God Hand

The gulf between wanting to like something and actually liking it can be so large.

In God Hand you punch people so hard they fly over the horizon. In God Hand you punch people so hard that they fly into buildings and then the buildings fall down. In God Hand you punch people so hard that their soul comes loose from their body and then you have to punch that as well.

Also, sometimes you kick things hard, too.

This is a winning formula. This is something you can write on a white board and underline a few times and then sit back to watch the money roll in. If I were to write a book on designing "fun", this would be the first chapter, the case study, and most of the conclusion. I would write, "And in conclusion, in God Hand you punch people so hard that your fist breaks the sound barrier, and then the person you have punched flies off into the distance, also breaking the sound barrier."

So what really baffles me is why God Hand isn't fun.

Disclaimer: I didn't finish God Hand. I didn't come close. I just wasn't enjoying it, so I haven't seen the whole game. It's hard to imagine a second act, though, that would redeem the five hours or so I spent with it.

God Hand is a PlayStation 2 title by (now-defunct) Clover Studios, the same clever fellows who made the amazing Okami. Where Okami was the transcendent poster-child of the "games made art" movement, God Hand is something born wholly crafted from the mind of an illiterate 14-year old. It is crass, it is gratuitous, and it is crude in every sense of the word. In God Hand some of the villains are gay men and you punch them so hard you make them straight.

God Hand is clearly influenced by Capcom's action franchise Devil May Cry. There's a deliberate emphasis of style over substance. The plot is incoherent, the dialogue and voice acting are horrible, and your combat moves bear little to no relationship to the laws of physics. However, where Devil May Cry boasted smooth controls, deep tactical combat, strong level design and above-average graphics, God Hand instead opts for hand-twisting button maps and repetitive brawling in a series of unattractive linear corridors.

Unattractive may be an understatement. God Hand looks God Awful. One could be generous and say that level and enemy designs are "inspired by" such brawling classics as Golden Axe and Streets of Rage, and it's true that there is more than a little deliberate homage here, but the reality is that both Golden Axe and Streets of Rage had significantly more art in a single screen that God Hand can muster over the course of a level. Everything's done in pallets of dull brown. Enemy designs are so generic that even the villains of a Dynasty Warriors game could put them to shame. Ground surfaces are a flat brown while skyboxes are a flat blue. Every wall is set at right angles to another wall and the camera is not afraid of clipping right through surfaces to show you that they have no depth or substance.

The gameplay is standard brawler fare. You punch, and you kick. There are some 100+ punches and kicks available, and you can ultimately map up to 11 of them to your controls at one time, so there's some tactics involved in picking your repertoire. Most enemies are largely similar though, so once you've got a set-up you won't need to change it much. You run around a 3D level, and enemies mosey up you singly or in groups, so as to allow you to punch and kick them.

Every few punches or kicks, enemies will block. When they block, you'll need to back off, as hitting them while they're guarding allows them to do a dangerous counter-attack. So you'll get used to the pattern of punch-punch-punch, wait, punch-punch-punch, wait. Later on you get special "guard-break" moves which simplify the process. You yourself are unable to block, although you can dodge. Blocking was presumably inserted to pace combat and stop players from self-combusting from the sheer awesomeness of non-stop punching.

Defeated enemies sometimes drop money; money can be used to buy new punches. In God Hand you punch people so hard that they turn into currency.

Also, you have a rage meter, which when full allows you to turn invincible and unleash the titular God Hand for 10 seconds or so, and "roulette slots", each of which will let you pull off one of your particularly awesome super-punches. Using a super-punch empties a slot, which you have to refill by finding a magic card dropped by a defeated enemy.

God Hand is really hard, even on the easiest difficulty. Not consistently hard - you'll go from an enemy that just stands there as you punch him straight to a hell-demon that moves faster than you can see. Not interestingly hard - enemies you can't see because of the horrible camera will cheerfully punch you in the back of the head and follow up with a combo that kills you before you can recover. Just hard. Stupidly hard. Death usually means a trip back to the start of the level and up to twenty minutes of play erased. In God Hand people punch you so hard you travel back in time.

