a review of
kingdom hearts ii: final mix
a videogame by square-enix
published by square-enix
for the sony playstation 2
text by tim rogers
score: zero (out of four)

Bottom line: Kingdom Hearts II is “a lot like Disney World, if Disney World were a shoebox.”

ZERO
If you drool whenever you smell pleather, Kingdom Hearts II is the only game in town. If you already like it, you’re gonna love it.

If, however, you are not a zippers’n'pleather fetishist, a blind Square-Enix devotee, or a three-year-old whose mother forces you to watch “Beauty and the Beast” every day while she’s talking to the electrician in the other room, you may come to behold this game with dropped jaws and utter terror. That terror speaks these words: this is what suffices for entertainment. This is what the kids spend their time doing. As a piece of work, it’s similar to, though much worse than, that “Captain Planet” episode where some made-up narcotic was turning kids into rats. My friend’s dad had walked into the living room to see his children watching that, stood with folded arms for fifteen minutes, and then banned them from watching television forever. Kingdom Hearts II should evoke the same reaction from parents strong-minded enough to believe that their children, however short, do indeed stand above certain things. The rub, however, is that most of the people willingly purchasing, playing, and taking pleasure in Kingdom Hearts II are legally adults.

Kingdom Hearts II, in short, is the sequel to Kingdom Hearts, a game about a spike-headed boy who swings a giant key as though it were a sword, fighting his way between “planets” based on Disney animated films, in a quest to rescue King Mickey. The game is a mishmash of Disney characters and Final Fantasy characters, at once hugging the heartstrings of every basement-dwelling, keyboard pounding game fan who wanted to see Aeris brought back to life, providing Japanese girls who spend Saturdays at cake buffets (where they pay 2,000 yen to eat just one cake, even though it’s all-you-can-eat) with a videogame to play at their night-shift-working boyfriends’ apartments (reason: “I love Disney”), and providing game fans in general with a serious thumbs-up and a zealous grin: “Look, dudes — Final Fantasy and Disney, together! This means that, yes, your hobby has made it! It’s a viable, world-class form of entertainment, now!”

Except they spent so much money acquiring the licenses from Disney and navigating around weird clauses, like the one that prohibited Goofy to attack enemies with a bladed weapon — he bashes them with a shield — that the resulting game was a weird, stumpy gimp of a thing. Playing it in a critical frame of mind is actually rather exhilarating. I’d recommend it to any game designer. There’s so much wrong with it that picking it apart is almost as fun as playing Resident Evil 4. Almost.

Kingdom Hearts II is more of the same; all throughout, a shadow puppet of someone having fun is cast on the wall of its coffin-like, claustrophobic game worlds. Only now, it’s desperate, and reaching. The first game was able to carry itself with a bouncy, wacky step, and watching it fall flat on its face every five seconds was kind of cute. This time, it’s serious fucking business. The game is hateful. It starts out with an extended montage of footage from the previous game, followed by a theme song sequence showing various scenes from the second game, the one you’re about to play. Then you spend six hours as a guy named Roxas, who’s obviously just a slightly more realistic-looking version of the actual hero, Sora. There’s some sort of time-shift thing going on. Producer Tetsuya Nomura probably thought much of this sequence is brilliant, or even literary: it starts with a group of kids eating ice cream and lamenting that summer is about to end. One of them dares to ask if childhood will last forever. Mr. Nomura, kids don’t think like that, because they’re kids. It’s jarring and weird.

Eventually, you’re armpit-deep in the game’s lack of a physics engine. Kingdom Hearts II has only two buttons worth mentioning — the Yay Button and the AWESOME Button. Press the Yay Button to send Sora cartwheeling and flipping around in an attempt to attack the enemies. He flies and flails around like a rag doll. I guess players like seeing their on-screen avatar go fucking nuts. When the game doesn’t have any depth otherwise, I guess that’s about all you’ve got. And even with the Awesome Button — press within a hot five-second window when a big triangle appears on-screen in order to cause something AWESOME to happen — which tries to inject some kind of cinematic verve into the mix, the game is a pale shadow of God of War. The spectacle is watered-down and cheap. There’s no crunch at all. The game is a bowl of soggy corn flakes, when you hate soggy corn flakes. (I actually like them that way, to be honest.)

