Level Up! Seize the Experience!

My husband bought me Kingdom Hearts 2 for my birthday in 2005. I didn’t play it for about a year because well, I hadn’t finished the first Kingdom Hearts game because I got mad at it for two years and then I wanted to play Chain of Memories before I played the sequel. When I finally did play the game, I blew through it like I’ve never played an RPG before and stumbled upon the final save point before fighting Xemnas at level 53. I had barely touched leveling up my forms, let alone completing Jiminy’s Journal. Since I had no interest in doing nothing but leveling for hours on end, I started over this year. Well, I STILL had to level for hours on end, doing absolutely nothing but restomping over worlds and fighting Heartless and Nobodies to gain experience and level up my forms. Oh sure, I could stop and take part in Jiminy’s sadistic Journal of mini-game bliss, but that only breaks up monotony; it doesn’t HELP ME LEVEL.

If a RPG doesn’t provide enough gameplay in the form of the main quest or sidequests, then it suffers from poor design. Not even the tournaments in Olympus — the closest thing KH2 had to sidequests — offered experience for the enemies vanquished. Why on earth would I fight in a tournament if I can’t either 1) progress the story or 2) gain experience.

The end result for me was a lot of frustration and boredom for a game that had a really, really, REALLY good story. I actually teared up a little bit during the final end sequence. But will I play this game ever again? Most likely not. If I wanted to play a game with tedium, I’d play Tetris, not a RPG, and even then, at least I got points for the tedium in Tetris.