Wasted potential? Everything about Birth by Sleep screams wasted potential. I'd argue Kingdom Hearts 2 had a lot of wasted potential as well.
Those entries warned us of what to expect from Nomura's shoddy planning.
As much as I like the potential of the cast of BBS and its story premise I've to agree with that.
With BBS it is like they had i.e. two handful of interesting story threads available, but just like with the characterisation they went only one step down each story path before everything had to fall into place for Xehanort's plans to succeed, even if that meant to have all other characters including all three mains had to juggle the idiot ball.
I'm not even sure if it is Nomura himself who plans everything or if he just draws up the general framework of everything and then lets the scenario writers do their thing from just a rudimentary base. Since he's the only one to know all twists and situations though, this may leave the scenario writers with pretty little to actually work upon and then the end result is some sloppy mishmash.
That KH 2 had so much wasted potential can be easily seen by just how much more content the Final Mix version has and even that one scratches only the surface storywise. The vanilla KH 2 is almost an insult.
Even though 1 & CoM had their own flaws gameplay wise, Storywise they were far more solid.
Which is probably because especially KH 1 had not really that much of a elaborate story to begin with, not to mention that there was
no already established mythos at all. In this matter, KH 1 had it easier than all other entries in the series.
As for CoM, one can still argue that this title was the one that started the whole complexity due to the whole memory-mess, but if I recall correctly Watanabe was the sole writer for this one and it also wasn't rushed in any way, so that may have played a role.
Thanks for clearing that up. I didn't know about those other sources, and tbh I just read the wiki of re:Coded.
You wrote this much better than I did. I started this thread late at night after just finishing the game and I was frustrated with the confusing way they threw in all these plot devices at the end.
I hope that the time travel and other plot points will end up paying off well in KH3. Hopefully Nomura had really awesome ideas for KH3 but couldn't think of a way to make them happen without all this mess.
No issue.
I used to get somewhat annoyed at people who don't know these facts, but by now I've mostly changed stance because you cannot really expect fans, especially ones outside Japan, to actively seek out such material except if they're truly invested in the series' lore.
In the end, it is clearly the fault of the work to not make that information readily available.
Even the "Kingdom Hearts Series Memorial Ultimania", a work that summarizes the whole series up to KH III and even explicitly clears up that it was
really Master Xehanort's old, true body that was revived at the end of DDD, is a compilation that is only available in Japan.
Don't trust the wiki!
While there are some diligent users who try and stay true to established facts from the games and the interviews, more often than not there gets wrong information or just speculation into the articles.
Depending on which wiki you frequent (there are at least two as far as I remember), one of them even includes information from the novels as clear-cut fact when in reality the actual canonity of the events of the novels is unclear.
They're often cited as second-tier canon (after the games themselves and the interviews of Nomura) and events not contradicted by either of the first tier materials are seen as good to go, but there is no official statement about the status of the novels.
The Manga on the other hand is clearly stated to be non-canon/alternate universe.
That's probably because I also wrote that without much emotional investment. I'm with the KH series since 2006 and following it for this long has teached me how it works by now and while these obvious flaws the series as a whole has are undoubtly unpleasant, I do not really waste energy getting upset over them.
I would not place a bet about this since Nomura isn't really the best in letting dangling plot points pay off. If there are five plot points, you can expect Nomura to make two pay off well, one rather shoddy and the last two are either completely ignored, delegated to the in-game reports or cleared up in interviews (or a mix of those last three).
Heheh, the sad thing is that most of the things happening in DDD already had a premise in earlier parts of the series that could have been expanded upon rather than complicate the mess further. I fear more that instead of being unable to think about how making this all happen without what we may call "a mess", Nomura thought that the possible already existing paths were not "surprising and exciting" enough and therefore deliberately opted against using these concepts.
Nomura actually has an error in his priorities when he cares more about making the story "surprising" rather than making it coherent.
He once received advice from the original creator of Final Fantasy back in 2002 when the first KH was made,
Hironobu Sakaguchi, who he also considers to be his mentor, that he had to make the story of KH more complex in order to compete on the international market, but when we look at the series at a whole today it seems he took that advice a little too far.
Regardless, BBS may have begun 10 years ago but it doesn't mean it had to be so short. If anything, Aqua's story is proof they could have extended the narrative.
I'd argue that this has also to do with BBS being on a handheld console.
BBS was originally planned for the PS2 and according to Nomura an inofficial "KH 0", so I would not be surprised if the overall story of BBS as a whole got truncated in the process of bringing it over to the handheld console.
The main characters not really being fleshed out that much beyond the initial stages would also fit in well with such a scenario.
A council made up of 13 different versions of the same guy? It sounds awesome to me. If others don't like it, that's cool, but I do.
It is not the premise itself that is the problem, but the way how it is achieved and presented in-game that most people have a problem with.
Eh, that's kind of the case for most fiction if we're being honest. It's because side-characters are often less-developed and therefore have more potential. The missing pieces of their stories could contain anything and thus it's excited to see and know them. This is why new characters always seem better, because it is a chance to learn new things. But eventually they become known, and then people will be looking to the further under-developed and new characters. Give the BBS trio three games and I can guarantee you that people will start wishing that Newbie X got more screen time lol.
It's Mystery Box kind of stuff. The mystery will always be more exciting and satisfying than the answer. That applies to characters, too.
I can only sign that statement, lol. It's really true.
The BBS trio is a good example as most people label them as the least developed and "believeable" trio but that is a "no shit Sherlock"-case when one keeps in mind that the BBS Trio indeed had the least screentime out of all the main trios
and gets the short stick in terms of attention and characterization even in the one game that stars them so far.
Xion may be a textbook-example of a solo-spotlight-stealing squad, but even her trio with Axel and Roxas got more coverage than TAV did for themselves.
No self respecting person will want 3 games of Terra being the role model of why peer pressure is bad.
This statement just shows how narrow and partially
hollow the characterisation of the BBS trio (or at least Terra) is so far, as he wasn't allowed to play a role much beyond the one stated above so far.