Re: Dream Drop Distance Wishes and Improvements [aka let's get KH less shit than it is]
Off the top of my head:
+ Make the higher difficulty levels actually more difficult. (Critical BBS is still easy as shit.)
I don't completely agree with you there on the difficulty for Critical Mode. I will say that killing the base Unversed was relatively easy. It was a challenge at first, but it was still pretty doable. Due to the ease of killing the Unversed, it downplayed the actual difficulty and that was the boss battles. While I could plough through the Unversed easy enough, I wiped
endlessly in boss fights until I made it standard practice to outlevel the world by eight-ten before engaging the final boss.
+ Level design that accentuates the vibrant and colorful Disney worlds rather than making them feel like a series of connected caves.
+ Make the world feel populated and lived in. (Doesn't need a ton of NPCs, but this can be accomplished in creative ways.) A HD console version of this game will feel even more barren if they don't follow through with this.
I agree with you here in that the worlds we've been to recently don't really feel as if there is anyone really there. KH1 had it work best with its worlds. In Deep Jungle there was Sabor, Tarzan, Jane, Clayton, and the gorillas. The Professor wasn't there, and neither was Tantor, but the world was colourful enough and felt like the jungle in the film, especially with Sabor being a nice multi-fight sub-boss. And those worlds that didn't require a repertoire of characters didn't have them (such as Hollow Bastion), but Traverse Town's 1st District (which you would expect to have a number of people walking around the town's 'safe zone') did.
+ Do not split up the story between more than one protagonist's scenario. BBS was a fractured mess when you play through it, only after going through the story as a whole does it have an impact. The relationship between Sora and Riku needs to blend into each other rather than have them trudge through the plot alone with few meaningful intersections.
I don't think that
not splitting up the story is a good idea if it needs to be split up. BBS worked in my mind because as you went through the story you saw it all from one character's perspective, and you heard tidbits about what the others were doing. Hearing something about what the others were doing without actually knowing was a lure to go into the other stories and see what Ventus or Aqua were up to and why they were acting the way that
they were, while knowing while the one you'd chosen was acting as he/she was. The whole point was to not understand everything until you'd seen it all from all three points of view, and even then there were still questions that still need answering.
If I can draw another parallel from another game, I would call up World of Warcraft and how you play between one of two Factions, Alliance and Horde, and of six playable races within each Faction. Each Faction has it's own questline and it's own story that weaves into the greater Warcraft universe. There's also a moment in Wrath of the Lich King expansion that I know that I
didn't get quite the emotional impact because I play Alliance so I never got that side of the story. Before Cataclysm, some of the starting quests for Forsaken Horde players involved a new plague Grand Apothecary Putress was developing, and afterwards it was never touched upon again. Then at Angrathar the Wrathgate, Putress shows up with catapults filled with this plague and betrays
EVERYONE and all people who rolled a Forsaken got this huge "Oh shit, we
did that!" moment.
You can't get a player reaction in some cases unless you
do split the story up. Sure, it would be segregating everyone who didn't play through that character's story until they go and do it, but it also gives them that carrot on a string. If someone played Ventus or Aqua first, wanting to know what happened to Eraqus would be a prime motivator in playing Terra's scenario, and for those who played Terra, wanting revenge on Xehanort for delivering the final blow to Eraqus and for influencing Terra to do something like that in the first place was a good hook to drive them on to endgame.
