little's Limit, called FPS Mode, makes the game turn into a first-person shooter as you control him in battle.
- A nice touch is added to the HUD, the Commands menu changes appearance to match the theme you're currently in, for example, Christmas lights are added to the Christmas zones of the The Nightmare Before Christmas world. You can change this so that it looks like the one from the first Kingdom Hearts game if you like though.
- The Final Mix release adds many new features:
- A new difficulty setting called Critical Mode which gives a good challenge for very experienced players. Another ability called No Experience which is only available in Critical Mode disables the obtaining of experience, allowing for players to play through the game at level one for an additional challenge.
- The puzzle sidequest, where you need to obtain puzzle pieces that must then be used to complete a puzzle. When a puzzle is complete, a special powerful item is obtained.
- A new dungeon called "Cavern of Remembrance" where you can fight again against the members of Organization XIII, who have been made much stronger.
- Five "Absent Silhouettes", the antagonists from Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories that you can fight again.
- A boss battle against Terra, one of the protagonists from Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep.
- A second ending that you can unlock with a different method that depends on the difficulty of the game and tells you about Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep.
- Many technical issues from the 1st game have been fixed like the camera control is now mapped to the right analog stick. There is also an option to restore the old control system, which has been improved, too.
- Some areas that return from the first game are much bigger than their original counterparts.
- Unlike the first game, this game has post-game and post-game content.
- Improved magic system from the first game, with a Magic Points system more similar to Final Fantasy, with the difference that if your MP completely drain, you can enter a "Charge MP" phase, where your MP recharge and abilities like MP Haste now increase your MP recharge speed.
- Sora's moveset has been greatly enhanced from the first game. Instead of just being able to roll and gliding, he now can roll, glide, sprint, double-jump or perform a second jump when he's knocked in mid-air to recover momentum.
- Mushu massively redeemed himself after being flanderized in Mulan II.
- Roxas gets a prologue in the beginning of the game.
- You can now skip cutscenes if you want to
Bad Qualities
- While the story is good, it's also pretty complex and does not make certain elements of the story clear, with the game expecting you to have played games such as Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep (by the way, that game was released four years after Kingdom Hearts 2) for the complete story to be revealed. At first, this caused confusion as Chain of Memories was not considered as a spin-off that was not part of the main story because it was not a numbered title in the series and the different gameplay styles in the game compared to the original.
- Also, most of the worlds don’t have an original story to link them to the main plot anymore, they instead retell their respective movies' events with Sora, Donald, and Goofy shoehorned in. Thankfully, the second visit to each world tells its own story, with the exception of Agrabah which just retells The Return of Jafar.
- The only worlds that fully have original plots to them for both visits are Beast's Castle and Olympus Coliseum; the former uses Xaldin as the villain instead of Gaston, while Auron appears in the latter alongside the Underworld cups and the Hydra.
- Reflect, one of the Spells Sora learns during the story, first started off as a below average Spell in the initial Japanese release, dealing a low amount of damage. When the game was released in the West for the first time, it was buffed enough for it to be actually balanced. However, the Final Mix version of the game (used for the PS3, PS4 and Xbox One remasters) made it even stronger to the point where it was downright overpowered, even against post-game bosses.
- Magnet is also a broken Spell, since almost every Heartless can get caught with it, making them extremely easy to defeat. Basically, once you obtain Magnet, you literally have no reason to not use it on every single Heartless fight.
- Worlds are very linear, with little to nothing in terms of platforming and exploration, something that the first game already achieved correctly. However, Cavern of Remembrance is exempted from this, as its whole structure accommodates the Growth Abilities from Sora’s Drive Forms.
- Speaking of worlds, they also feel very empty most of the time, with a very small amount of NPCs roaming around. Here’s an example.
- While the English voice direction is excellent across the board, Mena Suvari's voice performance on Aerith was widely criticized for sounding bored and robotic, in comparison to Mandy Moore's widely praised performance in Kingdom Hearts I. Thankfully, Andrea Bowen's performance of the character
- The prologue is drawn out and lasts about four hours if you don't skip any cutscenes.
- The personality of the Final Fantasy characters don't properly match the personalities in their actual games, and some elements about them are not properly emulated in this game, such as a character saying that Sephiroth is actually a dark part of Cloud which is not the case. Seifer went from being Squall's rival to becoming nothing more than a schoolyard bully, while YRP (Yuna, Rikku, and Paine) are now fairies working for Maleficent instead of being Tidus's allies (and in Yuna's case, his girlfriend).
