Lately, I've been thinking a lot about Kingdom Hearts.
It's a series I've been into since I was probably, like, 9 or so. I got KH2 first; I'll always remember being told that Final Fantasy 10 was rated too high for me, so I moved like two spots down on the shelf and grabbed the next cool looking box. KH2 had some pretty neat looking holofoil boxart, so KH2 was what I picked. I loved it, but I was generally pretty terrible at it. I played on Standard, didn't understand half the mechanics of the game, and mashed X or Triangle whenever applicable. Never bothered fighting Sephiroth, either, because the one time I tried he killed me in approximately two hits, and at the time I had no appreciation for what difficulty can do to make a game fun. I beat Xemnas, moved on to KH1, and never beat that either because I was kind of scared by Ansem's weird ship form during the final boss.

Years later, I'd come back to Kingdom Hearts 2 thanks to the "2.5" collection. I was in highschool, by this point, and the idea of getting to fight the weird extra secret bosses (and, you know, fuckin' Roxas) made me pretty happy. For those unaware, Kingdom Hearts games on the PS2 got Japan-only "Director's Cut" style revisions that added a lot of extra content. New bosses, new attacks, new difficulty modes, lots of fun stuff. KH2's "Final Mix" release in particular got an extra difficulty mode by the name of "Critical Mode" which I tried to play, having heard for years through the internet that it was the "intended" way to play the game— 2.5 was based on the "Final Mix" version of the game, and by this point I had started enjoying harder games, so that was what I picked.
I absolutely hated it.
Nowadays, if you asked me, I'd be a strong advocate for the "Critical Mode makes KH2 better" argument. I'm not super interested in going into detail why I personally like it, here— what I think is far more interesting is discussing why it took me four playthroughs across four systems to appreciate KH2, and what that says about both the game itself and what I find valuable about games in general.

Kingdom Hearts 2's not a perfect game. You might be fooled for thinking so with the way some people online tend to talk about it, but it's got a lot of small issues that compound into a game that feels far less cohesive than the first in the series. Enemies feel like they can't hold a candle to your base moveset, and any attempt to compound them into a harder fight is broken wide open by several enemies having "get out of jail free"-style Quick Time Events that deal massive damage to everything around you for free. World design is lackluster— there's a lot of flat ground without any interactibles, and Sora moves so goddamn fast that it's really not worth taking any consideration. Magic now regenerates on its own, discouraging the usage of items since, you know, why would you ever use an item when you can bind Curaga to X and get a free full heal at almost any time? Later bosses feel a bit more equipped to handle your moveset, sure, but they do so little damage that you can really just get away with wailing on them forever. Drive Forms boost your attack power into overdrive and leave all but the most difficult of bosses completely unable to cope, and Summons take away Drive, so there's no reason to use that when they don't feel nearly as cool.

That was my experience playing KH2 as a child, to an extent. Mash X, mash Triangle, watch the cool lights. Don't get me wrong, for a 9-ish year old that's pretty fuckin' fun. KH2's excellent visual design and soundtrack really carry the hell out of that game for a casual player, and if there's one thing I'll always say in regards to games when applicable, it's that sometimes you really don't need much to make a good game other than to make the act of hitting buttons feel really good. Still, I went into 2.5 with fairly low expectations; partially because you probably need to do that when revisiting anything you remember being great as a kid, and partially because I was not a very happy teenager. So, playing KH2FM, I immediately picked Critical Mode with no further research or expectation, thinking the only way I'd enjoy a game I remembered being fairly easy was if I dove straight into the deep end.