I've mentioned how the voice acting is horrible, but it's really just fitting into the overall audio standard. Pretty much every in-game sound effect is some variant of explosion, which at first glance seems to possess a certain kind of awesome but in practice really doesn't. There appears to be only one piece of background music, a kind of surfing-guitar reminiscent of Hawaii Five-O that loops endlessly. Enemies yell "Come on!" at you a lot, and "Oof!" when you hit them, and that's about it.

Actually the whole game feels more like a prototype than a finished game. There's the bare bones of a gaming experience, and a whole mess of awesome punches, but everything else feels like placeholders rather than final product. I can see that Clover were trying something worth trying, a kind of re-invention of the brawler as a genre, but that intention is in no way manifest in what they actually released.

There is a certain class of people who will love God Hand, and these people are not to be ridiculed. There is a genius located deep in the core of this unlovely software, a genius that knows that it is absolutely impossible to ever punch a videogame villain too hard. But those who can look past the eye-gougingly horrible aesthetics and the nun-punchingly torturous gameplay to find that genius will be few and far between, and for the rest of us it's worth mentioning that this game came out late in the PlayStation 2's lifespan, almost no-one bought it, and it's practically impossible to find a copy.

Beyond Good & Evil

With Christmas well and truly behind me and the flood of blockbuster next-gen titles temporarily receding, I've taken the time to catch up on some overlooked gems from my PlayStation 2 collection, in particular Beyond Good & Evil.

This is a game from Michel Ancel, the creator of Rayman. At the time of its release, it sold poorly, but it's picked up steam as a cult classic and the general consensus on the blogosphere is that it's time to revisit Beyond Good & Evil with kinder eyes.

I'm glad I did. The game is excellent. After playing through the recent Prince of Persia I had been thinking to myself, "I want more like this," and now I'm feeling a little stupid because it turns out I had "more like this" sitting on my shelf for the better part of two years, completely unplayed.

In Beyond Good & Evil you play as Jade, photographer and surrogate big sister to a gaggle of assorted orphans. When Jade's adopted planet of Hillys is attacked by the militaristic DomZ armies, Jade is pressed into service to find out what the DomZ are up to and why, exactly, the local defence forces aren't doing much about it.

I say that it's a bit like Prince of Persia, and by that I really mean that it handles relationships between the core characters well. Jade is aided by her "Uncle Pey'j", an avuncular pig-man with a gift for mechanics. (Actually, Hillys is populated by all manner of animal-people, although it spurns catgirls and bunny-women in favour of antropomorphic sharks, rhinos and goats.) Later on you'll also team up with "Double H", a likeable resistance fighter who's forever quoting his role models "Johnson & Peters". These characters are really enjoyable to be around, and when the game makes you go solo you'll really feel their loss. The interactions with Pey'j and Double H form the emotional spine of the game.

Really, though, the gameplay is more like Metal Gear Solid meets Pokemon Snap. Jade's role as a photographer isn't a mini-game or sidequest - it's the core of the game. All your efforts are ultimately directed and getting access to places where you can take photos which reveal the truth of the DomZ plan. You compose and shoot your photos yourself, and the game stores the photos you've taken and weaves them into the game in unexpected places, notably to excellent effect in the game's final scenes.

To keep you busy between plot photographs, you're also challenged to photograph every animal species on Hillys, of which there are I think 50-something. Some of these are ubiquitous but others will require finding some very specific environments. The animals are beautifully unique and make sense in the context of the biosphere; finding the rarer specimens can be really breathtaking, whether it's turning out the lights in a deep cave to capture an unrecorded bioluminscent algae in full glow, or catching a giant blue whale in mid-leap as it breaches the waves. The nature photography is so excellent that I found myself wishing that it could have been the main plot.

