immortalfrieza

Vanitas has golden eyes because Vanitas started out as essentially a human shaped heartless. When Ven joined his heart with Sora Vanitas gained Sora's general form and since all heartless have golden eyes he kept the same eye color in the transition, just like how he has black hair.

Maybe that could work, but it would probably end up feeling like a giant space flea from nowhere.

Got anything more specific in mind?

I was interested in seeing what kinds of ideas the fans have come up with since Kingdom Hearts 3 was announced all those years ago (it's been a LOOOONG time hasn't it.) Feel free to put in anything, the story, the gameplay, worlds, just as long as it's a genuine idea and thus remotely plausible, even if it's been invalidated since. For instance, after Dream Drop Distance I wondered how exactly they could balance the fact that the story requires 7 keyblade wielders on the side of good, because if they just focus on Sora again Riku and the others are going to end up shafted and even if they were party members they'd just go back to being near useless like the party members generally are so I thought up this idea. I was thinking that the game could be split into segments following each as a party, Sora, Donald, and Goofy for one, Axel, Roxas, and Xion for another, and Riku, Kairi, and Mickey for another. The prologue would follow Sora, Donald, and Goofy, who bring back Roxas and Xion during it, then the player could choose between then 3 groups to run through their individual stories much like how Birth By Sleep worked, and they all meet up at the endgame. Each member of each group could be switched to as the main controlled character at any time out of combat, with the other 2 functioning as party members, (which would also mean they'd have to make Donald and Goofy useful for once) and once they all meet up at the end, the player could mix and match the 9 as they saw fit (Imagine kicking Xehanort's butt with DONALD.) Ideas like that.

Unless they're somehow translating, voicing, and porting it for international release at the same exact time they're developing it for Japan, I'd say they'll release the game in Japan first early to mid 2018, and then spend a few months translating it for a release in the US and such in the tail end of 2018 or early 2019.

It doesn't happen that often but it's really nice whenever they decide to have Disney worlds that don't run off of the movies they're based on so I'm really happy to see that. After all, anybody that actually has any real interest in going to any particular Disney based worlds probably knows the plot of the movies they're based on by heart already so it's much better to see something new.

You know, I would have said the same, if it weren't for Donald in that scene. I just cannot take any scene where Donald talks seriously, he really deflated the emotion of a scene that otherwise would have been perfect. Well, it's not a scene actually, but an opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k1g765zMIM An opening that just filled me with feels. I was actually getting REALLY tired of Simple and Clean because it was starting to feel really overused, but this opening revived my love for the song.

The Heartless we see in the Realm of Light are vastly weaker than they would otherwise be, they are effectively "screwed", just as beings born in the Realm of Light are when they enter the Realm of Darkness the Heartless are weakened simply by BEING there, this is why they tend to congregate in worlds where the Light is weaker and the Darkness is stronger, it's like a safe haven to them where they can't or won't exist elsewhere. This is the reason why the opening of the Hollow Bastion keyhole caused all the Heartless to increase in strength massively and why even the normally barely even worth bothering to kill Shadow Heartless were a threat to Aqua while she was in the Realm of Darkness. The reverse isn't really true for RoL beings in the Realm of Darkness because the Realm of Light is actively being corrupted by Xehanort and his cronies with Darkness while nobody is out there trying to corrupt the Realm of Darkness with Light and there's no group of mindless creatures from the Realm of Light trying to invade the Realm of Darkness either. In short, in the Realm of Darkness the Darkness holds all the cards while the same is not true of the Light in the Realm of Light. The differences between a Pureblood Heartless and a Emblem Heartless comes down to their origin. Pureblood Heartless are born when a person's heart is consumed by the Darkness within, or when someone forcibly extracts the Darkness out of their own or someone else's Heart, while Emblem Heartless are created artificially by trying to forcibly corrupt a Heart with Darkness. Pureblood Heartless don't leave behind Hearts because the Darkness has utterly consumed the Hearts at the moment of the Pureblood's creation (it's also possible they are simply formed out of large enough concentrations of the Darkness at times) while the Emblem Heartless do because the Hearts the Emblems are composed of were never completely consumed by the Darkness due to the process being an imperfect replication of how Hearts become Pureblood Heartless.

