Altaninort

What do you mean not care about their quality? All of their internally developed games are off high-quality

They have not been losing money since FF15 lol Their earnings and revenue are still far higher than that time period

Nomura didn't know he would be director but he was still working on the project before that was announced, still pepega but he was still on the project as producing Okay, you said last year so I was assuming 2022

Questionable business practices and companies go hand in hand lmao. 2022 also didn't have that much big-name flagship releases, with stuff like Crisis Core being at the end of the year. We've also moved past the games taking too long era of SE by a few years now, the mid 2010s was them getting shit together and restructuring after getting FF14 into shape

You do realise that Sakaguchi left after he financially damaged the company, which almost killed them? SE's big firetruck up since Sakaguchi leaving was FF14 1.0 in 2010, which had have happened even if Sakaguchi was still at the company And aside from small project blunders here and there, you can't say SE is in any sort of real decline quality wise considering since then FFXIV has boomed into being the biggest MMO on the market, FF7R did super well, CCFF7R did super well, KH continues to do super well, etc

The guy who left the company in 2003?

Kitase is still at the company? And has nothing to do with KH lmao I'm assuming you mean Shinji Hashimoto. But even he wasn't that involved with the mobile side of KH anyway Missing Link also did start recruitment for testing. The likely reason for the delay is First Soldier being cancelled, and resources and staff being redistributed

Ya

Having Shan Yu become the dragon heartless (and throw in a line about Xigbar turning his army into the heartless we fight) would have also better foreshadowed the reveal at HB2. Rather than Xaldin saying he wants to make Beast into a heartless and then nothing for... uh... 7 worlds I also think Port Royal should have been combined with the Grim Reaper being Barbossa's heartless

Or the worst aladdin movie stretched into two visits Or Mulan twice but the second time it's an inexplicable dragon Obviously not to say KH3 has absolutely godlike pacing or placement of events. But it has much stronger connective tissue throughout

There's no need to do the entire plot of the Lion King twice in one game

KH2 spends a loooong time not doing much until HB2. With Xaldin in Beast's Castle being the prime exception And even after HB2 it meanders until Twilight Town. Again the exception being Beast's Castle KH2's worlds would have much better stories if they were just combined

Every world has overarching relevance to something in the universe And marketing aside. Each world unveils a true Organization member And there's plot relevant cutscenes after basically every world

KH3 does a better job of dividing its plot throughout the game KH2 has the pacing of a heart attack It has spikes followed by stretches of nothing, and the revisits feel a tad insulting and really didn't need to happen

It's Sora's heart It even says its a newborn heart and stuff

but its more correctly a much more general thing

or castlevania on the nes

But Retro literally is just to denote the relative age of something The Gamers ™️ use the term to strictly refer to shit like super mario bros or sonic 1

KH1 is a retro game by the definition of the term retro game. The difference between retro games now and retro games 20 years ago. Is that what was retro 20 years ago wasn't well-preserved, physically or mentally, and there was a much bigger gap in aesthetics

The thing is is that Retro literally just denotes the age of something It's not a term with much nuance to it outside of the aging populace's inability to grasp the things we liked becoming as old as us

It's less weird to call Sonic 1 retro than it is to call like Sonic Heroes retro You can't apply a cut off like that to something that largely denotes age

We aren't as likely to consider KH1 a retro game because it doesn't really feel or look to different at a glance from stuff nowadays, and fandom and internet culture has helped those older games stay fresher in peoples minds

The problem is that retro is kind of a looser term now. You could point to say, Super Mario Bros and Mario Sunshine. SMB is old, it's pixel-y, it's simple. Super Mario Sunshine was fresh and new and 3D. There was a large different in the look and feel of those games. There's a massive leap in the core look and feel of those games. But for stuff like Kingdom Hearts there largely isn't

The problem is, is that those older games still dominate public conscious, and are what people think when you say retro. People aren't going to jump right to PS2 era games

If Mario and stuff was considered retro in the 2000s. Then KH1 and KH2 can be considered retro now