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Culture clash. There's a strong precedent for fictional characters visiting one another's worlds. It's especially frequent in the ever-reinventing world of comic books, where, for example, DC Comics' Superman first met Marvel Comics' Spider-Man back in 1976. TV and literature have been seriously getting in on the act in the past few decades too, utilising both characters from different licensed properties and characters that have entered the legal domain. Tarzan scrapping Aliens in a comic, say, or Bram Stoker's Dracula turning up in Buffy, or pretty much any character from turn-of-the-19th-century fantastical literature appearing in Alan Moore's masterful The League Of Extraordinary Gentleman. Even in movies, walls have broken down between different intellectual properties – the landmark film Who Framed Roger Rabbit featured cartoon characters owned by Disney, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures/Fleischer Studios and MGM.  Despite all that, however, the Kingdom Hearts games have a whiff of the downright peculiar, with their meeting of Square Enix – and several of the Fantasy Characters – with the worlds of Disney. What's more, the latter includes characters that were, of course, appropriated by Disney from fairy tales and myths, and from the literature of AA Milne, JM Barrie and Lewis Carroll. It's quite the cultural megamix. Kingdom Hearts 2 is the second sequel to the original 2002 PS2 game and its GBA follow-on. As with its forebears, it's a role-playing game that involves big-haired manga-esque Square Enix characters joining forces with Donald Duck and Goofy. If you haven't played the original games, the myriad characters, settings and story – which is either epic and grand or convoluted and protracted, depending on your sympathies – will be baffling. It's certainly a strange scenario that enables our spiky-haired Square Enix hero, Sora (though you start out playing his "Nobody", a kind of clone, Roxas), and his comrades Donald and Goofy to visit sundry Disney-owned worlds, including: Beast's Castle from Beauty & The Beast, the Pride Lands of The Lion King, Winnie The Pooh's 100 Acre Wood, and, increasingly bizarrely, Port Royal from Pirates Of The Caribbean and Halloween Town from A Nightmare Before Christmas. Heck, there's even a blast of Tron for the oldies. Despite this bizarre melange, though, the game gels well, with the PS2 pushed to provide appealing settings and reasonable action. Plus, many of the voice actors from the movies in question reprise their roles.  Your involvement with this will depend on familiarity, not just with Disney's properties and the elegiac and emotional – or just plain mawkish and melodramatic – storytelling style of Square Enix, but also with your tolerance for a title that plays out with way too much full motion video, cut scenes and on-screen text. But most of all it'll depend on whether you can get your head around the meeting of cultures. In a way, it makes perfect sense, as mid-20th-century manga (such as the work of the medium's godfather, Osama Tezuka) was so strongly influenced by the style of Disney's cartooning of the period. It's not only about weird cultural crossovers, it's arguably a family reunion, or divergent cultures coming full circle.
Daniel Etherington
Kingdom Hearts 2 is out now on PS2.
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Read members' comments related to this game.
comment by ekiatoui
Dec 21, 2007
That's because Final Fantasy is vastly inferior to Disney. Get over it, weeaboo. :D
comment by YuRiPax
May 7, 2007
Although the Kingdom hearts games are awesome.. And KH2 was great..Has any played KH2 Final mix+ Yet? I Know they've only really released it in japan. But I was hoping to play it I've picked up alot of japanese...And I can read it..But, It said on several websites they've added more disney characters..Doesn't this spoil the game? It was already ridden with annoying and pointless disney stuff. And there arn't enough final fantasy characters and worlds. Has anyone got any idea about th enew changes in KH2FM+??
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 just causegames #173  company of heroes #172 lego star wars iigames #171  saints rowgames #170  dead risinggames #169 books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. |
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