Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days!

I’ll be honest with you. Being a die hard Final Fantasy fanboy, when I heard that the creators of my all time favourite RPG video game franchise were ready to throw down with Disney and attempt to combo effort I wasn’t exactly over the moon. To be even more honest I was more looking forward to a sequel for Final Fantasy X. Ironically out of the two games, Final Fantasy X-2 and Kingdom Hearts, it was the latter of the two which gave me more enjoyment (though I still stand by my decision that FFX-2 was a fun albeit Charlie’s Angelish addition to the FF series.)

Out of all the video games I’ve played it is the Kingdom Hearts series that’s really kept the “gamer” alive inside of me. The original, released for the now extinct PlayStation 2, I remember with a great amount of joy as if I were a kid playing Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive for the first time. The combination of Square’s tried and tested level up and story systems with Disney’s vast and colourful worlds (that we all remembered watching as youngsters) really meshed well together. The level designs were familiar but still far more refreshing than anything seen in competing action adventure dungeon crawlers, the characters were believable despite the cartoony feel of their designs but what really got me addicted was the fast but fun combat spread about the levels.

The Heartless of course get a mention as one of my personal favourite video game antagonists, their range alone gave the player a great variety of challenges to overcome, once again amazing how such cuddly creatures could become so menacing. If only the story hadn’t been so tied into it’s numerous prequels and sequels then I might have given it a 10/10 too but alas Squaresny knew full well that they were shooting for another uber franchise when they started this one and to be fair most of the time I never paid much attention to the story anyway hahaha.

Next came the Gameboy Advance sequel Chain of Memories… the less said about this obvious money spinner the better… Oh you actually want to know more? Basically KH:CoM was a watered down version of it’s predecessor with a terrible card game style combat system, a shite side story and GBA graphics rivalling those of the Sega Master System (barring the few poorly animated cut scenes.)

Want to know how it bridges the gap between Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II? Cough “Wikipedia” cough.