Game:

Kingdom Hearts II (2005)

Duration: 26:48

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Hollow Bastion is a little different this time around, rather than the dark castle from the first game we get a bit of a town to explore and a different castle at the center later. Here we meet up with Squall, Yuffie, Aerith and Cid who explain the sitch, and since Sora starts at square one he has to re-learn magic from scratch, not the first time he’s had to do it and I can tell you this won’t be the last.

Normally when the Drive gauge runs out after going into a Drive Form, you’d have to build the Drive gauge back up by dealing hits (you get more while your MP recharges) or using a Drive Recovery item since Drive Forms cost a certain amount of your gauge, Valor for instance costs 3 Drive Gauges, however your gauge gets fully restored after you leave the world if you left while still in a Drive Form. Useful for general use of Drive Forms, and good for farming purposes so that you’re not starving for Drive Recovery items early game, doing this essentially makes them near worthless unless you run out of gauge during a boss fight or something. The incentive to using each Drive Form, outside of having different movesets to try out, is that you can level up each individual Drive Form to obtain abilities associated with the form by fulfilling certain criteria, in the case of Valor Form it gains EXP simply by connecting hits in a combo, I’ll explain the others later.

Once you make it to the Bailey, you’re greeted by the Organization, and it’s up to you and Squall to defeat all the Nobodies that show up.

What I usually like to do after this is grind for Valor Form after the fact to get the first level of High Jump as soon as possible (which thankfully doesn’t take too long), and gain a level or two for Sora if I feel like sparing the time.

On a side note, you’ve probably noticed in the first few parts, but the cast for some of the Final Fantasy characters (and Ansem, say goodbye to Billy Zane) had indeed changed from the first game to this one (except Cid who gets a voice when he didn’t have one in the first game), some of the replacements vary from good to just okay, but one that stands out to me in particular is Mena Suvari as Aerith and not in a good way at all, she sounds like she’s hopped up on painkillers the whole time and it sounds awful, I’m sure she’s good in other stuff but I vastly preferred Mandy Moore’s take as Aerith. If you actually like Mena Suvari’s take on Aerith then more power to you.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Hollow Bastion Intro
1:42 - Awakening Puzzle Piece
2:00 - Nobodies Encounter: Samurai Introduction
3:49 - Meet the Hollow Bastion Restoration Committee
7:32 - Demonstrating Drive Form Exploit
8:01 - Collecting the Remaining Chests and Heading to the Bailey
9:31 - Bailey Encounter
12:40 - Hollow Bastion First Visit Ending
16:57 - Final Mix Exclusive Scene: Organization XIII Chatting
18:46 - Early Valor Form Grind
19:58 - Valor Form LV. 2
20:04 - Valor Form LV. 3
20:46 - Sora LV. 10
22:03 - Asteroid Sweep

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