The first game was able to carry itself with a bouncy, wacky step, and watching it fall flat on its face every five seconds was kind of cute. This time, it’s serious fucking business. The game is hateful. It starts out with an extended montage of footage from the previous game, followed by a theme song sequence showing various scenes from the second game, the one you’re about to play. Then you spend six hours as a guy named Roxas, who’s obviously just a slightly more realistic-looking version of the actual hero, Sora. There’s some sort of time-shift thing going on. Producer Tetsuya Nomura probably thought much of this sequence is brilliant, or even literary: it starts with a group of kids eating ice cream and lamenting that summer is about to end. One of them dares to ask if childhood will last forever.