Sadly, the other half of the game is stealth. Despite my love of Metal Gear Solid I've never enjoyed having to be stealthy, and I like it best as a vehicle for getting myself in the prime position for completely eliminating every guard in sight. Beyond Good & Evil does a pretty passable job at this type of gaming - the controls are tight and responsive, for example - but it still doesn't quite get it right.

The camera doesn't give you anywhere near enough information. It's not clear how many guards are around, where they're walking, or where they can see. This turns the stealth sections into frustrating trial-and-error processes where you'll proceed halfway across an area, realise there's an extra guard you couldn't see, get caught, and have to restart. Thankfully checkpoints are extremely generous and well-placed. Also, the consequences of detection vary. Sometimes you'll merely end up fighting the guards, which is an appropriate punishment as you'll usually win but at a severe cost to your health. On other occasions, however, detection results in immediate death from a previously-invisible hovering laser orb that can apparently shoot through walls.

Were it not for the stealth sections, this would be an extremely casual-friendly game. Nothing anywhere else in the design comes close to replicating the frustration and repetition of the sneaking missions; every time I started into a guarded area I came close to giving up the game for good and I ended up playing with a walkthrough in hand to minimise my negative experiences.

Everything other than the stealth is perfect, though. You can cruise around the watery surface of Hillys in a hovercraft, compete in suprisingly entertaining hovercraft races, discover hidden nooks and crannies, collect valuable pearls, and explore the pedestrian district of Hillys' main city.

That city, by the way, is a triumph. The main canals that connect everything are packed with an amazing variety of water-borne and airborne vehicles moving in every direction at once, while giant television screens hovering in the air boom out propaganda messages. This kind of business is something we've seen in videogames elsewhere, but the fact it intrudes out into the player's space - the other vehicles are using the same areas that you can use - makes it feel real and immediate and alive. It has an effect something like the cantina from Star Wars, giving you the impression of this being a real, diverse world, through the use of only a single scene. The city also grows and changes as you play, with the propaganda messages changing to reflect your exploits and growing numbers of citizens protesting in the streets as you take more photographs and uncover more of the truth.

The graphics are gorgeous. Despite being rendered on a last-generation system I had no cause to fault anything visual about the game. This is largely because it relies less on technical prowess than it does on genuine art; good aesthetics is good aesthetics at any level of resolution. These are clearly deliberate choices - for example, the art uses simple lines and blocky, childlike shapes for all the Hillyan characters, while making the Domz significantly more visually complex, with assymetries and irregular silhouettes. (The only Hillyan to copy this design style is Pey'j, presumably to reinforce him as a "grown-up" and set him apart from the "child-like" Hillys. It's worth noting also that, story-wise, he's not a Hillyan native.)

Jade is a textbook example of how to do a modern female protagonist. She's dynamic, interesting, competent and attractive, without being sexualised, gimmicky or shallow. Part of what makes her work is that she's "just a person", and a late-game twist that sheds new light on her background feels weak precisely because it violates her identity as someone "normal".

The music is fantastic. I've had it stuck in my head for days after I've finished playing the game, and the main theme is a genuine gaming classic.

I love the story, I love the art, I love the characters, I love the thrilling unexpected action set-pieces (in particular an amazing rooftop chase), I love that the action facilitates the story rather than vice versa, and I love that after such a long hiatus it's finally getting a sequel.

Finding a copy of Beyond Good & Evil is easy. It came out for every last-gen system, it's available for the 360 through XBox Originals for PC direct download via Steam, and if you live in Canada they're apparently giving it away for free with certain packs of cheese. If you haven't played it yet, get yourself psyched to complete some annoying stealth in pursuit of a greater good, fire up your system of choice, and sit back for one of the best gaming experiences ever produced.

Silent Hill Origins

I come from the backwards world. I thought that Silent Hill 2 was easily the worst of the franchise, while Silent Hill 4: The Room was the series' creative peak. I realise I'm alone in this, but to be perfectly honest, I'm right and you're wrong, so you can all go to hell.

Which brings me to Silent Hill: Origins, which I'm going to have to describe as "the worst Silent Hill since the second one". It originally came out for the PSP, and then, because the PSP is crap, got ported to a real system, in this case the PlayStation 2.

