You know KH1 and KH2 targeted the recent Disney properties when they came out too right? In every mainline KH game, the worlds are always roughly within the last decade of Disney movies.
KH1 had
Pinocchio (1940),
Alice in Wonderland (1951),
Peter Pan (1953) and
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) as proper worlds, as well as a healthy dose of extra representation from throughout the Disney canon in the form of summons (Bambi, Dumbo), the 101 Dalmations, and the Princesses of Heart, which helped lend to the sense of variety and the stylistic melting pot that KH ought to be. And while a film like
Nightmare Before Christmas might have been in closer temporal proximity to the release of KH1, it was nevertheless sourced from visually and tonally distinct material that further helped to diffuse the monotony of musical "Renaissance" films KH1 might have been expected to rely on due to ease of recognition. KH2 continued this trend with films like
Tron and the menagerie of classic sources for Timeless River. The reason people like when the series draws on film content from different time periods is because it helps to expand the look and tone of the games beyond one Disney era:
Toy Story might be two decades old (and, I know, Pixar), but there isn't a lot to differentiate it from modern Disney CGI flicks as far as its primary motifs are concerned (contrast that with how different it seemed to the films Disney was producing at the time...)-- the current Disney "Revival" or whatever feels much more prolonged than past eras because advancements in technology and a sort of nostalgic sterilization of the media landscape (partially constituted by Disney's domination of the entertainment industry) has prevented major and popularized shifts in the film making approach within the family/kid friendly genres of animation from occurring.
Yes, KH3 has Monstropolis, The Caribbean, and (I guess) Olympus to act as visual buffers for this game, but with TS,
Frozen,
Tangled, and
Big Hero 6 all being essentially cut from the same cloth and a lower overall world count to spread their uniformity around, and with character cameos like Remy and Ralph getting the bulk of the marketing attention, it's not hard to see why there's an impression the game is dealing in trendy, safe sameness to its own detriment.
That's not to say that older Disney films are inherently better. Many of them are as trite and humdrum as anything being made today (and worse than that, in terms of their reflections of cultural norms and attitudes). But for the purposes of KH as a franchise, it behooves the games in almost every way to eschew blockbuster standards and strain for that left-field feeling of uniqueness that gives the series its flavor, its real "oomph" factor: instead, KH3 seems to want to lean right into every of-the-moment cinematic trope and then some. That's why the world selection disappoints me.