I mean it's pretty easy to come up with ideas when you don't have to grapple with the realities of game development such as budget, resources, time constraints, memory constraints, etc etc Like. there are a thousand reasons why something happens the way it does.
I understand and overall agree with that, that's why I wanted to say I don't just want to play the part of a lazy bum on the couch yelling at people that they could do better.
The problem is... when it comes down to KH III and some specific issues they also could've done better, and sometimes alternative solutions didn't require drastic changes in the course of events or budget increases.
I wouldn't generally say "you should've just done better" out of the blue to a professional, but I'll kinda think it when I see the Kairi treatment or the fact that you've boasted the 4 allies at the same time mechanic throughout the game ands then you don't use it to give me a fight with multiple Guardians of Light.
So it's not that as a general rule people in the fandom are just better at coming up with ideas, of course, but to some extent professionals should see some issues coming and deal with them.
And as others suspect, I too believe they kinda did see some issues coming but decided to play a "there wasn't enough time" card.
I mean, it's basically Nomura's new catchphrase in the interviews.
But when you cut a corner on a paper, you've just made two.
(I think. It was a moral lesson in an old American Dragon episode)
Sora: WE GOTTA FIND ROXAS
Also Sora: Let me spend 10 hours collecting crabs
I’m joking because I really did enjoy collecting the crabs lol but finding Roxas was a plot point for maybe an hour of the story and then it just disappears until Roxas appears at the end of the game and the TAV stuff really doesn’t come into play in any meaningful manner at all until the end. We get a hint every now and then by Sora mentioning needing to find Terra or like one off things like that...but the narrative they think they delivered and the narrative we actually got are not the same.
Yes, exactly. By all means, Roxas is indeed mentioned and kinda brought up over the course of the story (I really like the BH6 moment on the bridge), but it's really discontinuous. Sora has the very big and apt emotional moment about Roxas with Ansem and Xemnas, then it's back to Remy and cooking for levity, which is fine in a way, then it's onto another world like nothing happened. Terra's even worse.
It might've even been done in such a way because Nomura realized they would only appear in the final beats of the game, but... they believe they did a fine job in covering that, we kinda don't.
EDIT: I sound salty, and I probably am. I’m surrounded by drunk cops and have a 3am work shift on a forced work weekend so I’m living in salt. I have also spent two months both really happy about KH3 and also just truly and utterly disappointed to the point of depression so I have a lot of words.
I hear you. I feel bad that I always come off as extremely angry or salty in discussions, I have forcefully imposed on myself not to comment too much on KH III during the first days when I was trying to sort out all the feelings I had, but then everything just piles up and comes out all at once.
It's just that this game hits me on many levels and I have a lot to say so it's hard to keep the frustration at bay.
Now, back to your question: That requires pointing out that Radient Garden in general needed to be a major location in KH3 rather than a cutscene-only world. Radiant Garden is where the Organization began, it’s where a good number of the supporting cast of KH3 originate from, it is also known as the former capitol of light in the Realm of Light, and is where the Door to Darkness lied.
All of this in mind, these concepts should have come back into play in KH3 as a way to retrace Xehanort’s steps in order to try and understand his plan. The big thing KH3 was missing was having the heroes attempt to understand just what the hell was trying to do first hand rather than standing around listening to Yen Sid monologue about his plans. By having Yen Sid explain everything, it completely undermines the impact this should have on both the main cast and the player themself because there is no active attempt at seeking out answers over what the main antagonist is doing. Instead Sora and his friends go on a wild goose chase for absolutely no reason. Why not go to RG to see if there were answers about understanding the Power of Waking...y’know, in the world where Sora faced one of his most important battles when he first began his journey and committed his first act of self-sacrifice for a person he cares about? How about being a place where we could get even a HINT of Xehanort’s true plan to rid the worlds of all beings and of Darkness to make the worlds pure Light?
There is no attempt at having Lea confront his past in order to better guide him in his choices in the future. A place where he was changed into a Nobody and lost his best friend(s) (cuz X/Skuld(?) is a thing now) by Xehanort himself should have major importance to the story. A world where Kairi originated from should have had importance. The world where Mickey and Riku visit to seek out some answers to their own questions should have been given more screen time and have been playable.
And this is where the FF crew would come into play. They run Radiant Garden. They should be the ones delivering information to the main cast, or at least guiding them to where that information is. They should have been trying to confront the apprentices and come to a temporary truce in order to aid Sora and his friends. We should have gotten some more of that stupid “the girl†teasing as well to make it feel less out of the clear blue.
So, literally, they needed to play the same role they served in past numbered KH games because that was always the role that was established for them. The overal story is weaker by having Sora meander about in various Disney worlds and could have been tightened by giving him a hub he could return to whenever he hit a wall in looking for answers. This could have been the perfect place to tie up all of the little connections that were left hanging for no good reason.