The Silent Hill franchise is about ordinary people who, upon visiting (or living near) the titular town find themselves inexplicably transported to a hell dimension where everything is similar and yet horribly different. That, in fact, is exactly how I felt upon firing up Silent Hill Origins. This is definitely Silent Hill, but it's Silent Hill as performed by a really dodgy cover band.

It's developed by Climax, a western company whose previous track record consists almost entirely of bad ports. All the previous games had been by Konami's Nippon-based Team Silent. It's pretty clear that the distinctive Japanese sensibility for horror has gotten lost somewhere along the way, because Origins is less creepy than it is shocktackular. A rising sense of terror is replaced with the "suddenly, zombies" syndrome, where opening any given door leads to nasties immediately in your face, without explanation.

Origins is a direct prequel to the first Silent Hill. You play as Travis, a truck driver who has an encounter with series poster-girl Alessa and then decides to play explorer in the nearby abandoned town.

The "prequel" angle leads to a lot of opportunities for fan nostalgia. You'll encounter plenty of characters from previous games, often in a fairly forced fashion, and revisit key locations from the franchise including Alchemilla General Hospital. There are some great moments, like seeing the iconic "Welcome to Silent Hill" sign come looming out of the fog, but there are a fair helping of points that are just silly, too.

The silliest aspect of the game comes from the re-tooled weapon system. In previous games, firearms had limited ammunition, while melee weapons lasted forever, meaning that melee was often the best choice for most fights. Origins addresses this by making melee weapons incredibly plentiful, but having them break after a couple of hits. It's a system much like that employed in Dead Rising, where any number of regular objects can be picked up and used as weapons, including wooden planks, IV stands and toasters. Unfortunately, it looks stupid. Wandering around a creepy hospital carrying a toaster just makes Travis look like a particularly incompetent burglar.

Also, the combat is clunky and unresponsive, even by the standards of Silent Hill. To make matters worse, to see the game's "good ending" you'll need to down less than 70 foes over the course of the game, so in the end you'll almost entirely bypass the combat portion of the game and just run past most foes.

The developers apparently playtested this "running past things" strategy and found it too easy, so they've compensated by giving practically every enemy the ability to grab you from about half a screen away. There's no defence against these grabs, and escaping them involves an irritating button-mashing minigame. On the whole, the game's monsters seem not spooky but just annoyingly cheap.

The one redeeming feature to the game is the soundtrack, which is by franchise composer Akira Yamaoka and is some of his best work. The music is absolutely gorgeous and you'll sometimes want to stop playing just to make sure you've heard the entire music track before moving forwards.

Music can't save a tragically poor game, though. If you're a Silent Hill fan you might want to get this just for the sake of completeness, but if you've got a limited budget for survival horror then this is not the game you've been waiting for.

Great Gaming Music #12: Hymn Of The Fayth

Final Fantasy X might be called the last great hurrah of the Final Fantasy franchise, before the disappointing outings of X-2, XI and XII. While it's a valid criticism that FFX had an overly linear first and second act, it successfully used that focused early-game experience to flesh out the moody, spiritual world of Spira.

Integral to that experience was Nobuo Uematsu's soundtrack. Featured here is his Hymn of the Fayth, a recurring musical theme throughout both this game and Final Fantasy X-2.

Great Gaming Music #11: Katamari On The Rocks

Naaaa-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, Katamari Damacy.

Yu Miyake's theme to Katamari Damacy is like a particularly tenacious brain weevil, in that you just can't get out of your head. Despite how intensely strange the game is, it's music that nevertheless captures the spirit of the franchise perfectly.

As far as I can tell, the Katamari games are Miyake's only work as a composer, although he has acted as sound director on the Tekken games for Namco.

If, like me, you just can't get enough of Katamari On The Rocks, then you'll probably get a kick out of this somewhat dodgy a capella version of it.