One might say it’s possible to enjoy this game if you’re just there to see the cut-scenes and clap your hands maybe once every couple of minutes. One might even say that most of its audience enjoys the game because of its “Keep pressing the Yay Button until you win” mechanics, not in spite of them. I can go along with that, to a certain extent. I can nod and agree wholeheartedly when you say that maybe, this game just isn’t for me. It’s not for me.

I bother to review it because I find its artistic conscience appalling. Surely, the first game was considered a “risk” by the metal-headed corporate drones who OK’d Tetsuya Nomura for funding, because it was going to cost a lot of money to acquire the license to all those Disney flicks. Surely enough, Nomura might have even been grasping at straws for game design ideas back then. He might have even been rushed, and so he pushed the team to shit out the most reasonable facsimile of a hot, million-selling game possible in the shortest amount of time. Weekly Famitsu pumped it up at Square’s humble request, and the game launched to incredible success, at least, “incredible success” for that era, before Brain Training and Animal Crossing and Nintendo DS showed up to sell many millions of sharp little games to non-gamers. The first Kingdom Hearts was an endearing, damn-near-hilarious effort. The second one is a lot like the first one, except the parts most people didn’t like (the absolutely arbitrary space-shooting segments) aren’t as terrible, the parts where people were too busy popping boners in the Name of the Mouse to complain (combat, the general flow of the game) are unchanged or barely distinguishable, things people didn’t ask for (like little animated moving parts on the in-game battle menu) have appeared, and the characters are wearing even more zippers than before.

The first Kingdom Hearts was, ultimately, a failure because it just didn’t feel “epic”. Sure, you were traveling between worlds and fighting manic monsters, solving perplexing puzzles, and outwitting tricky traps, though hell if the whole thing didn’t feel like a diorama of Disney World. Perhaps the makers believed it was impossible to recreate the majesty of Disney World in videogame form, though hey, they could have tried. I’m not dumb enough to suggest that Kingdom Hearts II couldn’t have worked no matter how hard they tried.

Instead, the sequel is just a sequel. It’s bigger, it stars many of the same environments, and the plot is a complete jumbled mess that opens with men in black robes portentously intoning that “He will awaken soon”; they go on to portentously intone many, many things, until the player is as confused as the writers must have been when faced with the question “What is this game about?” That the game casts Mickey Mouse in the role of (for lack of a better word) a cold-blooded murderer is simultaneously perplexing, amazing, awesome, and retarded.

Producer / character-designer Tetsuya Nomura said in an interview with Weekly Famitsu that most of the staff moved on after the first game — graduated, so to speak. (In this industry, if you touch a million-seller prior to its release, you’re immediately regarded as a genius after it’s topped the charts, even for just a day.) So they had to hire new people. His smug, amazing description of the interview process brought morbid tears to my eyes, so to speak. Said Nomura: everyone who interviewed was overflowing with joy, ready to admit that they loved the first Kingdom Hearts with their entire bodies, even their swimsuit parts. I can imagine the art-school educated girls in cat-ear hats, with Jack Skellington keychains, grinning and covering their mouths with black-nail-polished hands, breaking down into hyperventilation when Nomura told them they had the job. I’m not saying these people are worthless or anything — just that it’s kind of telling, about the videogame format we call “Japanese Role-Playing Game”, that the majority of the development staff is made up of people who, were they film geeks instead of game geeks, would consider a job as a production assistant the highest honor, who would proudly tell their eventual grandchildren of the magnificent day when their favorite film director once spit coffee in their face and told them they were worthless. Encouragement from their idols, more often than not, leads to psychotic behavior. To put it simply, these are people for whom the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride at Disney World is realer than real life; these are people for whom the “Pirates of the Caribbean” world in Kingdom Hearts II is a tribute to something meaningful. They stop at every turn to consider that this is a game stage based on a movie based on a thrilling theme park ride. As their “art” can only ever regard different sectors of the world, these people are hard-wired with an inferiority complex about their “art”. They’re settling for second or even third place. And their compromise is rather responsible for Kingdom Hearts II hollow failure at being decent entertainment: the finished product is a lot like a Disney World, if Disney World were a shoebox.