I went into KH3 with maybe a handful of expectations, had those expectations met, and still came out underwhelmed on a load of things I didn’t even care about prior to playing the game, so I don’t know what the point of bringing people expectations up has to do with their overall experience with the game. People can go into something without any set expectations and come out of it feeling satisfied or unsatisfied.
I didn’t go into KH3 with the expectation the game would be difficult but I certainly came out wishing it had been.
I can't really act like I needed FF characters badly, not for me at least. But I also can't act like all of this isn't a solid argument and shows the uncertainty in how many new themes got handled in favor of old ones.
It seriously bummed me when I realized that Kairi never properly returned to RG, despite it being the only sensible thing to do for the saga finale.
This is why I said we perhaps needed one more game: Yasue and even Nomura really wanted to focus on Disney worlds and how could they play out on ps4/xbox, and I'm fine with it and giving original worlds the bench, but KH III was literally the worst title to do such a thing. If you made all the Disney worlds experimentation you wanted in another title and put Kairi in training zone then, KH III could've handled all the important bits and maybe even having Kairi coming back to her Grandma's house ("grave" might've been a tad too sad) or something.
"Retracing Xehanort's steps" could've been a much more fleshed out and immersive portion than just Riku and Mickey realizing Terra is being held captive (something fans knew since 2011 so it wasn't exactly a thrilling discovery either), and even Sora getting Master's Defender could've been better by having a lenghty Destiny Islands segment. I mean, it's the birthplace of Xehanort as well as Sora and Riku, played a part inKH1, BbS and 0.2 and whatever confused lore there is about the Kingdom Keys happened there as well. How fitting would've been to go full Half-blood Prince and just focusing on figuring out Xehanort.
And I'm certainly never gonna say that replacing Leon and the gang with lenghty Ienzo exposition was a good idea.
I'm sorry, but Ienzo is such a boring character, propelled in the fandom by the Blank Points and KH II FM moments that seemed to imply he was going to be such a pivotal character in the final clash (I SO knew that wasn't going to be a thing in the end).
No offense to Corazza, but hearing Ienzo talking on and on wasn't exactly what made me excited about KH III.
I mean, whatever problems I might've had with FF cameos in KH was rarely about Leon and the others, and more about the most "pointless" ones like Vivi. I didn't cry because street punk Seifer wasn't in KH III.
But the Restoration Commitee was definitely important to drive at least the "big games trilogy" home. They were the ones who first introduced the concepts of Ansem, Keyblade and Heartless in KH1. They're part of the family, I'll never deny that.
And if I did it in the past... I'll admit I was being too stubborn.
Also yes, as pointed out the reason why we didn't have all of this, the "replacement" provided by Disney worlds, it's so messy that it only adds on the frustration.
Building basically three quarters of the game over a power of waking never heard before DDD was a daring move by itself, but then it only gets worse.
When you sit and think for even a few seconds, you realize there is nothing that ties the power of waking to the Disney worlds. Nothing at all. It's a power Sora had but then lost, and it was a power gained by interacting with seven sleeping keyholes in the realm of dreams. No reason whatsoever to go to Disney worlds. This is why all the times the power od waking is brought the scene just never feels right.
"Sora, what about the power of waking, did you get it back yet?"
"No."
"Oh..."
And that's... it. No one says anything else, because there's nothing else to be said. What SDG are doing throughout the game is useless in terms of their long-term goal and they all ignore it because pointing that out loud would make it blatantly obvious how un-thought this whole plan was.
Of course you can say that going through the worlds had other purposes, like recovering Sora's power and keeping an eye on the Princesses, but that's going from the pan into the oven since those themes are also poorly handled. The Norts don't really do anything with the Princesses because they're waiting on the Guardians of Light. So you just have this stalemate where the villains can't really do any villainous act since they need to preserve both factions of good characters for their own goal. And this is why they're hardly anything more than an annoyance in Disney worlds.
And Sora's lost powers saga begins and ends with Olympus.
Lastly, surprising absolutely no one, the power was in us the entire time and we just needed to point the Keyblade in front of us and hope really hard, much like every other Keyblade technique. And it was such an obvious and inevitable outcome that if that was the road they chose then they should've made a believable and engaging story with double the effort to make it all worth it.
All of this is why whenever they say that there wasn't enough time to do this or that and that it was so because of Disney worlds salt is bound to come. Their whole premise for focusing on some stuff in spite of other things was weak from the storyboard meeting to its execution.
Spot on about this all "expectations" debate too. KH III managed to perform much better than expected in the areas I was most concerned about, and then failed and let me down where I didn't even think it was possible.
Okay, I'll admit Kairi is a case of "fool me twice, shame on me".
But, like... I didn't think they would do friggin' Riku like they did. Or having Terra never interact with either him or Xehanort. I never thought FF characters wouldn't be in the game at all.
Those were not my expectations, or rather my expectations in the sense that I was building up hype specifically for those things.
Of course if it let me down it means some expectations weren't met, but if believing Terra would at least confront his archnemesis that ruined his life or Riku, an already popular and well established character doing more was setting the bar too high, then... eh.