Kingdom Hearts.

[Rune]

I've played kingdom hearts too. I liked it for awhile but after getting to the little mermaid level the game got boring for me. I've never been much of a fan of square (Though I'm a fan of enix's Dragon warrior games). I didn't care about the characters enough to keep playing for the story, and the gameplay got stale for me. I thought everything else about the game was alright though. (Except the camera! GRR....How I HATE the camera in most games....) The controls were pretty smooth, and magic was easy to use thanks to the shortcut, and the graphics were of course beautiful.

[Admiral Purge]

I never really could get into Kingdom Hearts. Once I found out I'd be stuck with Donald and Goofy, alot of the appeal was struck out of the game. Squall's voice didn't sound like I imagined it (which Square can't help, obviously, but it annoyed me very much), and the controls felt very loose and awkward, both in and out of combat. I didn't get very far at all (I gave up in disgust in Wonderland) but what I did see was very disappointing.

Perhaps worst of all, the storyline utterly failed to interest me from the beggining. I've played action games with more interesting plots. If it got more interesting later on, that's fine, but when you've thrown a couple tedious hours at a game and you don't see a single redeeming quality... it's alittle discouraging. Glad I didn't waste money on it (I borrowed a friend's copy).

Oh, and as an aside, I was very disappointed with Tales of Symphonia as well. The original (Tales of Phantasia) was much better.... the characters were more serious, the plot more interesting and epic. That, and the game was hilarious (I recall one scene in particular which finds the characters in a bar... two of them get rip-roaring drunk, the sorceress passes out and has a very loud fantasy involving the main character right there at the table). The battle system from Symphonia is basically a copy and paste deal from the original, with four nasty changes: 1) You can't wiggle your joystick to do new sword (or halberd/spear/axe/etc. depending on what you're using at the time) techniques, 2) The system in Symphonia tries to be sort of 3D and fails, leading to confusing and infuriating 2D paths cut into what should be a full 360 degree arena, 3) The character's abilities don't compliment each other nearly as well, and 4) They [almost] allow you to have other players come and help. The problem is that only one or two characters are actually balanced enough to make enjoyable PC's, and also, the camera is stuck to 1st player, so the other players can't see what they're doing alot of the time. Frustrating, disappointing... they would have done better to take the original straight to the Game Cube.

... wow... that was a big aside