Nomura had said, in an interview on Kingdom Hearts II, that it had taken so long to develop because he didn’t want to have to make a “Final Mix” of it, the way he did with Kingdom Hearts. Yet, he ended up making a Final Mix. An interviewer asked him why, and he responded by saying that, at the time they made the game, they couldn’t have predicted the good ideas they’d eventually come up with after the game was released. Is that the same as saying his previous judgment had been a failure? I think so.

In that same issue of Famitsu, there was a two-page spread on the eventual Blu-ray Disc reissue of the fanfiction film “Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children”, which is mostly computer-animated pornography for people who like flying men, dragons, and huge swords. The Blu-ray Disc edition is loaded with tons of extra animation detail — for example, the protagonist Cloud’s face no longer looks so shimmeringly white during battle. There’s dirt on there, now! Said Nomura in the interview on the BD of “Advent Children”, when asked if it would contain both the English voice track and the Japanese voice track: “It’ll only contain the English voice track. For one thing, we’re not sure there’s enough room on the BD for the Japanese voice track, and for another thing, we’re certain that the buyers of this [Japanese release] disc have already seen the Japanese version, anyway.”

That’s a hell of a way to know your audience. Notice the complete failure to even think of “reaching out”. And look what Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix does as an attempt to reach out and include members of the audience who might not be familiar with the series’ sparkling legacy: it includes Kingdom Hearts: Re:Chain of Memories, which is kind of a hilarious title if you’re in the right mood. Simply put, Chain of Memories was a game for the Gameboy Advance, in which Sora, hero of Kingdom Hearts, lost his memories of what had happened in the first game, and so he had to revisit the worlds and events of that game with the help of “The Chain of Memories”. As a Gameboy game, it was appropriately dinky, with a card-based battle system. Now, they’ve brought Chain of Memories to PlayStation 2, with the help of the Kingdom Hearts game engine, and all it succeeds in doing, with its paper-thin, room-to-room, item-hunting design, is making the entire series look even more ridiculous than ever before. I mean, cards, for god’s sake? Weren’t real card-based games created because the makers didn’t want to make videogames? Why did cards find their way into videogames? And was Chain of Memories not made as a card-based game because such a design was optimal for a portable system? Wasn’t the card system just a placeholder for the so-called “dynamic”, action-based system of the PlayStation 2 game? Why keep the placeholder in place?

Could a good Kingdom Hearts game be made? Absolutely. You can make an enthralling game about two US soldiers in World War II outwitting a German squad by dressing up in a two-piece horse costume, if you’re sure to keep the design tight and not patronize and/or shudderingly fear the audience. That’s what Kingdom Hearts II does; it’s so scared out of its wits that one of the glue-sniffing fanfic-writers out there is going to find an error in the horizontal variable of Captain Jack Sparrow’s swagger, and then start up an internet petition about it, that it forgets to make an actual game to surround the character fetishism, to make the skies above the varied worlds feel like more than blue-painted shoebox lids. And for fuck’s sake, can someone teach game designers how to stage a cut-scene? Why must there be five seconds of silence between every two lines of dialogue? Why does the camera rotate around and around the characters, slowly, as they speak their lines? Because it can? Quite frankly, it’s getting embarrassing, and it’s only going to get more embarrassing, because so many people — even me — find this badness appalling and hilarious at the same time, and we keep paying for the games just to point our fingers, or, shudder, to actually enjoy ourselves in some way that doesn’t involve anger.

Nomura is no doubt hard at work on a Kingdom Hearts III for PlayStation 3, and maybe now that they’re using the Unreal Engine, maybe that’ll distribute the mammoth task of making this fetishistic mess into a “game” a little more evenly. We can only hope.

–tim rogers

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