That's the thing, there's nothing tactical about the Chain Of Memories card system, not to mention how slow and boring it is, it's just a turned based RPG trying to make itself look like an Action RPG. The Kingdom Hearts series has always had very tactical combat, all but the easiest fights have always been about being able to predict an opponent's actions and dodge and block attacks as necessary looking for an opening. Attacking recklessly will nothing but getting you slaughtered especially on higher difficulties in all but Chain of Memories. However, with Chain of Memories there is no real tactics and the necessity of picking cards to make attacks slows everything down, it's just pack your deck with 9s and a few 0s for sleights and just attack blindly until you win, and it's basically the same with Riku except you can't build a deck there. Combined with the screen flash battlefields and the whole thing just makes fighting a boring chore, and that's not even getting into the gamebreakers that utterly crush any difficulty there possibly could be like the Jafar Ars Arcanum mix. The GBA's technical limitations are no excuse for it either, even if the GBA wasn't already capable of running a Kingdom Hearts RPG in it's entirety there was nothing stopping Square from making Chain of Memories for another more powerful system at the time. With other Kingdom Hearts games I fight everything I come across without getting bored no matter how strong I happen to be at the time, but with Chain of Memories I find myself actively avoiding fights just so I don't have to deal with them anymore by halfway through the game, especially since I can probably slaughter everything the game can throw at me by then anyway and thus don't NEED to fight anymore. The story is the only reason I even bother with the game in the first place, that is still good.

I wouldn't say I cried, but 358/2 Days was just one long session of punches to the feels. It's all the worse because canon dooms Xion, Roxas, and Axel all to horrible fates regardless of what the player does, which is why I have always hated prequels.

Take Birth By Sleep's entire combat system and make every other game use it, might as well throw in the Flowmotion from Dream Drop Distance while we're at it. Particularly, remove the card system from Chain of Memories already, it's just an exploitable mess that slows down battles significantly and was never a good idea in the first place. Speaking of Birth By Sleep, change the worlds. Either have all 3 protagonists go to largely only to different worlds or make it so each protagonist only goes to sections of the same worlds that the other 2 don't have access to. Going through the same areas in worlds with each protagonist except for maybe one or 2 that are locked out from the rest for no real reason is annoying and what makes going through what is otherwise an excellent storyline with each protagonist much more of a boring slog than it could have been. Dream Drop Distance, throw out the drop mechanic entirely, just let us stay with the protagonist we want to control for as long as we want to control them. That, and just go back to using leveling or BBS' command fusion mechanic to get abilities, having to play and fight with Dream Eaters for dozens of hours to get abilities and commands is extremely annoying especially since the Dream Eaters were basically useless in combat anyway. I love 358/2 Days the way it is, I just wish it didn't have such godawful graphics that make my eyes bleed looking at it, same with ReCoded. This is why I was so disappointed that the Remixes went the blatantly lazy route and just did the cutscenes for both games instead of just putting the actual game in like they should have.

Enough times that if you made a drinking game out of it you'd kill a humpback whale.

Yep. The Soul Eater was a Keyblade that Riku never realized was a Keyblade, a Keychain isn't necessary for something to be a Keyblade, just like the Keyblade of Heart didn't have one. Think of Soul Eater as Riku's equivalent of the Kingdom Key, it's Riku's infant or weakest form of Keyblade which manifested when Maleficent unleashed Riku's hidden powers and like all Keyblades it grew in power and changed to reflect the Heart of it's wielder. However, the Way to Dawn could still could take on it's previous form if it's wielder wished it just like how the player can change the protagonist's Keyblade back to it's base form whenever they want. While Riku struggled with the Darkness within him his Keyblade took the form of the Soul Eater to reflect the Darkness in him, and when Riku accepted the Darkness and strove to balance the Light and Darkness within him it became the Way to Dawn Keyblade. When precisely that change occurred and what prompted it isn't shown, especially if Riku decided to use the Soul Eater most of the time for whatever reasons he might have had.

Atlantica in Kingdom Hearts 2 of course. I think if there was a lot to do besides those musical minigames it would have been fine. I'm starting to get tired of them reusing worlds over and over again. Honestly? I don't have a problem with Kingdom Hearts reusing worlds, it makes sense that Sora and Co would go to the same worlds more than once or twice, I'm just sick of them reusing the same areas and characters all the time, with maybe one or 2 new areas added in at the most. If they're going to keep using say Wonderland let's just go to areas we've never been to exclusively and meet up with the Mad Hatter, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and any number of other characters that haven't been used a half dozen times already. Oh, and change the freaking music already, it would go a long way to making things fresher to get a new score.

I'd like to see a full FF world in a Kingdom Hearts game, not just the characters from it, FF6's World of Balance for instance, or Ivalice maybe. The most important thing whatever worlds they have in future games is the size of the world. Every world they've had in Kingdom Hearts is so small and congested, limited to a few screens at best when most if not all of them could be much larger. Open world is preferred but doubtful, really though just something with some space is really all that's needed. The big plains area in the Lion King world in Kingdom Hearts 2 for instance is what I'd say most of the screens should be like. Ooh! A Chrono Trigger world would be awesome, though how they'd stick time travel with it I have no idea.

All of this, and the fact is that Kingdom Hearts 2 "works" without Xion's existence only because Roxas' time in Organization 13 is barely even alluded to in the game, an entire year goes by with this one character doing nothing for all we see at the time. KH2 It doesn't work in any way whatsoever without Xion, they just skipped over addressing Roxas' history much at all and thus his significance to the plot and as a character is all but nil. Without 358/2 Days and Xion Roxas is just this really brief prologue character that's simply just "there" with no real personality and no role other than to get absorbed by Sora at the end of the prologue.

