After Organization XIII presented me with the most astoundingly ineffectual villains I've ever seen in any game EVER, no, I'm not excited about the new KH games. Think about it. A year and a half prior to KH2 Sora and Riku both killed half their membership--and didn't even give them the courtesy of REMEMBERING killing them. But they STILL keep going, "don't you know who I am? I'M with Organization XIII!" as if it actually MEANS something after that. What's worse, they didn't even bother recruiting new members to fill in the blank spots in all that time. Everything indicates to me that they're INTENSELY stupid. I mean, after a year or so of having no heroes around to screw with their plans... whatever they were... you'd think they'd have taken over the world--
<M. Bison> Of COURSE!
-- by the time KH2 rolled around. But by the time Sora wakes up, it's like nothing happened at all. They may as well have been spending that time preparing their hair gel. If the events of the DS game amount to exactly nothing I'm not all that inclined to play it. As for the PSP game, after the dark and brooding trailer for KH2 turned out to be a pile of flanderized nonsense I don't expect that game to turn out any better. KH2 LITERALLY convinced me that Square has become incapable of decent writing.
If you really need more evidence that Square's imagination here is on the decline, let's compare KH1 to KH2 for a second.
KH1: Maleficent turns two best friends violently against one another and Ansem damns one of their immortal souls to an existence of taint and corruption as his slave. Mickey Mouse ends up sealed on the other side of the gateway to Hell with said best friend while Sora and his girlfriend are torn apart by the barriers between worlds mending themselves around them.
KH2: Organization XIII harasses the Beast and kidnaps said girlfriend in order to force Sora to kill Heartless that he would've been killing anyway. Maleficent comes back from the dead for no reason and puts on her best Rita Repulsa act and does nothing. Pete bumbles. That's about it.
KH1: The most intimidating normal enemy is a huge, muscular black demon with a heart-shaped hole in its chest, black wings, a huge sword, and that has the power to become invisible and strike from all sides.
KH2: The most intimidating normal enemy is a zany-looking cartoon hot rod that gets really mad, honks, and charges at you.
KH1: A host of villains terrorizes all worlds in an organized coalition in an effort to control the Heartless. The game draws from the darker side of Disney's classic films--which to be fair had some pretty traumatizing and dark stuff--in order to present a surprisingly compelling story.
KH2: The Heartless... ... attack. There is no coalition to speak of. Pete attempts to make deals with other villains but ultimately is too intimidated by Hades to actually do anything useful.
I think I've let my unstructured ranting get the better of me long enough...
If this is the kind of pattern we can expect KH to develop on, I'm NOT playing any more of these games and Square had better pray that FFXIII isn't an unplayable mess of a game.
