Appealing...why?

I need help in an unbelievable way....I need help understanding why everyone likes this game because as far as I can tell it is a crappy 3D version of a Mana game from what I played except it stripped out all the good gameplay elements from it and left the battling and level up system.

The jumping and more of the action/camera mechanics are pretty bad just like every square game ever made that is an action-esq game. As a person who plays a decent amount of action games, I found the implementation of this basic stuff to be horrendous to the max...THE MAX!

So what is it that makes this game great? Is the story really that good and compelling that it is worth dealing with the above problems? Is it just for the novelty of having FF & Disney cameos? Is the gummy ship really that awesome?

Help...why is this game good?

I just play it because Aeris is alive

Everything is cute in Kingdom Hearts; the protagonists are cute, the enemies are cute, the Disney worlds are cute, the Gummi Ships are cute, and the story is cute (and exciting)!

Sometimes the camera bothers me, but everything else is fine by me. :sebastian:

camera bothers me too, and the cuteness is getting on my nerves, but for the rest the game is ok.

I think it's a nice story, plus I like Final Fantasy and Disney.. and somehow putting the two together works, at least for me.

When it comes to gameplay the game is lacking a small bit, but it became better in Kingdom Hearts 2.. which is overall just a better game than the original.

The main reason why I like it is exactly the things you don't like, the movement and action. I find it much better than any Mana or FF game.

By the way, was this thread only created because of the Cid Knight challenges?

It's got Disney characters in it, which for me hold a special place in my otherwise cynical and blackened heart.

On one hand it was created because of the competition and on the other hand I just like to bitch about a few games every now and then XD This happens to be one of them. I can't remember if I ever made a thread here on this but I do remember taking peeps at gamestop down when I worked there XD

My original reason for buying this game was to kick ass with Donald and Goofy :D

In reality though, I consider myself a diverse gamer, I like slow, turn-based games, I like ATB games, and I like Active games like KH.

Utada's songs from the commercial drew me in. That, and the storyline looked really great and different.

I can make this easy for you and tell you that you will never understand why people like it, and I can tell that by the fact that you said it's "stripped of good game mechanics," which is horribly false. That's especially true for the second game, since it has quite possibly the best 3D camera I've ever experienced in an action game. But to make a short story long I'll elaborate a bit on this. Sure it's a flawed series by a gameplay standard, but I'll get to that once I explain all the positives that greatly outweigh the negatives.
First of all, the surprise factor helped the first game immensely. Kingdom Hearts could have easily been a throw away game to make a lot of money with minimal effort, and it would have. It almost was, in fact, and one person you can thank for it not is the Gooch. Instead we got a very well made game with a surprisingly deeper story than one would have expected, that at the same time remained faithful to both the classic Disney films and Squares own games.
Second, you're right about it being a lesser Mana series. It is similar, and yet much inferior to games like Secret of Mana or Seiken Densetsu 3. That doesn't make it bad. Mana is one of the SNES's best titles, and Seiken Densetsu 3 can stand on it's own against any other Square game. The first game suffers from camera issues, and the second suffers from a childish difficulty and terrible linearity, but they're easily two of the best games for the PS2, and I would even go so far as to say they're the Square side of Squeenix's best titles on the PS2. Now, for a Square fan who could care less about Disney, it might not be as highly regarded, but they should still be able to appreciate it for being a well made game.
After all, the idea alone that you could pull off a concept like Kingdom Hearts at all is unfathomable, and yet they far exceeded any expectations.

Also, the jumping (which isn't even that bad) has no relevance. Kingdom Hearts is about it's combat, it's not a platformer. And while the first game does try to stuff some of it down your throat, the second game has no platform elements whatsoever.

Hated the camera in KHI x.x

CoM I played only because I was a little confused when I started KHII. I thought the cards were a pretty neat renovation, but I didn't like the GBA controls. I am so mad that we aren't getting a PS2 remake, because I think it would be so much better with a Playstation controller.

KHII was NEAT n.n

I liked it for all of the reasons you don't.

Music is average, story is crap, gameplay is quite entertaining, cameos range from boring ---> awesome.

The main reason I like it is because of the awesome characters that appear. But imo KH >>> KH2. Tho' I played less than half of KHII in the end. (I was doing POTC. How far was that?)

Ooh! I like the music in KH, especially Dearly Beloved and the orchestral version of Hikari. :ariel:

I started playing because a friend recommended the first game to me when it came out. Then I fell in love with it. :D