It's not quite enough, but that thick layer of Disney is almost sufficient to make Kingdom Hearts seem good.
Kingdom Hearts is, like DOA, a mediocre game plastered with a shiny coat of paint - only in Kingdom Hearts' case, that paint consists of almost every Disney character you can imagine as well as a handful of Final Fantasy VII and VIII ones. They are present only to make you tolerate the gameplay - or perhaps their presence meant more hours shifted towards art design and less towards game mechanics. Then again, as you'll see throughout the experience, that may not be the case either.
Like almost every single JRPG in existence, the game ignores the concept of 'in medias res' and lets you become accustomed to the game's interface through a dream sequence and then an hour or two of plodding narrative and silly minigames on the island before the story actually, you know, starts. This would be less of a problem if anything done up to that point involved fun.
Beyond that point, at the introduction of Disney characters and worlds, the story becomes more interesting - if only because you'll want to see what movie Square has decided to draw upon next. Each world is essentially a condensed down version of that movie's actual story with a slight twist to fit in Kingdom Hearts' villains, the shadowy Heartless. It's not brilliant, but it's one of the game's stronger points and is part of the reason you'll want to keep playing.
Another reason is the cutscenes, which may be a pretty silly reason to want to keep playing a game. Nevertheless, all of characters (Disney and other) are rendered in 3D quite well, and about half of the time feature fully-animated faces. These are feature film quality and a joy to behold. However, due to time constraints or limited animators, faces will often only be displayed as a flat blurry texture with a flapping anime style jaw. On its own it just looks kind of bland, but seeing that sort of thing only one cut after the character had a completely animated face is jarring and ugly.
The final draw to the game is the music, which features either the original or redone versions of actual music from the appropriate movies (it's hard to tell). Unfortunately, the music loops are really short; depending on how much you like the song in question it may drive you slightly insane.
So what does the game try to do to make you not want to play it? A lot.
First off, the gameplay is kind of 'meh.' Movement of Sora is on the sloppy side, although it seems to tighten up a bit when you get into battle, where you can strafe around and lock onto enemies before whacking them with your, um, key sword. As you progress through the game you'll unlock new moves and spells and they certainly help the battles stay interesting enough. Outside of battle, the camera does its best to make jumping difficult - which is made even more frustrating due to the fact that Sora's jumps are really wonky, as if he jumps late and hangs in mid-air for a moment.
Your partners are inoffensive enough to only warrant a sentence or two - both Goofy and Donald run around randomly during battles and throw out spells and attacks. It's likely they won't kill anything, but they still act as a little buffer to distract a handful of enemies while you slaughter your way through their ranks. And once Donald gets a healing spell, he becomes much more useful. It won't mean you can ignore healing yourself, but he will toss it out occasionally.
The game's biggest flaw, of course, involves progression and level design. They are awful. Most of the levels are nothing more than a handful of sharp-edged rooms connected with doors. Strewn about are some random items that look like they came from a particular movie in order to make you think everything belongs. Most levels consist of fighting hordes of Heartless in rooms, grabbing a key or item that might as well be a key, and taking it back to unlock another room where you'll fight even more Heartless and get another key to unlock yet another room. Every level is the same.
Breaking up these levels is the method of travel Sora and his friends utilize - only transformed by Square into a brilliant little minigame often referred to as the Gummi Ship segments. You see, throughout your adventures you acquire Gummi Ship pieces and can slap them together in different configurations kind of like rudimentary Lego blocks. It alters your ships's visual appearance and apparently has some sort of effect on armor and weapon damage during these little flying segments. Good luck finding those differences - these segments are VILE. It's entirely possible that the Gummi Ship minigame respresents one of the most ill-conceived and executed space-style shooters in the past ten years. Everything is comprised of a handful of polygons and is coloured in a random preschool sort of way. Things fly at you, you fly through and around bizarrely shaped obstacles and shoot at things, but nothing really seems to happen. You do get new Gummi parts for killing some enemies, but given that aspect of the game is useless, it's a pretty shabby reward. Every trip to a new planet is accompanied by a Gummi Ship segment, and the only reprieve comes when your ship can instantly warp to planets you've already been to. Unfortunately, you still have to travel to new planets via Gummi Ship torture. Sorry.
There are little bonuses strewn about, hidden markers that grant items (usually Gummi Ship parts...), pages for Pooh's book so you can play with the animals of hundred acre wood, and a neat little character section where you can look at all of the 3D models used in the game (or refresh your memory on just who exactly that Disney character is). The boss battles are usually a lot of fun because they offer a challenge not present in most of the smaller encounters, and due to size and scope of the boss in question are often visually impressive. The final portion of the game offers a number of boss battles in a row and is a lot of fun. There are also a few secret bosses in the game to play after, and some of the enemies will ramp up in difficulty to grant you further experience. However, other than bragging rights there's really no reason to slog through to the point where you can defeat Sephiroth.
Kingdom Hearts is a hard game to recommend. It can be a lot of fun but it can also be frustrating. If you enjoy Disney and Final Fantasy there is a lot to like about the game, but you also have to prepared to put up with the half-hearted game Square has built to back it up. When playing a game becomes a chore but you keep at it because you can't wait to see what Disney character pops up next...well, you know there's a problem. Hopefully Kingdom Hearts 2 fixes that problem, because the mix of Disney and Square works pretty well otherwise. Just not enough to call Kingdom Hearts anything but an okay game.