KH2FM's Critical Mode difficulty entirely flips the script on the game's flaws, and not in a good way, at first glance. Enemies still feel largely helpless in the face of your moveset, but the occasional cheap shot can no longer be tanked; with the boosted damage values and halved health bar, getting beaned from off-screen usually means you just straight up die. In an attempt to even the playing field, you might start using Drive Forms more, but now the rarely-seen "Anti-Form"— a transformation that seemingly replaces your intended form at complete random by turning you into a feral, darkness-coated version of Sora— seems to show up constantly. Anti-Form lacks adequate defensive capabilities at first glance, and its attacks are wild and often high-commitment compared to the rest of your potential forms. You can't heal, and can't revert from it manually. This means that using Drive Forms now feels like a diceroll to determine where or not you just fuckin' die on any given attempt at a fight. They're still strong enough to completely overshadow Summons, which consume the same resource for far less visible benefit at first glance. Late-game bosses now feel like complete shit, breaking out of your combos without rhyme or reason beyond simple trial-and-error. The end result of this is that you end up hanging back for the whole game, getting in small pokes before circling around the arena to be sure your cure command is up before you commit to any offense, and rarely bothering with full-on combos, since humanoid bosses will often just gain Super Armor and beat the living shit out of you for the audacity of trying to play a video game in their presence. Good luck with Roxas; if you're particularly frustrated by this system, he'll stonewall you for a few days.

Anyone who knows KH2 well enough to enjoy Critical Mode is probably a bit mad after reading that last block of text, but I implore you to hear me out. See, KH2's biggest flaw isn't anything I've said so far, at least not directly. It suffers from a far more interesting problem, one I think is certainly worth discussing when we're talking about video games and how people experience them:
KH2 is fucking terrible at conveying its mechanics.
Let's take Anti-Form as our first example, here. Anti-Form's strongest means of defense isn't obvious. It's actually loaded up with "parry frames" on most of its attacks— you can deflect most proticles simply by hitting buttons when the projectiles are hitting you. It's also got a move called "Anti-Glide", accessed by tapping Square. You'll zip to the nearest enemy, largely invincible the whole time. You have no way of knowing either of these things beyond trial and error, sure, but a savvy player might figure them out eventually; not many people are going to get mad enough to just put the controller down and give up when they get Anti-Form, and...
Hey, wait, how do you actually get Anti-Form?
You see, every time you activate a Drive Form in Kingdom Hearts 2, a change is made to a counter. The higher that counter's number, the more likely it is that your next transformation will be Anti-Form. There's a number of factors that also change the likelihood of getting it— as an example, fighting a member of Organization XIII will quadruple the number of points added to the counter when you transform. Fighting certain bosses will automatically clear out the counter and make it impossible to get Anti-Form, ever. Getting a new form will reduce the counter to 0. There's actually a pretty shockingly in-depth little system, here. So why is it such a pain in the ass when you're actually playing?
None of it is ever told to you. There's not a tutorial, there's not a counter buried in the stats menu, there's not even a subtle hint like the Drive meter getting darker or something. It's completely, utterly hidden from the player in all regards.

Now, I'd like to make my stance on these kinds of things clear: I think secrets are fun in games. Discovering how a game works is just as fun as playing it, for me. Thing is, nothing Kingdom Hearts 2 is unnecessarily obtuse about is to its benefit; things that should be subtly hinted to the player (like Anti-Form) are utterly invisible. Basic Combat Mechanics (like Revenge Value) are secret, and boy, does that have a knock-on effect. Before I get to Revenge Value, though, let's talk about Summons, and why an ability's functions should really be made clearer. Remember how I said Summons didn't feel great in both of my initial reads of KH2?
Turns out, that's because their greatest benefits are almost all passive.
Chicken Little will give you access to a Magnet-like ability far before you have access to Magnet. Peter Pan will augment your attacks with his own and auto-revive you if you die. Stitch will auto-refill your MP and HP and stay on the screen for 18 fucking years oh my god why is this not made more clear
Genie is the only exception; his primarily use is far more active, being an offensive powerhouse that gains new forms to match yours, each with their own Limits. Limits are borderline useless for the other summons, but they're far flashier and even Genie's wants you to realize that the "Drive" command has been replaced by "Drive?" to get the most out of him. I think it's incredibly telling that despite Stitch being one of the most busted tools in the game, one of the top autocomplete results for "kh2 summons" on Google is "kh2 summons useless". Why would you ever try to use Summons when Drive Forms are right there and have far more obvious benefits, especially when Drive Meter is such a seemingly scarce resource?
Well, the trick is that Drive isn't scarce. You regenerate it every time you hit an enemy. The game doesn't tell you this; it only tells you that Drive Orbs refill the meter, and most enemies don't actually drop Drive Orbs. Whoops.

