Yet people say the story is the best aspect of the game...

I think the problem is... that like a lot of other okay/so-so RPGs it has the whole... damsel in distress story yet again, with of course the WHAT A TWEEST semi-ally into villain crap. I'm looking forward to seeing you react to stuff later in the game.

KH1 feels more like... it was a fun romp through Disney worlds for me. With some hackin and slashin. But now... I imagine it hasn't aged all that well. KH2 is much more story-based within itself, but I grew bored of it after the super long tutorial. I'm planning to actually finish both games when the HD version comes out. I'm not a huge KH fan, but they're okay games.

Well, we're planning on finishing the game today. Apparently this dungeon is super long, so I don't know exactly how long this'll take. We will be using a walkthrough every step of the way until we get to the end to try and save a little time and frustration of running around not knowing what to do.
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Half an hour later using a walkthrough we made it to Riku after a scene with Maleficent using all the princesses to "show her the keyhole". Donald and Goofy return to his side and Sora has this kind of self revelation that his heart is strong and all that stuff. So the keyblade comes back to him. So now you get to fight Riku for the first time. Wasn't as big of buildup to this fight as I thought it would be. The payoff wasn't that great either as Riku just silently runs away once you beat him. Some twenty minutes later, you catch a scene with Riku and some unknown cloaked figure telling Riku he needs to plunge deeper into darkness if he wants a stronger heart than Sora's. Which sounds, quite honestly, like the exact opposite thing he would need to (or even WANT) to do if you wanted a strong, pure heart. But for the sake of being a good-guy-turned-bad-guy, of course he does it. 45 minutes later, and we see Riku's new dark powers gave him an evil looking keyblade. Maleficent says she's going to come fight us herself and that Riku is to guard the princesses.

After beating her, Riku uses his dark keyblade to make her morph into a dragon and then he runs off. After she dies, Riku comes out and says how ironic it is that she died... which isn't ironic at all, actually. So we make it to that room with all the "princesses." I put that in quotes because I still refuse to call Alice a princess... because she isn't. But there, Riku is waiting. Turns out Ansem took over Riku's heart or something. We've heard very little of this guy. Apparently he's just some guy who did research on heartless or something and became consumed. That's about it. But he says that Kairi's heart is inside Sora. So he was going to take it and revive her... which I thought would be something Sora wanted. But regardless they fight.
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Okay, so since the Ansem fight, we've taken a very long break. Ansem is by far to hard to beat. We were level 43 when we started and the second he was on his last bar of health, he would relentlessly take us out. So we spent a few hours getting up to 47 and it's the exact same story. Since Rachael's been playing majority of the time, she's a lot better at combat than I am. I'm lucky to even get to his last bar. But both she and I are tired of grinding and don't feel like watching that unskippable cutscene anymore before the fight.

She herself admitted that the game hasn't aged well and said that it wasn't as good as what she remembered. And maybe that's the case with everyone else. I don't know how recently anyone's played it, but maybe try it again and see. So we are taking an extended break. Until Rachael decides to pick the game back up, we are kind of done. I asked when we'd pick this up again and she said "I don't know."

I can give my final thoughts for those who are interested in it, or I can wait till when/if we get back to it.