It's been almost four years since I played Sora's last adventure, not to mention five years since the sequel was actually released -- so my retro goggles have blurred somewhat, and it might be unfair to expect a PS2 game to compare favorably with more modern productions. All that said, after having put more than ten hours into Kingdom Hearts II, I'm fairly confident in my "meh" impression.

Of those ten hours, I'd put money on better than half of them having been spent staring blankly at the screen. Even neglecting the plodding introductory sequence, KH2 is lousy with cutscenes, such that it's rare to proceed through more than a single room without being interrupted by one. Which would be alright, if the narrative in them was interesting -- but whereas the first game's story set up a clear goal of finding Riku and Kairi, and the quest through each world was direct in its pursuit of this goal, in KH2 the narrative feels more disconnected: the beginning establishes some vague threats in the lingering Heartless and in Organization XIII, and mentions the continuing search for Riku, but every time Sora and co. show up on a new world, they pretty much just seem to be tooling around and having fun. I'm sure this plot will pick up later in the game, but after ten hours I still have no further insight into any of the game's big picture plot threads.

These hours of tedious cutscenes can all be skipped, but even without them, interactivity still eludes me. When Brad said that KH2's mechanics had been streamlined from the first game, he wasn't kidding around: in on-foot segments, the vast majority of environments are corridors, funnelling Sora from room to room. Most of the rooms aren't even aesthetically interesting. And the rest of the time - that is, during combat - in spite of a number of new mechanical features and wrinkles, the controls have basically been simplified to "Press X, unless you're asked to press Triangle."

The other buttons have some uses too, and there is still a menu for combat options like items and magic, but there is so much X and Triangle mashing by comparison that everything else seems trivial. While the transformation system is an interesting new addition, everything else about combat has been mindlessly simplified -- I didn't even have to heal myself until after the ten-hour mark, when I was fighting partially-invincible pirates. With guns.

Rather than get into an extended discussion on whether KH2's lack of progress from the first game is a bad thing, it's easier to compare my experience so far to Final Fantasy XIII, or at least to what the interweb has told me about it: even if I assume that the later game is more interesting, more engaging, and more fun, getting there has so far been boring and dull. I feel like I'm just going through the motions, and not getting any joy out of it.

Progress: Gave Up -- Level 22, passed through Port Royal

Rating: Meh