Kingdom Hearts 2 is laden with this sort of thing, and I really want to reiterate something I said earlier: a game hiding information from the player is not an inherently bad thing. Some of my favorite games are built off this idea. On a note that's probably more relevant to the majority of people reading this at the tail end of 2023, Lethal Company is a game that derives half of its appeal and comedy from the haphazard discovery of information done in the moment, largely through player experimentation. I do not think every game should spell out everything, but this is where we find ourselves on a tightrope of sorts, as most acts of design tend to be: how much is too much? Well, in my personal opinion, the line is crossed the moment the majority of players start ruining their own experience. I remember reading once that, given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of their own experience. I don't remember who said it, but I'm pretty sure it was a World of Warcraft developer. I think this quote misses something important: players are generally inclined to go after what feels fun, but what feels immediately "correct" is very easy to mistake as what will ultimately be "fun". KH2's mistake is that, in its lack of information, the things that feel the most "correct" are nowhere near the most "fun"— Hell, they're not even the most optimal.
Nothing in KH2, in my eyes, embodies this more than fucking Revenge Value.

So, what is "Revenge Value"? Well, KH2's combat is combo-based. You hit an enemy, the enemy is briefly stunned, and you can continue your followup attacks without interruption. The key question in any combo-based system is simple: how do you keep the player from just juggling the enemy with punches, kicks, and slashes for the next twenty years? Fighting games have their own methods of dealing with this; it can be as subtle as something like Pushback (in which the longer a combo goes, the more each hit pushes to separate the two players from eachother, until eventually the attacking player is simply too far away to follow up further before their victim can recover) to something as unrepentantly blunt and unsubtle as Mortal Kombat 4's MAXIMUM DAMAGE, in which doing too much damage has the game scream and forcibly separate attacker and defender. KH2, as it turns out, is actually a bit closer to Mortal Kombat's method, but with an extra layer of absolutely bizarre obfuscation. The quick rundown is this:
Every enemy has a "Revenge Threshold" and "Revenge Value". The "Revenge Value" starts at 0 , but every enemy's "Revenge Threshold" is different. In a sensible game, this system might actually be reasonably figured out from trial and error alone; if we assume each attack adds +1 to the "Revenge Value" of a given enemy, then every enemy would break out of combos at a fairly consistent time every attempt; you'd get a reasonable feel for how many hits you could get in before an enemy beats the shit out of you, even if the first few times would certainly give you trouble.
Kingdom Hearts is rarely sensible.
See, every single goddamn attack adds a different number to the Revenge Value. Some add fractions. Some don't add any. Some add them in parts, meaning the enemy may not have their Revenge Attack triggered if you stop your combo early to avoid it. Don't get me wrong; once you know this system exists, it's still entirely reasonable to Trial and Error this shit out, but if you don't? Committing to long combos feels like fucking gambling, and even as someone who likes gambling, the house eventually wins in the end. I've gotten several different people to play KH2 blind, and as anecdotal as this may be, I don't think I've seen a single one of them naturally fall into a non-defensive playstyle; this includes a couple of "character action" fiends who've 100%ed every Hideki Kamiya game I could think of. I've shilled NEO: The World Ends With You on this site before and I'll probably do it again, but NEO elegantly solves this issue by just having yellow and red flashes of light when the Revenge Value is nearing/at its limit.

As per usual, I don't really have an ending to this post. It's more just a long-winded rant, something to entertain people with some musings and/or weird trivia. If anyone reading this is debating on taking up the Kingdom Hearts series, don't let this article dissuade you; I do still love these games, especially Kingdom Hearts 2. If anything, you'll probably enjoy KH2 a bit more having known about this dumb shit in advance. I guess if there's anything akin to a "final thought" to end this on, it's that if you're an aspiring gamedev trying to figure out why your players are all playing like morons, it might be a problem with the converyance of information more than the balance of raw mechanics. Like, you know the pistol in Half Life 2 everyone jokes about being shit because it sounds like throwing a rock at the wall? Try using it sometime with the sound turned off. That thing's a workhorse, but it feels like it's way worse than it is just because the sound is underwhelming. Even something as small as that can completely change the way someone approaches a game.

Also, difficulty settings are bullshit. Don't be a coward, just have no setting at all. Me and every other choice-poisoned idiot who can't figure out which difficulty is the "intended" one will thank you.