Sora gets progressively more & more flanderized in each sequel, with less reasoning as to why. In KH1, he was a kid who's friends were torn away from him for various reasons, he had to team up with Donald & Goofy in order to try to make sense out of all of the madness because his world was swallowed into the darkness, but he tries to remain positive in the face of all of that. It's really a miracle he didn't end up turning Emo or something over the course of the first game.
Chain of Memories has him progressively become a jerk for little reason to Donald & Goofy. His critical thinking & reasoning skills are thrown out the door. Memories affect your emotions towards certain things at first glance, not turn you into such a dumbass jerk.
KH2, he's back to how he was in 1, thankfully, only a bit more happy-go-lucky than he was originally, but at least it's not much & he's mostly consistent in personality to the first game.
Dream Drop Distance feels like it was written by a writer of a generic Shonen manga or anime because Riku is the only main character you play as that you actually care about. Sora's Idiot Hero status is turned WAY up in this game & he's so generic in typical Shonen hero fashion that you end up kind of hating him by the end. At least Chain of Memories had the excuse, though bad, that Sora had a LOT of conflicting emotions due to his continual screwing of his memories by Namine, DDD doesn't even get that. It's as if the writers thought that because it was on a handheld played by children under 14, rather than a console, that they could just throw Sora's previous characterization in the wood chipper, which doesn't make any sense because the game bridges the story between 2 & 3 by setting up stuff to be continued there, so people older than that, especially with the 2.8 collection porting the game to the PS4, will feel something like this if they play the games for the plots. The game was supposed to show their mark of mastery stuff that would then get side-tracked by the Xehanort stuff, which you'd expect that Sora would be more consistent with his 2 personality, since that was the last game the real him appeared in before DDD, but no. I hope 3 keeps him consistent in his personality from 2 because you wouldn't believe how many times I said, "God damn it, Sora," during my playthrough of the game when he did or said something completely stupid.
Riku seems to be the only character the writers can consistent portray right, though even he suffered some discrepancies between Chain of Memories & 2, but not any I'd consider major. Sora and Riku seem to be something of a cross between the relationships & characters of Naruto & Sasuke from Naruto & Goku & Vegeta from Dragon Ball, only more friendly, since they share many personality traits with these characters. Sora in particular is similar to Goku in that he's been progressively flanderized as well in recent years. I just hope Namura got it together when they wrote Sora in 3, because his DDD portrayal was almost unbearable.
Note: I made this post before seeing an earlier post that says similar stuff.
