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In the grand scheme of things, the first Kingdom Hearts will always surpass the second. Kingdom Hearts 1 was a much more solid game. The gameplay, story, and mood were perfectly balanced. Kingdom Hearts two was flawed in almost all of its aspects. For one thing, progressing through the game took no thought at all. Not one world had any thought-provoking puzzles, a complete declination from KH 1 standards, which had challenging puzzles and complex obstacles in nearly all of its worlds. KH2 was composed of nothing but an excessive amount of cut-scenes, followed by tedious button-mashing battles. The game mechanics were greatly improved in KH 2, however, by making Sora a single-handed killing machine, Donald and Goofy became virtually useless, making the gameplay anything but balanced. Furthermore, I found everything about the gummi ship much more enjoyable in KH 1, and every reappearing world in KH 2 to be inferior to its original. Like many others, I thought the story of KH 2 was more interesting, however, too much of it went unexplained in the game itself, which is ironic because they had plenty of cut-scene space to fit it in. Overall, KH 2's mood was one of unbalance and pretension, mainly because of the cut-scenes that were never given a rest. Was anyone else sick of hearing Sora's voice by the end of the game?
Now, on to the positive things about KH 2. First of all, everything regarding music was much better in KH 2. With this, I found the mood of KH 2 to have one superior aspect: it's emotion. KH 2 has much more emotion put into it, everything about Organization XIII was executed perfectly. The ending credits were phenomenal as well, I was almost in tears by the very last scene.
As was mentioned before, Chain of Memories is indeed underrated and overlooked. Many people neglected it because of the innovative gameplay, which, if given a chance, is fantastic.
Last edited by Hawkeye; 07-11-2008 at 09:56 PM.
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