Great Gaming Music #7: Max Payne Theme

The haunting main theme for the Max Payne series by Finnish composer Kärtsy Hatakka is a piece of music that still gives me shivers to this day. The player first encounters it at the game's title screen and there are few compositions in gaming history which so ably set the mood for what is to follow.

The version above is the arrangement for strings featured in Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. Those wishing to hear the piano version from the first game can click here.

Great Gaming Music #6: Metal Gear Solid Main Theme

Harry Gregson-Williams is one of the most talented composers working Hollywood today, and his Metal Gear Solid Main Theme is easily one of his best works. The version shown above is as featured in the opening to Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, which for my money is the best of the several arrangements showcased throughout the franchise. The music for the Metal Gear Solid games, combined with Hideo Kojima's direction, are responsible for the memorable big-screen cinematic feel of the franchise.

Gregson-Williams has also produced scores for a huge range of big-budget films of the last decade, including but not limited to the two Chronicles of Narnia movies, the Shrek movies, and Kingdom of Heaven. He collaborated with Hans Zimmer on The Rock and will be scoring the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie.

Great Gaming Music #2: Sanctuary

Hikaru Utada's compositions for the Kingdom Hearts games are just one of the many reasons these titles became a runaway success story for Square-Enix. Featured here is Sanctuary, the English-language version of her theme to Kingdom Hearts 2. (The Japanese version, entitled Passion, is available here.)

Hikaru is massively popular in Japan and her album First Love became the highest selling album in Japanese history. In the West, she's signed under the DefJam record label, which leads me to wishful thinking about her contributing to forthcoming expansions of the DefJam fighting game franchise.

UPDATE: By the way, how awesome is this Hikaru Utada cover of Boulevard of Broken Dreams?

Great Gaming Music #1: Kiss Me Sunlights

If aliens ever put humanity on trial, the fact that so few of us have played Zone of the Enders will not weigh in our favour. ZOE and its sequel The Second Runner both boast incredible soundtracks; featured here is the ZOE opening theme "Kiss Me Sunlights" as composed and performed by Heart of Air.

Heart of Air also contributed "Blue Flow" to the anime Haibane Renmei (which I love to death). The Heart of Air duo consists of Nanase Hikaru and Itou Masumi. Itou may also be known to anime fans for her work on the soundtracks to Azumanga Daioh, Scrapped Princess and Galaxy Angels, among others.

Obscure Post-Mortem

Obscure is a game that lives up to its title. Developed by French studio Hydravision in 2004 and released in the Euro-Australian market long before it made its way to the US, the game never really made much of a splash. Which is a shame, because if you're into old-school survival horror, Obscure serves up a unique, if derivative, experience.

Obscure's really like a trip back in time to late 90s teen horror flicks. The first character you control meets a hideous fate before the opening credits roll, and then you'll find yourself leading a group of teens out to investigate their missing schoolmate. You'll end up traipsing the length and breadth of an American high school while simultaneously fighting off waves of darkness-spewing plant mutants.

Your team of groovy mystery solvers starts out with just three members, but you'll soon pick up some friends to round out the posse to an even five. Each character has a special ability, although none of the abilities are ever absolutely necessary. Stan, for example, can pick locks quickly and without needing to use the length of wire that everyone else requires. Shannon can advise you of where you'll need to go next to progress, while Kenny can run a little faster than anyone else. You can play as any character in your party, and you can take a second character with you as backup. The remainder of your group remain at a central "meeting point", which you can return to in order to swap people in and out of your expeditionary party.

It would be polite to say that Obscure references Robert Rodriguez's 1998 sci-fi teen horror romp The Faculty, but it would be more accurate to say that it steals from it wholesale. Entire level designs are taken straight from the film, along with large chunks of the plot, and the character model for Stan looks so much like actor Josh Hartnett that you'll be surprised to hear someone else's voice reading his lines. What it doesn't take from The Faculty it draws from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, including a very familiar school courtyard and foyer, and a principal who bears an uncanny resemblance in appearance and character to Armin Shimmerman's portrayal of Principal Snyder.

