Who are these kids living on this lonely island? How do they live, where do they get their clothes? Why is Sora almost not surprised when he gets a keyblade? Why do they hardly explain what is going on at the end with the door, how did Sora suddenly win just because he decided the door was made of light and just what is "Kingdom Hearts".
What frustrates me when people say KH became a mess is that they almost never admit that even the first game was pretty incoherent and its premise was not very clear from the get-go.
Why do you even need any of these setting details? I played this as a teen and even then I could easily take context clues that this was a smaller island the kids came to hang out on away from their parents. Where do they get their clothes? Are you serious right now? Sora not being surprised is your (wrong) viewpoint of that scene and no Sora didn't win because he decided it was light, it was light all along. Even if it was supposed to be that way I don't see a problem, the main character's struggles being that he has to end up with that positive viewpoint despite all the terrible things that have happened to him and the villain trying to cast doubt on that with his cynical viewpoint.
It has that Disney magic because these things are left unexplained, just like in those Disney movies they're unimportant to the tale being told. Is The Lion King ruined for you because it's not explained why all the animals worship the thing that's going to eat them and somehow Simba is a fully healthy adult lion living off a diet of bugs?
They're my gateway into the game's world. "Who are these kids on this weird island" is not a small nitpick. It's basic world building that falls flat but you just have to go with it and watch completely random stuff happen until you get to the part where you have to traverse to disney worlds. Nomura stories always seem to involve characters doing certain things for the imagery of it but with zero practical dimension. The island is just there so Sora, Riku and Kairi can hang out by the palm trees so it looks good but I can't ground myself in this fiction, I just can't and it deflates the revelation of being introduced to the keyblade and the light vs dark stuff.
I think you're failing at being able to relate to basic human desires, like being stuck on a chain of islands doing the same thing and wanting to build a boat to explore the world. That's really all we need to know about our main characters, they're friends who want more than this small island life.
Yes because that's where the issues begin. It's the small unexplainable things like these that ramp up as the storytelling progresses until you have hundreds of questions about everything because it was all vague and nonsensical to an extent right off the bat. The introduction is supposed to introduce you to the concepts and to provide proper exposition about what the setting is, who the main character is and what is going on in the larger picture which will affect them. To me KH1 fails at the premise, and when I got increasingly confused about what was even happening anymore during KH2 and other games I attribute it to the way it already had those warning signs from the moment it started.
So you think there being a bunch of exposition in a long intro about how the economy of Destiny Islands works would have made the game a lot better? I'll take giving us just enough info on our main characters for us to have some feelings for them before we got our call to adventure, while mundane stuff is left for us to infer as it should be.
This might be the most tone deaf take I've ever seen on a game/series and I've read the thread about how Ico is irrelevant thanks to Portal.
