Back in the Saddle: Two more hours of KH2

So I was finally able to pull myself away from Oblivion for a bit to get back into some Kingdom Hearts 2. As it seems, I put it aside about an hour before stuff actually happens -- meaning, of course, that I probably shouldn't have put it down in the first place, but I give myself a free pass on this one since I'd just gone through 10 hours of in-game filler. That much filler pretty much demands a break from the game for awhile, if not permanently.

A couple of notes and adjustments from the "revelations" of the last few hours of the game:

• This game looks like it should be about half of its (expected) length. The first pass through all of the worlds was ultimately pointless and by and large uninspired, with the added bonus of doing nothing purposeful in advancing the plot. It would have been much more entertaining had they just gotten to the point; I am now revisiting each world and doing what I should have been initially: chasing the Organization. It's like the writers went on vacation for a few months, and the developers figured it'd be better to just throw some content in there to make good use of their time while waiting for the writers to come back. Hopefully the writers didn't contract some horrible diseases on their vacation, so the game will finish strong.
  
• I find it interesting how they're drawing out the activities on the Little Mermaid world by imposing random restrictions on getting to the next song. I suppose they thought to treat it as a reward for progressing through the game -- like they did with the Hundred Acre Wood -- but the irony is that the "reward" that you reap here is playing through a horrendous rhythm game. Actually, calling it a rhythm game does rhythm games a great injustice; pressing buttons with "excellent" timing has little to no relationship with the music.
• The Tron world was far too short (at least in the first pass... I'm guessing I'll be back later) but they really did a great job capturing it visually, especially Sark and the MCP. So good, in fact, that I ended up watching Tron after putting the game down for the night.
• I really enjoy seeing the reimagining of some of the early Final Fantasy characters smattered throughout this game. Setzer was rather blah but I think that was because the artist for KH had nothing to do with FF1-6 -- he took over character design duties for 7-9 -- so there was less of a connection there. What I'd like to think I'm seeing here is how the artist would have liked to model his characters back when the technology couldn't accomplish it. Despite my distaste for all things FF7-Fanboy, I'm starting to think I'd like to see a remake of that game just from a visual standpoint.