I think one additional purpose of Destiny Islands is Nostalgia. As a kid, I often imagined how it would be to run away from home with just a stick and some bread in a cloth tied to the stick and have some "adventures". I imagined the wildest things to be out there in the world back then and asked myself why I lived where I lived and how it would have been to live elsewhere. Even though I had left that age and dream behind me when I first played KH, I could really relate to Riku's questions what would be out there and his feelings of living in a small world. The thought that you could cross an ocean with just a small raft reminded me of my stick and cloth *grin*
As an island child myself who spent most of my teenage life at boarding school, I constantly questioned why my parents had chosen to settle in such a small and remote place (I can appreciate their decision these days, but 15 year old me was constantly frustrated that I had to spend most of my holidays away from my friends). Tapping into this impulse to experience/be part of a bigger world is undoubtedly at the heart of many uses of island settings in fiction. Whether it’s explicitly related to nostalgia in regards to Destiny Islands seems uncertain: bear in mind that when the original game released, the majority of people who played it would have been children, and by definition most children are unable to experience nostalgia.
While I do mind a lot of the Xehanort stuff, I actually found it pretty interesting that he was from DI. If I remember correctly, KH1 already hinted that someone who had once lived on the island found a way to escape to the outside world and YX bears some similarities in character to Riku, so that one was actually grounded and mentioned early and not made up for shock value and retconned later.
All valid points, though I’m pretty sure there was some retconning involved. I think Nomura simply left himself the opportunity to make this change through use of an ambiguous reference to someone once leaving the islands.
An island offers a reason to wanting to leave practically by default because you are so obviously limited in space. If you live in, say, a city you would theoretically have the opportunity to leave home every instant since you could just go out and buy a bus ticket - if you have no money, you can just go until you tire. Theoretically possible so not as good a reason to leave as living on an island. Many, many RPGs use the destruction of the hometown as a reason for the main hero to leave home - which was also the case in KH, but there was a reason before that, so the cliché didn't hit too hard. They would've left anyway (probably without success, but so what) and the destruction just sped up the process instead of making the process inevitable from the start.
Good observation. I particularly like how that trope is subverted in Final Fantasy IV, when
potential spoiler the player as Cecil is partly responsible for the destruction of the hometown of Rydia, one of your party members
end spoiler. As I note in my article, an outside force intruding on the island helps to catalyse the hero’s journey in both Link and Sora’s cases.
What always irrititated me about DI was that Riku and Sora gave of the impression that said island was their origin in KH1 which was later corrected in KH2 and BBS where we learned that Sora's unseen father just brought them out there to play and that they actually lived on a bigger island that had a school and buildings and stuff. So if there were at least two islands, there might have been more, maybe it would've closer to inspect those first and after that take on the world but they avoided having that argument by mentioning Kairi came from another world which is way more interesting for kids than the island next door. Concerning that, it still confuses me that Young Xehanort is also supposed to originate from DI - it would be quite interesting to know if Destiny Islands is the name of that particular island or a chain of islands. What do the other islands look like? Where do they all actually live? We will probably never know.
I always got the impression in KH1 - from the cutscene in which you hear Sora’s mum calling for him, and a few other things - that the island the kids play on was just one part of the larger islands. Admittedly it would have been better if you could actually see the other islands in game, but level-design in KH has always been a bit lazy in some regards. As lusca_bueno intimated, perhaps we’ll return to a more expansive form of Destiny Islands in a future game.
Yeah, there's actually also this point! Surely it was a role that other places like Twilight Town and Traverse Town filled later on, but it definitely will be remembered for this purpose on early entries.
Indeed. Again, this is further evidence to the argument that the roles Destiny Islands once filled have been warped and diluted, but still they were of great gameplay significance in the first game. For many fans of the series, Destiny Islands were the first proper subworld we ever moved around in as Sora, and the very first place we ever wielded the Keyblade! Besides, returning to the same starter world for successive games can be very tiresome (off the top of my head, numerous 2D
Sonic games are guilty of this).