Who would have thunk that THIS community would miss non-mobile side games??
in theory, side games rule! you get more story, more characters, and properties that might not be given a chance in a higher budget title. There are just some issues with how KH went about this, specifically looking at BBS and DDD.
- these titles were developed by a team with substandard experience in action games under a pretty grueling development period. The talent was not there and their skills had not coalesced to the point for BBS and DDD to be taken seriously as games meant to *continue* the KH franchise. Many at the time said that these games were just as good as KH1 and KH2, but from a fundamental mechanical level, this just wasn't the case.
- it kind of sucks to have the stakes and storyline laid out in prequels/midquels! A little bit is fine, like with Chain of Memories, but getting the entire premise and motivation of KH3 laid out beforehand led to KH3 feeling like an answer to a proposition rather than a fully fledged story in its own right.
Nowadays, however, this could be very, very different. KH3 and ReMind have a very acceptable foundation for combat, traversal, and style. Why throw the baby out with the bathwater?! 0.2 in and of itself is proof that the reuse and iteration of a solid-to-good gameplay style can be hugely malleable for telling different types of stories with a shorter development period. Instead of
introducing new storylines, we could have side games that
elaborate on characters and experiences that we're already quasi-aware of.
All of the existing Missing Link assets could have been used to say what Nomura wanted to say about that period in the series' timeline. We would have already played that game by now... Hell, we'd probably already be in the 'let's be honest, was Missing Link any good at all?!' level of stupid discourse by now... But because either Nomura or Square lack integrity and value algorithms over the stories they want to tell, we're still waiting for what is ultimately a small, only-tangentially important plot that Sora himself will likely never become aware of in canon. I question the importance of a story that is created to exist in an extremely temporary format.
damn, this shit got me yappin for real!!!