- Using Peter Pan's Limit attack will show screenshots of his encounter in the first Kingdom Hearts game over the screen obscuring part of the screen.
- A glitch can occur in the original PS2 version of the game where equipping a non-existent item (listed as red in the menu) above items you have in the items menu for Sora, then switching to the abilities menu and exiting causes the item type to not be selectable in the Commands menu, which may screw you up in a fight where you need those items to succeed.
- The game crashes in all versions of Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix when Sora dies in the boss fight against the Experiment. Also, in the PS3 and PS4 versions of the game using Limit Form during the Memory's Skyscraper boss fight to destroy the blocks then using the Reaction Command crashes the game.
- Sounds and voice clips are bugged in Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix on PS3 and PS4 and don't play sometimes, such as in the boss fight with Jafar where he says "All shall pend to my will. The world is mine to control," he doesn't say the second sentence of the line.
- The PS3 version of the game has long annoying loading times. The long load times affect the Drive Forms making it take longer to transition into a Drive Form which affects gameplay because the stagger effect caused by switching to a Drive Form does not last long enough to account for the long loading times, thus causing enemies to be able to attack freely when Sora finishes transforming instead of being set up for an attack combo for Sora to perform like it is supposed to be. To counter this you must now pause the game to let it finish loading while paused which was not intended by the original developers. The PS4 version is much better on the loading times which are actually faster than even the PS2 version of the game. Also, during the battle against Sephiroth in the PS3 version, his attack Meteor makes the game lag.
- Jafar is still an underwhelming and annoying boss.
- The Tech points system from Kingdom Hearts is removed in this game, even though it was a great incentive for learning and exploiting a Heartless’ weak points for more EXP.
- The stage of Atlantica was heavily criticized for diverting from the typical gameplay of the series in favor of a rhythmic game approach.
- Despite being popular in the fanbase as a character, Demyx is an annoying boss mostly because of the time limit in destroying the water clones, his data fight is even worse mostly because of the 99 water clone attack at the end.
- Port Royal was one of the least liked worlds in the game as it was criticized for things by critics and audiences.
- The graphics felt inconsistent with Sora Donald and Goofy having the exact same rendering when they don't change their appearances to protect the world order, which clashed with the aesthetics of the world, and it made Sora, Donald and Goofy feel out of place.
- While everyone else’s voice providing was spot on and well performed, James Arnold Taylor's performance of Jack Sparrow was very bland, and it barely sounded like a replication of Johnny Depp's performance. It's justified because he was sick while recording.
- Like most of the other worlds, the world's plot was just a watered-down retelling of Curse of the Black Pearl.
- Young Simba's faces in the flashback when you enter the Pride Lands, are very weird, as he looks like he is always smiling, even when he sees the stampede, he looks like he's trying to frown, but can't.
- Similarly, Scar's face always has a permanent evil grin, even when he is supposed to be angry.
Trivia
- The opening song, Sanctuary, if played in reverse, spells out an entirely different song.
- The game was censored in many parts outside of Japan. For example, during the Xigbar boss battle, there was a scene where he merged together his two guns in one bigger gun, where as the European and North American versions he just reloads them. This scene was restored in the PS3 and PS4 versions of Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix.
- Nomura said in an interview from 2014 that Pride Lands is his favorite world.
- The original PS2 game has a Spanish dub and the only game in the series to have one.
- Buzz and Woody from Toy Story were going to be summons in the Final Mix version but were scrapped.
- David Warner wanted to reprise his roles as MCP and Sark but can't due to commitments at the time.
- There is an unused version of the Final Fantasy IX world map theme in the code.
- Rufus Shinra from Final Fantasy VII was going to have Setzer's role instead but was scrapped because Nomura wanted to use other characters that are not from VII.
- Xemnas in the final battle was going to have him melding into a giant Transformers-esque creature and later transform into a distorted version of himself.
- Axel was going to be killed off in the prologue but it never happened due to being a fan-favorite character.
- A data mine reveals that worlds based on Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and Fantasia were planned. However, later games gave those movies worlds.
- After being cut from the first game, Rikku from Final Fantasy X makes an appearance in this game.
Reception
Kingdom Hearts II has received numerous awards and high ratings. It tied with Resident Evil 4 for the best game of 2005. In the highly regarded Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu, it received an almost perfect rating: 39/40. The game also received a 9.5/10 in the North American Game Informer magazine. G4 awarded it Best Soundtrack and Best Voice Work. The gameplay aspect of the game was criticized, as many did not like the AI system or the fact that the game was so much easier than its predecessor; but still, many commented that the game was fun.
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