1. Maybe I've just gotten too strong somehow, but battles are really getting repetitive. Early on they were almost fun, especially the boss battles if you were good at using reaction commands. But now every fight that isn't a boss is just a matter of hammering on the x button indiscriminately. Early on I at least had to partially pay attention to what I was doing. Now I don't think I'd even need to watch the screen. The last few boss battles have been poor, too (for reference, I just finished my first visit to the Pride Lands), and mostly consist of hammering x with the thrilling addition of sometimes using a Limit, thus hammering triangle and x for a while.

2. So many cutscenes. I've played Xenosaga, so I've seen worse, but they still seem to be worse than the original KH. What's especially annoying are the cutscenes that end and return you to your character so that you can walk two feet to a door and start the next cutscene. I wouldn't mind them so much if it weren't for the fact that..

3. The cutscenes suck. There are a few reasons for this.

a. An issue that became apparent in the first game is still around for the second -- they simply can't use all the high-animation models at once, so they have to pick and choose who will actually lip sync (or try, anyway) and who will stand around doing a canned animation loop while some mouth textures cycle through on their faces. It's distracting and it looks bad. Almost as if to compensate, the animation on the "good" models is overacted most of the time.

b. Re-enacting movies. I've seen the Lion King, thank you, I don't need to sit through it again. I especially don't need to sit through your embarassing condensed version. They try to shove 60 minutes of a movie into 5 minutes of cutscenes, sloppily jumping from key point to key point and stuffing in signature lines without any of the lead-up or proper delivery that made them signature to begin with. Timon and Pumbaa have to say hakuna matata somewhere, who cares if it makes sense. Oh, and be sure to take that Heat of the Night quote from the movie completely out of context too, that's good. Then, to take it to a whole new level of ridiculous, do scenes exactly like the movie except randomly throw Pete into the middle of them.

c. Replacement actors. What makes sitting through these re-enactments even more cringeworthy and even more like a bad middle school play production of a particular film is listening to some poor chump tasked with sounding like Jack Sparrow or Jeffrey Irons. The first KH was notable for how many of the characters were played by their "official" Disney voices (even if it was the official non-movie voice, like Dan Castellaneta doing Genie in the TV series). Here it seems like you run into as many mediocre sound-alikes as you do the real people.

d. Lack of plot development. The final nail in the coffin for these scenes is not only that they're boring, but they serve no purpose. The last several areas I've been to have consisted of Sora showing up to go "hey fellas what's happening in this world" and then leaving after repeating the Cliffs Notes version of that movie's script. Is Sora actually supposed to be doing something other than randomly poking his head into other people's homes? Yeah, Maleficent shows up every once in a while, but she accomplishes exactly Jack and Squat. Somehow in the last few hours, the game has become a season of Sailor Moon, where bad guys show up for two seconds, create a new monster, the heroes immediately defeat it, and the process starts over again in the next episode.

Obviously I've still got a ways to go, and things could pick up. But that still makes for one hell of a lull in the middle of the game. As it stands right now, the only thing the game has going for it is that it looks great, minus the animation problems, with certain areas actually being rather amazing from a technical standpoint. I presume the distant backgrounds are done with a skybox of some sort, but they're incredibly seamless.

I just wish there was something other than the background worth paying attention to.