Having spent most of this week playing through my newly-acquired Kingdom Hearts II, as well as going through the rather older Final Fantasy 8, I have to say that playing one tends to make me want to play the other one.

KH2 is fun in its own right, but a bit uncertain when it comes to setting the mood. This is a game which contains a world where absolutely nothing terrible happens, and the worst which can occur is a bit of a scare and some minor mischief which is laughed off easily (Hundred Acre Woods); a world (or rather, several worlds) which is the usual Disney-esque movies For Kids, where there is a Designated Villain (who dresses all in Evil Colours and is all sneaky and malicious and stuff) and the plucky heroes have to stop them from completing their all-so-evil plan (Agrabah, Atlantica, Olympus Coliseum, Land of Dragons, Pride Lands); and a world where the default state of happiness is being sarcastic and snarky and backstabby, which is still a damned sight better than all these rotting skeletons and ancient curses and bloody works (Port Royal). Throw in the ghoulish humour of Halloween Town and the surreal existentialism of Twilight Town, and we have a fair case of mood whiplash. This may be illustrated with the differences between the Heartless, which look all cutely scary in a cheap-bedsheet-over-the-head kind of way, and the Nobodies, who move in a disturbingly rubbery manner that is genuinely creepy Nightmare Fuel.

And all this is presided over by an anthropomorphic duck, a similarly anthropomorphic dog-thing, and a boy who just hit puberty with a highly unusual weapon. And none of the other people in all the worlds think that this is odd. I would have expected Captain Jack Sparrow to make a comment, at the least.

I feel that I'm probably not the designated target age group for this game. I found myself wishing the Disney sequences, where we sing musicals Under The Sea or prevent an invasion of Disney China, were over as quickly as possible, so we could get to the deeper parts of the game, which dealt in downright mind-boggling concepts of whether someone exists if they're only in one's memories which one then forgot but then remembered again but only vaguely, and whether hearts and the shells left behind when they leave are interchangeable or shareable or something. It's akin to a mental and philosophical shell game: the truth's under one of these cups. Round and round they go.

This invariably means that I found myself impatiently rushing through a great deal of the game, only to have to go back and grind through them when it turns out that the Deep Parts are gated by bosses I need to level to defeat. I will not even mention Jiminy's Journal, which I'm seriously considering ignoring and just starting over on Proud Mode. At least in KH1 I could get the Secret Ending through level-grinding patience, rather than actual, yanno, game-playing skill.

At least the various cameos of Final Fantasy characters are appreciated. Setzer's appearance was just blatantly Out Of Character, but Auron was pretty well done, and Tifa was kind of fun to watch in action, in an Akane Tendo kind of way. The trio of Yuna, Rikku, and Paine made me remember how odd it seemed that the saviour of all of Spira and a self-sacrificing well-respected summoner would end up as a giddy pop star, but that's a rant for a different game, and at least they're very cute in this one.

A great deal of the tension and mystery of the game is maintained through the simple expedient of having everyone who might know something either disappear mysteriously for no adequately-explained reason, or get interrupted by a convenient (or inconvenient, depending on your point of view) attack of Heartless or Nobodies. I get the feeling that it is a staple in stories for those In The Know to selfishly guard their secrets, since Knowledge Is Power and all that, but I have to wonder what the story would look like if everyone revealed all they knew right at the beginning. It may be a rather shorter story, or it may not.

Leon, mind you, is a great deal more tolerable than his template Squall, who acts like such a self-absorbed jerk that I have to wonder why anyone wants to stay around him. I mean, the player sees what he thinks about and can thus follow his chain of logic, but for everyone else, his random outbursts are astonishingly non-sequitur. At least the game has the requisite Square Trio of cute female characters, and I find myself torn between Selphie's cheerfulness and Quistis's Reliable Older Woman appeal.

… why yes, that is a major reason why I play these games. This should not be surprising in any way.