The single player action isn't particularly inspiring. The game borrows gameplay elements from Resident Evil and Silent Hill, without really surpassing either of those classic franchises. You'll be moving through the interiors of school buildings, gathering ammunition and health items, duking it out with nasty critters, and solving simple puzzles. The two main innovations come from the use of light, and the second character.

It seems the monsters in Obscure are mutants created from a rare light-hating plant. Seeing as ammunition is brutally scarce even on the easiest difficulty, you'll be doing everything you can to pour light onto your enemies before finishing them up with a well placed bullet. Early on in the game, while the sun's still up, this involves smashing in windows to let the evening sunlight pour into classrooms. Some particularly tense scenes involve you working your way around the outside of rooms, near the windows, avoiding nasties waiting in the room's centre. Later, once the sun goes down, things become more problematic, but luckily the game lets you acquire flashlights, which can be sticky-taped to the barrels of your firearms.

The real genius, though, comes from the second character. In a single player game, your ally will support you with firepower, lighting, and the occasional bit of advice. You can switch between your active characters on the fly at the press of a button, and the two characters can even use healing items on each other to create healing support during combat.

But if you have a second controller sitting around, the game really begins to shine. Drop-in drop-out co-operative gameplay means that a friend can take control of that second character and turn an otherwise average survival horror-game into a fairly strategic social experience. The second player adds a whole new element to the game, allowing you to lay down covering fire, have one person providing light while another explores, or just have someone watch your back while you're working on a particularly tricky puzzle or door lock.

As far as I'm aware Obscure is the only modern survival horror featuring two-player co-op on a single console, and it's an absolutely fantastic idea. Everyone knows that horror movies are better when watched with friends, so why have we been consigned to playing survival horror alone?

The graphics are largely adequate to the job, although not special. The game makes extensive use of darkness, to the point where it occasionally becomes difficult to find your way around simple environments. Luckily a quick brightness adjustment on your TV will fix the problem.

The sound effects for monsters, weapons and suchlike are unexceptional, but the game makes fantastic use of ambient sounds including distant screams and breaking windows to suggest terrifying mayhem in progress just out of sight.

The music is even better than the ambient sound. In fact, it's absolutely fantastic. Opening music by Sum 41 and closing music by Span set up the teen-horror atmosphere, and the in-game themes feature rousing orchestral instrumentals and the creepy tones of a children's choir. You'll frequently want to stop and just bathe in how awesome the soundtrack is.

Is Obscure scary? Not in the same way as Silent Hill. The game makes use of very few scripted sequences, instead relying largely on the game's inherent difficulty and atmosphere to keep you on the edge of your seat. It's effective, but if you're looking for cat-in-the-locker or haunted-funhouse sequences you might be disappointed.

Arkem and I slogged through the easy mode beginning-to-end last night in about five hours, so it's not a particularly long game. There's a New Game Plus-type option which gives you access to new costumes and weapons, but none of that is very enticing. Even easy mode is pretty unforgiving, though - we did a lot of saving and loading - and normal might be a challenge for even survival horror veterans. When your characters die, they stay dead, and the game just teleports you back to the meeting place for you to continue on with whatever surviving teenagers you have left. There's also one bitterly stupid sequence involving a collapsing floor that can take several reloads if you're unlucky, but it's thankfully quite brief.

If you enjoy the survival horror genre, you should absolutely grab a friend check out Obscure, if only via rental, as a pleasant change from the genre kings. Or at least to tide you over until Silent Hill Origins finally makes its way onto store shelves.

On The Way: Obscure II

Okay, I've got something: news that Obscure II is on the horizon. PS2 survival horror ahoy! As someone who loved the original, I'm intensely pleased that they're keeping up the teen horror movie vibe, the co-op gameplay, and the rampant plagiarism from The Faculty.

Read more via Gamespot. And ignore their somewhat negative coverage. It'll be gold, I tell you! Gold!

