Now first off I know this game isn't a Gamecube title. I don't have a Gameboy Advanced so I got the Gameboy Player which attaches to the Gamecube and lets you play GBA games. I pretty much bought the Gameboy Player just to play this game cause I'm a big Kingdom Hearts fan, so how's the game? Well overall it's looking good. First off the graphics are pretty good as a GBA title of course, but the nice thing is that they actually have some very nice 3D cutscenes in the game it's hard to believe that they're possible on something as small as the GBA. Now as for the audio there is now real voice-overs but there is sound bytes in there by Haley Joel Osment and Billy Zane which are nice to hear also you have some nice reworked music from the Kingdom Hearts world and it's great to hear that. Now on to the story, the game takes place right after the original Kingdom Hearts with Sora, Donald and Goofy looking for Riku and King Mickey however they run into a cloaked figure that leads them into Castle Oblivion where some questions are answered but in the end you come away from this game even more confused then when you started, but you can tell that characters and places from this game are going to lead into Kingdom Hearts 2 which is going to be released on the PS2. The nice thing however is that after you beat the game you unlock another story line where you play Riku and King Mickey in there own journey through Castle Oblivion after Sora and the others. It's a great addition to the game however you go to the same areas and fight the same bosses and really the game is a lot easier when playing as Riku, but still it's great to have that extra story in there. Now of course I have to talk about the gameplay, which is a card battle game. Now don't turn away just yet cause the game is still a lot of fun even witht he strange battle system. Now you enter battle with heartless and you can run and jump around the battle area as much as you want the thing is that all of your actions are controlled by cards. They contain attack cards, magic cards, item cards and others. You of course can costumize the deck as you want, but there are a few problems for one during battle your friends have been turned into cards and so your mostly fighting alone and really you just don't get to do all you want to with the card battle system. It's kind of annoying that you can only hit an enemy with your keyblade when you got the right card. A nice thing is that unlike the original Kingdom Hearts summons like Simba and Genie are actually helpful and you can also summon in Cloud to take down a couple of enemies so it's not all bad. Overall the game is good, but seriously the game would have been a lot better without the card battle system.
