The way this thread still goes on and people still twist actual canon stuff to favour their favorites is still so funny to me.
Canonically, Sora is the strongest character if we go by feats. This is not arguable, it's literally there. Wheter his power is his own or from his friends doesn't matter because Kingdom Hearts, as a whole, changes it's own canon constantly for it's own purposes.
Xehanort Seeker of Darkness was a end-of-the-world treat during KH1 and still managed to be powerful during his later fights inside Riku's heart, but he still managed to be caught off-guard by a bunch of kids with no special powers whatsoever in 3. He wasn't defeated by them and chose to let them go, obviously, but just being ABLE to be caught offguard is ridiculous.
Sora constantly loses and regains his power in literally every new game just because the plot says so, but Riku can keep building his arsenal (even though 3D Riku should canonically be marginally stronger than Sora, they end up playing pretty much the same?). Even Donald and Goofy say they lost a majority of their power in the Gummi-Instagram-Thingy loading screens in KH3 which makes no sense at all since they didn't do anything at all between 2 and 3 besides watching Data-Sora do his thing through a computer in Coded.
KH3 is CONSTANTLY showing characters at different power levels throughout the game. The Guardians of Light are a bunch of weaklings throughout the cutscenes of the Keyblade Graveyard, all being saved by Sora, but then in Re:Mind they are all quite strong on their own.
One example is how sometimes people say gameplay =/= actual power level in cutscenes (even though in San Fransokyo Sora literally showcases every single thing we can do gameplay wise and even more in one of the cutscenes, and the Lingering Will does even more dumb things in Re:Mind than what he does in his boss fight).
Lea/Axel and Kairi are played as weaker than the others when Axel should canonically be one of the strongest fighters since he was the Assassin of the Organization, eliminating other members on his own (AND putting Xion down, and probably could take down non-dual-wield Roxas too) and we know he can still fight with his Chakrams if wanted, the Keyblade should only have powered him up, but then the Guardians vs Xehanort fight in Re:Mind puts all of them in pretty much the same power level ignoring literally everything else.
I'm not posting this to further the discussion (nor do I intend to take part in it again, really), it's just amusing to me how there's this need to rank characters in a franchise that doesn't give a crap to consistency. And how people will take certain things as canon but will argue the authenticity of other scenes because "it doesn't seem right/fair" or "it was protagonism taking place, not a fair fight" (aka literally everything that revolves around Sora, really).
When it comes down to what power scaling means in Kingdom Hearts the answer will always be "whatever Nomura wants to present for the current plot point". wheter it be Sora loosing his powers for the 4th time or Kairi suddenly going head-to-toe with Chi-Blade-Powered Master Xehanort.
But ehh, I get excited over other aspects of the franchise so I suppose getting amused over people getting so intensive about something I see as trivial or irrelevant is pretty redundant.
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