Kingdom Hearts II Post-Mortem

[Now Experiencing] [Computer Gaming]

Okay, I haven't posted much for the last couple of days, and the reason for that is largely because I've been helping Mickey Mouse save the universe from heart-stealing world-eating forces of ultimate evil.

Kingdom Hearts II is a sequel to Square-Enix's succesful Disney-themed action RPG Kingdom Hearts, and like the original it's a release for the PlayStation 2. Kingdom Hearts II is ALSO a sequel to the GameBoy Advance title Chain of Memories, which anecdotally seems to have been significantly less successful.

You'll want to have played Chain of Memories, because Kingdom Hearts II picks up exactly where Chain left off. Sora's still encased in a giant white pod, having his memories reconstructed by a mysterious young girl named Namine. He's been moved from Castle Oblivion at the instruction of an enigmatic red-cloaked figure named DiZ, and is now connected to a world named Twilight Town, where his destiny is about to become entangled with that of a young boy called Roxas.

Over the course of a three-hour tutorial-slash-prologue, you'll meet Roxas, explore Twilight Town, and learn the fairly simple controls for this sprawling action RPG. Most of the main concepts from the original game return - you'll be jumping, running, and swinging a keyblade much the same as you did the first time around. These basic abilities are complemented by a largely useless collection of summons, which are annoying to use and not particularly effective, and also a new power - that of the Drive Form. By choosing the Drive command from the action menu, Sora can now change into one of six alternate costumes which bestow a range of special combat abilities on him, most commonly enhanced speed, damage, and combo attacks.

New to Kingdom Hearts II are reaction commands. Occasionally when fighting an enemy, you'll be prompted to press the triangle button to execute a special attack or defence specific to that enemy. This works into the existing battle system surprisingly well, and is almost completely optional - reaction commands make winning easier, but you can still punch through pretty much everything while completely ignoring the whole reaction system.

Two major elements of the previous games are completely absent. Firstly, the card-battling mechanics of Chain of Memories are thankfully nowhere to be seen. With all due respect to Chain, which was an interesting experiment, you'll be extremely glad that there's nary a card to be seen.

Secondly, while the original Kingdom Hearts could be called a platformer-RPG, Kingdom Hearts II features almost no platforming elements. You'll never need to jump to raised platforms, make timed crossings of floating islands, or explore difficult to reach parts of levels looking for chests. Pretty much everything this time around is at ground level. Well, except combat, which still transforms into the kind of anime-inspired feats of aerial superhuman skill that the first game delivered so well.

I actually liked the platform sections of the original Kingdom Hearts, but you're unlikely to miss them much in the sequel. The effect is that the game is much easier and friendlier to new players, and is also much more focused on its combat, which it delivers in both quantity and quality.

I've heard a lot of people complain about the Kingdom Hearts combat system, and to be fair, it does consist mostly of just mashing the "X" button a lot. But for all that, it's still surprisingly satisfying, and it certainly looks fantastic. As you level up, you gain new moves and abilities which you can equip to beef up your combat prowess. The number of abilities you can equip at a time is limited by your ability points (AP), which also rise as you gain experience, so there's a certain amount of strategic thinking involved in choosing what abilities you'll have available at any given time.

The real star of Kingdom Hearts II, though, are the worlds. Over the course of the game you'll visit an impressive roster of Disney properties. Environments from the original game are featured, including Halloween Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas and the 100 Acre Wood from Winnie the Pooh. There's also an expansion of some of the worlds that were only glimpsed or hinted at before, including Disney Castle, The Lion King's Pride Lands, and the castle from Beauty and the Beast.

These worlds are all good, but what's likely to really excite you are the completely new entries - the worlds of Steamboat Willy (rendered in black and white and featuring a projector-click background sound and copious film grain), Tron (complete with the original voice cast including Bruce Boxleitner in the title role), and Pirates of the Carribean (sadly NOT featuring the original cast, but with lots of endearing Jack Sparrow finger-wiggling).