Kingdom Hearts 2 Sora definitely. Not only is KH2 Sora more mature and a badass character, KH1 Sora is just kinda... there. Aside from his "My Friends are my Power!" speech KH1 Sora basically doesn't have a personality, he's just a kid who runs around here and there getting jerked around by everybody and stands there just watching most scenes while rarely so much as commenting on what's going on.

Don't be. Just look at the recent vid they put out for it: If that doesn't make it worth the wait, I don't know what will.

I love Lightning so I have no problem with her incursion, so long as they are faithful to Lightning's original characterization. What I'd really just like to see is Final Fantasy centric worlds in general in the Kingdom Hearts series. Not worlds like Hollow Bastion/Radiant Garden or Traverse Town or anything which were just original worlds with Final Fantasy characters thrown in, but ones based on actual Final Fantasy games. God, please help us sinful children of Ivalice...

It was the combat system that drew me and kept me playing in KH1, it was just so smooth, dynamic, and strategic that I enjoyed simply running around killing things, a feeling that turned based and even other Action RPGs at the time just seemed to not be able to induce in me. However, it wasn't until I got to Hollow Bastion that the story itself really sucked me in. That's when things in the series got serious and the silly Disney elements started dropping off I think, and it's still my favorite part of the first game. Hollow Bastion is the point I knew I'd be hopelessly hooked on Kingdom Hearts for however many games it lasted, and I'm glad to say that with one exception (Chain of Memories) the series really hasn't had any real stinkers, and even Chain of Memories was only bad due to it's terrible combat system, not it's story.

I don't care much for Sora myself, since he is basically a Mary Sue to the entire Disney universe and all the problems that brings. Sora is every all loving hero cliche in the book, with no actual depth or development as a character, which is compounded by his ability to basically plow straight through every obstacle that at least would give the Disney heroes trouble with not much if any difficulty. Every other protagonist that Kingdom Hearts has had has actual dimensions and growth, with internal turmoil they have to try to resolve and sometimes fail, but not Sora. All of Sora's conflicts are ultimately external with nothing internal, even his Jerkass behavior in Chain of Memories is the result of Namine screwing with his head. Even taking the series as a whole from at the beginning of Kingdom Hearts 1 to Dream Drop Distance, the only thing that developed about Sora is his combat ability, not his personality. He goes from some kid from an island that play fights to someone that can wipe out world destroying Eldritch Abominations without breaking a sweat, but that doesn't make him a good character, just a typical protagonist. They are going to have to pretty drastically overhaul Sora's character in the next games to really bring it up to a reasonable quality.

Both happen for the same reason they always happen in games, because it makes less work for the developers. It's why you only see like a dozen NPCs milling about a supposedly thriving metropolis all the time, every NPC they have equals more time and work for the artists, animators, and writers have to put in, which is also why whenever you DO see large crowds in video games they are always just the same 4 or 5 characters if that done over and over again all using stock animations or worse a bunch of crappy 2D things that look like cardboard cutouts. It's the same rationale used for your next nitpick, they only had Jane, Tarzan, Clayton, and a handful of the Gorillas as important NPCs because the developers decided to just go with the "Clayton goes after the Gorillas" plot and her father wasn't needed for it.

That reminds me of another negative. Honestly? I feel like the Disney parts of the series have become largely irrelevant at this point and really just there as time fillers, the original and even the Final Fantasy related content being of much more significance to the actual plot, with most of the Disney worlds all but completely forgotten about plotwise after the first time they are visited. At least in KH1 we had a council of Disney villains that drove the overall plot for most of the game and a few other Disney characters like Beast and the Princesses of Heart actually involved in the overall plot, but now? Now the Disney stuff doesn't really even hold the Kingdom Hearts series together anymore, it seems like the Disney stuff is just "there" because it has to be. Even Donald and Goofy's character development and relevance to the plot (not that they had much) basically stopped after Kingdom Hearts 1, now they basically just make a comment every once in a while but you'd otherwise forget they are there, it's rare anymore that they ever actually DO anything. King Mickey is really the only Disney character that has any relevance to the plot anymore and it's not that much.

Basically useless party members, the entirety of the Card system in Chain of Memories, the fact that they didn't HD 358/2 Days and Re:Coded, the reuse of KH1 worlds over and over again, and the utterly ridiculous ability system for Dream Drop Distance, that's about all the issues I have with it.

I'd say 100% action, 100% RPG. The genre called RPG isn't so narrow as to not apply to Kingdom Hearts in it's entirety, it's more than simply character customization and class selection or anything like that. Those are only characteristics typical of RPGs, not something that determines whether a game is an RPG or not. Role playing is as much about playing a role as someone else as it is creating that person and playing it as you want, both are equally RPGs.