Kingdom Hearts has a lot of good points: some great characters, an amazingly executed concept (Disney and Square? worked out great), battle systems that are always well polished and fun, an amazingly idealistic yet mature tone for such an era in gaming (hell yes friendship is hard to find in video games sometimes), and even the convoluted story has a good point or two.
It has its flaws: heaps of retcon and continuity lockout and no export for you, some things just fall flat on their face with narm, others are just so confusing it takes heaps of help to understand, and then there are the occasional problems with bosses or other scenarios having fake difficulty.
But otherwise it was and still remains a nice breath of fresh air in the market. The graphics are colorful and look very nice (I might just miss them when KH 3 comes out) and very clearly show off the wonderful animation that can be put into emoting, and the voice acting is about as consistent as it can be; not to mention pretty darn good with all the trouble there could be.
The story is VERY, VERY hard to understand at times, but putting in the effort (at least to me) is completely worth it. It makes you think to understand rather than unsubtly feeding you every little bit, although it will do that occasionally. Not to mention the core concepts- what makes a heart/person, friendship and relationships, light and darkness, etc. -are all interestingly done and don't feel forced, unlike how it could seem in other games. Relationships are handled really well, able to be interpreted as just friends or something more. Characters themselves tend to be really well handled, Riku and Roxas's character arcs being particularly good.
Now back to those flaws. There's continuity errors and it's hard to pick up one game without knowing the rest (unless it's the first one and even then that's iffy), and bosses- especially ANY organization XIII boss fight in KH 2 -can be annoyingly difficult. Sometimes characters can fall flat- Xion and Terra being the some most commonly agreed examples -and sometimes things just seem to be pandering to the fan base (Axel/lea in particular has become gratingly special in my eyes).
It's not a game for everyone, but I still dearly love the series through all of its bad points and good, and feel that everyone should at least give it a try.
Great, could be better, but otherwise enjoyable as is
Kingdom Hearts has a lot of good points: some great characters, an amazingly executed concept (Disney and Square? worked out great), battle systems that are always well polished and fun, an amazingly idealistic yet mature tone for such an era in gaming (hell yes friendship is hard to find in video games sometimes), and even the convoluted story has a good point or two.
It has its flaws: heaps of retcon and continuity lockout and no export for you, some things just fall flat on their face with narm, others are just so confusing it takes heaps of help to understand, and then there are the occasional problems with bosses or other scenarios having fake difficulty.
But otherwise it was and still remains a nice breath of fresh air in the market. The graphics are colorful and look very nice (I might just miss them when KH 3 comes out) and very clearly show off the wonderful animation that can be put into emoting, and the voice acting is about as consistent as it can be; not to mention pretty darn good with all the trouble there could be.
The story is VERY, VERY hard to understand at times, but putting in the effort (at least to me) is completely worth it. It makes you think to understand rather than unsubtly feeding you every little bit, although it will do that occasionally. Not to mention the core concepts- what makes a heart/person, friendship and relationships, light and darkness, etc. -are all interestingly done and don't feel forced, unlike how it could seem in other games. Relationships are handled really well, able to be interpreted as just friends or something more. Characters themselves tend to be really well handled, Riku and Roxas's character arcs being particularly good.
Now back to those flaws. There's continuity errors and it's hard to pick up one game without knowing the rest (unless it's the first one and even then that's iffy), and bosses- especially ANY organization XIII boss fight in KH 2 -can be annoyingly difficult. Sometimes characters can fall flat- Xion and Terra being the some most commonly agreed examples -and sometimes things just seem to be pandering to the fan base (Axel/lea in particular has become gratingly special in my eyes).
It's not a game for everyone, but I still dearly love the series through all of its bad points and good, and feel that everyone should at least give it a try.