The graphics are among the best featured on the PlayStation 2, with an absolutely fantastic level of detail, including special costumes for Sora, Donald and Goofy when they visit many of the worlds. All environments are visualised in the style of the movies they draw inspiration from, and are filled with recognisable sets and memorable moments. Characters are animated with faithful attention to the source material - Jack Skellington's showy and expansive arm gestures are depicted just as well as the exhausted flying style of Iago the Parrot or the loping run of the Beast. The only world that noticeably suffers in the animation department is that of The Lion King, but considering the huge amounts of attention to animal movement that went into the original film of that, it's perhaps forgiveable that it was not all successfully transferred to this game.

The sound work is also exceptional. Utada Hikaru returns to design new original music for much of the game, including the catchy new title song, Sanctuary. This time around, you won't catch as much of the music from the original films used as background music (although Halloween Town still has the "This is Halloween" instrumental playing), but you probably won't miss it much.

Also, as if to compensate, the underwater world of Atlantica consists entirely of rhythmn-based minigames themed around a variety of Little Mermaid songs. It's a great idea that makes good use of some of the memorable music that accompanies many Disney movies, but it's unfortunately a bad implementation. The versions of Under the Sea and Part of Your World that are used are truncated and feature appalling vocals, while the other three (presumably original) songs vary in quality from the putrid Swim This Way through to the surprisingly good music for the fight against Ursula. The minigames that accompany the songs are also less than engaging, so it's probably a blessing that Atlantica as a whole is an entirely optional part of the game not required to reach the ending.

The game's list of voice talent is amazing, including Haley Joel Osmont returning as Sora, Christopher Lee as DiZ, and the entire English voice cast of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Wherever possible, Disney characters have been voiced by the actors from the original movies, or failing that the TV shows or direct-to-video sequels. Names like Zach Braff, Bruce Boxleitner, Pat Morita, David Ogden Stiers, Angela Lansbury, and James Woods fill the credits, alongside veteran voice actors such as Tara Strong, Dan "Homer" Castellanata, John "Bender" DiMaggio, Kath "Phil and Lil from Rugrats" Soucie, and Tress MacNeille (who has played the voice of Daisy Duck in pretty much everything since 1999).

If there's a problem with Kingdom Hearts II, it's that it has too great a focus on minigames. Pretty much everywhere you turn you'll find some minor task to perform that uses different gameplay mechanics. Luckily, most of the minigames are well designed, fairly fun, and, most importantly, optional. While there are some fairly challenging goals set for completists who want to revisit the many, many minigames, you'll never need to achieve them to progress, and - in a burst of good sense on Squeenix's part - most of the minigames don't even give you power-ups or other things that aid you on the main spine of the story. Usually the sole reward for achieving the challenge goals is getting a little orange Mickey Mouse icon next to the challenge's listing in the Jiminy's Journal section of the menu. (Contrast this approach with Final Fantasy X-2, which had a similar obsession with minigames but without the redeeming features.)

The GummiShip minigame returns from the original Kingdom Hearts as well, and while it's NOT entirely optional, the mandatory parts are very easy. More importantly, it's actually kind of fun now. Square Enix has developed the shoot-em-up subgame from its first incarnation into a really enjoyable rail shooter that sees you blasting your way through absolute legions of space-faring Heartless. Once again, there's almost no connection between the upper levels of this minigame and the main quest - there's no reason to come back for more except for the fun of it. I actually found it good enough to stand as a game all on its own - I played through all the way to the nightmarishly hard final boss of the gummi routes just because it was enjoyable to do so.

As far as content goes, the game probably has about 30 to 35 hours of play just in the main plot, which extends to a total of 70 or 80 hours if you're going to complete everything the game has to offer. Very little of that length feels repetetive or padded, with the possible exception of completing the synthesis material lists, which is a process which can be aptly described as "farming" (and is, again, entirely optional).

All in all, Kingdom Hearts II stands as an exceptional triple-A game that benefits from a combination of fantastic creativity, professional execution, and insightful game design. While it may not be the ideal entry point into the series for new players, it's a worthy follow-up for existing fans and one that'll get you excited about the franchise all over again. Definitely worth your money and time.