Extremely well-rounded game and easily the best in the series. The combat is deceivingly complex and ripe with possibilities that most people won't notice the first time they play, but its true nature slowly becomes apparent the longer you play with a complexity that continues to expand as your playtime increases and never seems to stop revealing new ways to expand the possibilities of combat.

Its mechanics are poorly explained by the game, but there's a genius level of game design lying underneath the surface with a combat system that feels incredibly complex and dynamic with an endless amount of improvement to be achieved, which is made all the more appealing by the variety and quality of enemy and boss designs.

Combat encounters are extremely varied and the hardest content in the game tests your knowledge of the game's mechanics and management of its various systems, which is especially true on Critical Mode - the maximum difficulty setting which not only makes enemies extremely powerful and forces you to play with a high level of awareness, but also tweaks the balance of your own power level by making you deal more damage to turn you into a glass cannon, rewarding confident play with satisfying results and keeping combat faced-paced, and giving you extra abilities from the start that unlock more possibilities and combat potential from the get-go. After playing this mode, it becomes clear this isn't intended to be a "hell mode" difficulty, but rather a mode created with a carefully curated gameplay balance to punish mistakes and force you to take a more thoughtful approach to combat, while giving you all the tools and power necessary to approach combat with a more confident playstyle to make for a perfectly-tuned balancing act of risk and reward - the game will punish you, but it's rarely unfair, and you can always learn to adapt and punish the game right back (and boy does it feel satisfying doing it). Critical Mode ultimately becomes the best way to play the game, period, and is a key aspect of the Final Mix version that transforms a decent action game into a masterwork of combat design across the game's abundance of carefully crafted encounters and gameplay tools that effectively grant inexperienced players a satisfying hack-n-slash game that they can learn to overcome through whatever tools strategies they feel personally drawn to, while having an astounding amount of depth in the amount of tools available at any given moment which grant an incredible amount of power to players with a deep understanding of all the options and how to incorporate them all into an optimized style of gameplay with a huge amount of freedom in the amount of decisions that can be made on-the-fly.

All of your resources are designed in such a way that feed into one another and reward complex desicion-making - for instance, if you conserve your magic without running out, you can use a limit to maximize the potential of your available MP. After you run out of magic from using the limit, you can enter a Drive Form which recovers all your magic and alters Sora's moveset with more complex and powerful ways of attacking. Before running out of magic, you can use another limit with your remaining MP and take advantage of the Drive Gauge gaining energy faster when you attack while MP is recharging. Drive forms not working out for you? Use the Drive Guage to summon Stitch to deflect attacks and periodically recharge your MP for free so you can control crowds with unrestricted uses of Magnet. Summon runs out? Back to a limit to recharge drive and get them back. All the systems feed into each other and allow the player to take agency in every decision, with so many options available for players to handle situations in whatever ways the see fit, with extremely well-constructed mechanics in place to reward those who know how to vary their gameplay and incorporate all these systems together in a way that becomes more optimal when utilizing as many systems as possible with an understanding of the situational decision-making required to maximize their potential.

Beyond all of the more complex reasons why combat is so well-crafted, it just feels incredibly satisfying and after hundreds of hours and years of playing, it still never grows old. There are so many attacks that are simply fun to use, with some of the most satisfying options becoming more apparent with more experience like those in the more powerful Drive Forms. Master Form enhances magic spells with animations that grant a high level of mobility in different ways for each spell and allows for magic to be chained into indefinitely long combos as long as you have MP, which turns the form into a dance of highly mobile and aggressive magic combos and crowd-controlling aerial attacks. Then there's Final Form, which yields unimpressive results when used haphazardly with sluggish movement on the ground and combos that lock you into long animations, and air combos that can trap you in vulnerable positions, but rewards gameplay knowledge and execution to those with a more technical understanding of its mechanics and stick by a few key ideas - 1) only attack and use magic in the air, always jump before attacking 2) cancel long aerial animations with magic 3) touch the ground to reset your combo and cancel magic animations 4) jump and continue attacking, rinse and repeat. The whole idea is to use Reflect magic to play reactively while playing aggressive and staying highly mobile, with Reflect being used to cancelling midair animations and allowing you fall to the ground, resetting your combo to allow for continued aggression. Final Form is the only way to use Reflect while moving and dancing around in the air (Wisdom lets you Reflect while moving but only on the ground can't be used aggressively like with Final) and the animation/float-cancelling properties of magic in Final Form mean the spell can be used reactively to fuel a state of constant aggression, rewarding knowledgeable players with the ability to react without slowing down or backing off while the damage from countering with Reflect devastates enemies. In the hands of an inexperienced player, Final Form is just a "cool" form with attacks lacking the utility found in Master Form's basic combos and endless magic combos, but for players interested in delving into the technical aspects of combat and optimizing their gameplay, Final Form provides a toolkit for skilled players to exploit their game knowledge and maximize their effectiveness.

There are countless ways I can praise the game and delve into specific aspects of gameplay like what I just wrote way too much about, but it'll become too exhaustive and I've already gone overboard. I haven't even mentioned the story and it's the main draw of the game for most people. There's nothing to say that hasn't been shown by the dedication and adoration of the game's fanbase. Can the story and pacing be a mess at times? Yeah, sure. Is the game a tonally inconsistent rollercoaster? Yeah, definitely. Is everyone who plays the game going to love the implementation of Disney IPs and decisions for how they're woven into the story? Certainly not. Is everyone going to see the value of gameplay that I personally see? No, and I'm aware that people who value the gameplay the same way I do are a niche portion of the fandom. Should any of those things prevent you from playing the game? Absolutely not. This game holds a sense of magic that no other game really captures - maybe KH1, but for slightly different reasons from this game. For all the problems and oddities it has, there's even more ways why it's considered such an exceptional game.

For those fortunate enough to find themselves enjoying the game, it's an experience that has an uncanny ability to charm the most unlikely of players. For those lucky enough to get sucked in, it's an experience that will worm its way into your heart and stick with you for a long time to come. For a special few, the game has a way of embedding itself into the core of your soul. And if you're like me, you'll find a masterpiece of a game, with combat that just hits different, and an offering of content that never stops being fun and you'll want to play over and over and over again.