Last time I discussed Kingdom Hearts 2, I had revealed the quasi-embarrassing truth that I had spent about six hours just tooling around in the Gummi Ship levels and editor. I think I put in another couple hours on top of that. It actually got to the point that I forgot what the actual game was, because I was so into the space shooter segments. Since the editor is actually easy to use this time, you have more of a reason to re-play the shooter courses to completion, since you win all kinds of crazy new Gummi pieces for shipbuilding.
I did get some upgrades that enabled me to work up a nicer version of the Air Pirate wingman ship. It is very impressive, for an old TaleSpin geek.
Eventually, I realized that I would have to go back and play more worlds, if only to open up new Gummi Ship routes. So, off to Port Royal!
The inclusion of a Pirates of the Caribbean world is even odder than having Nightmare Before Christmas show up in the first one. NBC is in no way a major Disney property; it's not considered part of the "classic" Disney features. And here in America, it wasn't even a big box office winner. Somehow, in Japan, the movie never dropped off the radar, and Japan-made NBC merchandising has kept the film alive (which probably has to do with Japanese culture being much more accepting of cute-ified horror than we are... particularly in the kids arena.)
So anyway, seeing Nightmare getting ranked as highly as Hercules or Winnie-the-Pooh or Little Mermaid was a shock for the American audience. Same deal for Pirates. But, whereas NBC was included as a response to the film's cult popularity in Japan, Pirates is included purely because the timing is fortituous with a film sequel this summer. Could be worse; had KH2 come out in 2005, we might have gotten a Herbie world.
Donald and Goofy seem similarly surprised by the Pirates world, as they make several "Boy, is this world strange" comments. The real question is, does the world work... because it could definitely be stupid to jump into a "real" world after spending so much time in "animated" worlds. The characters here (Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, etc) are obviously more realistically designed than most, but the effect is not as off-putting as I had anticipated. You just have to visually get past the notion that, suddenly, Donald Duck is talking to Johnny Depp. (Although it's not Depp's voice, just an impersonator doing his addled, cocksure shtick.)
Agrabah and Halloween Town return from the original, and it's more of Sora jumping in and vowing to beat all challenges within fifty miles. I just don't get what the game thinks is going on with the plot. Because I'm seeing nothing. Sora keeps asking about Riku, but he jumps from world to world with absolutely no clues to lead him. It's random and pointless. It just makes me want to spend more time in the Gummi Ship.
Agrabah is unfortunately almost a carbon copy of the first adventure in Aladdin's world, now with new cutscenes and an obvious lack of Jafar. At the end of the world, you get the Genie summon, which brings my summon total to TWO after twenty hours of play. That's pretty annoying. To make matters worse, the Genie summon kinda sucks.
Halloween Town at least covers a portion of the movie not found in the first Kingdom Hearts: the Christmas Town section. So at the very least, there's some different visuals here, which is nicer than the overly blacked darkness in the first game's Halloween Town.
Some stupid character moments: Sora becomes obsessed with saving Santa Claus, implying that the Santa legend is present in his homeworld. Which just seems to prove that, really, there isn't much at stake here if Sora has the kind of time to get distracted by thoughts of owning lots of free toys. And back in Agrabah, Donald is shown to be super-greedy. Since when is pure greediness part of Donald Duck's character? That's Daffy Duck... or at minimum, Scrooge McDuck, who is seen hanging out in Hollow Bastion trying to start an ice cream stand. Donald is easily angered and frustrated... not especially greedy. Scrooge pays him 20 cents a day!
All of which, by the way, has no bearing on how much fun it is to smack Heartless around at every corner. One great thing about Kingdom Hearts is that the game does not cheap out on baddies. Every world has exclusive types that fit in with the overall theme. Aside from a couple of low level generic baddies, there's always something new and bizarre to look at.
And then there's Atlantica, the Little Mermaid world. I always thought it was weird that Ariel didn't count as one of the seven Princesses in the KH1, and the blacklisting continues here. Atlantica doesn't even have any bad guys on it. It's just a world of rhythm games. And not particularly challenging rhythm games either. It's a happy diversion, especially if you're interested in hearing the original singing voice of the Little Mermaid do some different takes on the movie's classic songs.
Sora, however, will never be able to live down all the singing and dancing he does in this world.
