I felt Daisuke was better about holding onto themes in the story. He helped write KH1 but in CoM, I felt he did a wonderful job sticking to the theme of memories and for me, I feel CoM easily has some of the most touching and most intelligent writing in the series. It was oddly enough the darkest game in the series as we watched Sora slowly lose his memories and fall prey to Namine's powers. Even Riku's story wasn't too shabby when you learn to not laugh at the whole "darkness in my heart" spiel.Originally Posted by Mercen-X
Large worlds for exploration? Yes. I don't know about writing... somehow the stories seemed the same to me.
KHII starts off promising, I give Nojima credit that the prologue with Roxas continues the momentum from CoM but as soon as Sora hits the stage it falls apart. I felt his search for Riku was pretty half-hearted for most of the game. Axel and Kairi have really little reason to be in the plot and half the time I felt they were written into scenes cause Nojima remembered he had those characters.
Organization XIII had great potential as characters but instead get relegated to chatty villains with themes. Its like they became Mega Man bosses. They lack the overall chemistry of the ones we met in CoM. We were treated to an Organization with a dangerous goal that was hounded by in-fighting. Every member seemed to have their own reason for being there. The ones we meet in KH2... Not so much, just Lackey 1 and Lackey 2, oh and don't forget Lackey 3 he's my favorite cause he had a cool design and two lines instead of one! Even their back stories were squandered. We know about half the group through the Secret Ansem reports only. Beyond that, only Roxas and Xemnas got love.
There is Maleficent coming back and basically doing nothing in the game, Pete came off as more of an interesting villain than she did. I also felt the whole Ansem isn't Ansem but rather his apprentice was kind of a cop out plot twist. Perhaps Birth By Sleep may rectify this but the whole thing still seemed silly and plain stupid to me. It might make sense later but it still doesn't change my personal feeling that it was presented rather terribly in KH2. Even the "killing of Goofy" was more of a "wtf?!" moment than an actual surprise or shocking scene; especially how it plays out. I just felt that Nojima spent most of his time trying to shock and surprise the player and not about establishing characters or emotion. He hopes for the moment to bring emotions rather than build on the characters and trust the player to emphasize with them. He does this in most of the games he writes for.
I find the concept of people who are not suppose to exist and don't exist yet do to be fascinating. The secret ending and CoM promised me some good fun philosophical fun but KH2 took the kiddy route and chose to relegate it as an excuse for them being bad guys. The whole scenario regarding the Nobodies, even their designs seem to speak of deeper things but the game never really goes into it like I wanted them to. A few cryptic lines and Xemnas ranting didn't satisfy me cause I feel its something that could be explored. I was so miffed they chose to write them out of the story rather than just establish them as a another force in the series. I was even more angry by the idea they may have not explored them so they could make a spin-off title...Interesting point of view.
I love how your proof of 3D being better is from a Pre-rendered CGI cutscene (just a movie not in-game) scene from X-2 which hardly reflects what the actual 3-D looked like in the game and Pre-rendered CGI picture from KH2 that never really happens and once again, doesn't reflect the actual 3D style of the in-game graphics...
Definitely superior.
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