Quote Originally Posted by Winter View Post
Maybe it doesn't excuse the lack of screen time, but it might explain.

Honestly, more characters in CoM would have been ridiculous. I can't imagine trying to cram more Organization characters in. And while they obviously didn't do the best job with KH2's story, it was only the 3rd game in the series, on the second where interaction with the worlds really mattered, it takes time to work out kinks. I think the games that have followed since have done a pretty good job of not repeating that mistake, but I could be wrong...I haven't played KH2 in years, and try to avoid fighting the rest of the family to play the household consoles, so I haven't gotten the PS3 remakes.

At the time, they'd also had some minor details of BBS in place as well, I think--wasn't 2's secret ending essentially a trailer for BBS? But while they may have established that he had contact with keyblade wielders in the past, they may not have established how much he had, or what kind of contact he'd had with them. It was barely hinted at again in Days with Roxas and Xigbar, but again, we have no idea just how far they had gotten with that background at that point in time. Just because you have base details fleshed out, doesn't mean you always have full details fleshed out...or Nomura could just like being that secretive--look at how long it took him to explain stuff from the beginning of the series, I mean what number in the series is 3D? Like 6 or 7? And it was only then that he got around to explaining certain stuff from KH1.

I think they did firmly establish what everyone was going to be like--their personalities were pretty clear from the start. They just waitied to pile on the final boss fights until the end, but that just seems to be an annoying KH tradition. XD

EDIT: And while they could have added more scenes to 2.5, Square isn't exactly known for making the best decisions, now are they?
KHII may have only been the second game where the Disney Worlds were important, but the only one before that was KHI, which did a great job of making each of them relevant to the storyline as a whole. Either the main antagonist of the world was working with Maleficent to take over all the worlds or the Heartless had changed what the conflict was, or a little bit of both. I would be able to stomach that mistake from KHII if it didn't feel like such a step backwards from the first game.

If they really needed BBS to come out before they could do anything interesting with the characters they created for KHII, then they have made a huge mistake. There was no need for them to establish the specifics of anything for that game, such as who Xigbar lost his eye against and the context of that fight, but they should have known that Xigbar lost his eye against a Keyblade wielder at some point in the past. And that would be all they needed to know to work with KHII. They wouldn't have even needed to reveal it to the player as long as they knew it; there aren't exactly a lot of situations where Sora and Xigbar are going to sit down and chat with one another, so it would make sense if that information never quiet made it to Sora.

The first time they put a lot of bosses near the end was in CoM, while KHI only had Chernabog as the world boss of The End of the World and Ansem as the actual final boss. With how different the battle system in CoM is from KHI and KHII they should have taken more cues from KHI. And as I said, if they really needed to have a bunch of bosses in The World that Never Was, then all they needed to do was have a member or two survive their initial encounter with Sora.

I don't know. KHII is one of those games that I just want to like because of how much I enjoy the rest of the series, but I keep noticing all the little flaws in it.