While I can concede that Maleficent's revival is still out for debate, it just seemed odd to me to have her come back into the picture fairly early in the plot and then proceed to just sit in the background, only occasionally jumping into the fray. It just bothers me from a literary standpoint to introduce someone who is suppose to be a major player in a story and then proceed to ignore them. I would have been fine with her resurrection had it happened towards the end of the game as opposed to the beginning and making me think she's eventually going to blindside my party at every new cutscene.

As for the Org members, I have to disagree. Though I love 358/2, I feel this game is mostly a title made for the Org XIII/Roxas fans and at the same time, it was created to fix KH2's mistake of under-utilizing the group. There really is no excuse for the members of the group to be so poorly used in KH2's plot even if they knew they were going to make a game about them, its still not justifiable in my book to do stuff like that. While the characters are more interesting now that they've been fleshed out a bit more, it still makes going through KH2 annoying cause they lack the depth given to them in the other titles, instead their charm is reliant on the player having to bring into the game all the elements about them expressed in other titles.

This would have worked if 358/2 and BBS came out before KH2 but it was the other way around, so players got to experience poorly used villains for an entire game and wait 3-4 years to finally get the games that flesh them out a bit just so we can go back and finally be able to enjoy the sequel again.

I feel my problem here is that KH2 is unbalances from a story standpoint compared to the rest of the games in the series. KH1 is pretty much self-contained despite its cliffhanger ending but so are 358/2, CoM, and apparently BBS. These games are all pretty self contained sequels, prequels and spin-offs, its KH2 that actually needs all these titles to be truly enjoyable. I feel like KH2 is a bare bones title that is over reliant on all the spin-offs and prequels in order to fully enjoy the game. Like a badly managed game with DLC that is more impressive than the core title you bought. To the point where I sometimes feel the team deliberately removes content for the sake of using them to make more titles. KH just feels like a giant marketing scheme sometimes (well it is by nature of its very premise) but one where I am going to be forced to shell out more and more money to get to an ending that I can't even fathom could exist.