Wait a minute. Reverse That.

So I rented Kingdom Hearts II from Hollywood Video (a combination of two choices from my interior poll and if there's one thing this, Final Fantasy X-2, La Pucelle Tactics and most of Culdcept has taught me, it's that I'm not a console RPG man. All I seem to care about when the PS2 is on is eye candy and mashing buttons--and it's the former reason I figured I would be into the Final Fantasy games. Remember all those commercials for FFVII on the Playstation? That was all eyecandy.

But goddamn, are Square (makers of the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts) RPGs tedious. (And this is coming from a Metal Gear Solid junkie!) It's just button after button of boring speech balloons just so you can then be rewarded with a cut scene of people talking! And Kingdom Hearts II in particular has atrocious "acting"--a character will say something and then 30 seconds later, wave his arms about expansively.

Now, I'm not Kingdom Hearts II's perfect audience, it should be admitted, as I'm neither a nine year old boy or a twelve year old girl. But my fond memories of the Disney games on the Sega Genesis (Quackshot!) made me excited about the idea of these games, particularly when the reviews accentuated how perfectly the classic characters were captured.

And I'm a sucker for high concept, so when I started KHII not as Sora, protagonist from the last game, but Roxas, a kid who looks like Sora who's haunted by mysterious dreams in the strangely wistful sunset world of Twilight Town, I was down with the idea. Kingdom Hearts II takes a strangely Matrix: Reloaded approach to its opening scenes, as the hero occasionally finds himself in dilemnas that he can't quite get out of before the screen is occluded by television static. It's annoying and meta, so I should be all over it, right?

Wrong. The whole damn thing is dreary, droopy and slow, with minigames so dull they were probably plucked from educational software. Additionally, there's not a Disney character in sight, except for Roxas's dream flashbacks to the first game. But even by the time Donald and Goofy came on board (about four or five hours into the game), it was too late. I didn't care--I just mashed my buttons through the fight scenes, mashed my buttons through the dialogue scenes, and went and peed during the cut scenes.

By the time I stumbled on the game's horrifyingly robust gummi ship editor (with which you can costumize a battleship to a creepily OCDish degree for later arcade sequences), I realized my priorities and the game's priorities couldn't be farther apart. With a day left to play the game, I returned it to the video store and then beat MGS:Subsistence again. Whatever Kingdom Hearts II's priorities were, they weren't my priorities. And this is probably the case with RPGs in general--although I wish I could admit otherwise, I just don't care about the spreadsheet approach to customization and character building. That I played all of Champions of Norrath (and not even online!) and nearly none of Final Fantasy X-2, shows that my heart lies elsewhere--with God of War, probably.

Next: Can I have a video game blog without video games?