I wish the game was more story focused instead of you just fighting waves of boring heartless to Disney backdrops.
I feel the game would be a lot better if it was trying to tell a proper story for each world. You have huge maps, great production values, Disney characters/story, and Sora does nothing. You just fight the same old heartless over and over as the story goes on in the background and resolves itself before you know it. How long is a Disney movie? Like an hour and a half? You could tell the whole story, but with Sora and friends being involved, have battles etc, and probably still keep it at under 5 hours. It's not like the game is long, I finished it in about 25 hours, and there are only a handful of Disney worlds, so I feel like this would be a much better approach.
Maybe then I would actually feel something when Anna turns into an ice statue and subsequently is saved. Instead it just feels like Sora stumbled onto some scene he doesn't belong in, and doesn't know whether he should leave or say something.
What I want to say is that the Disney worlds are boring. What's the point in having the Disney properties if you aren't going to do anything with them?
I don't even know what the hell Sora is doing in any of the worlds. It's been forever since I played so maybe I am remembering wrong, but in KH1 Sora was travelling the worlds because he was trying to find his friends and also save the worlds from being destroyed, or something. So it made sense that he was there.
In KH3 it feels like he is just killing time as he waits for the other characters to move the overall story forward. In the beginning there is sort of a goal in that he needs to regain his powers so he goes to Olympus to ask Hercules for advice as he also dealt with something similar before. After that it's just... nothing.
Sora arrives on the frozen world, because why not, then he sees Elsa running away and she looks kind of sad so he chases after her. He has a brief exchange with her before she runs off. An Organization 13 member shows up and traps Sora in a labyrinth he has to fight his way out of, which has nothing to do with the Frozen property aside from being made out of ice I guess. After he gets out, his goal is to find and talk to Elsa. This is his goal the entire rest of the world. He never really does anything else. He climbs up to where Elsa is, and gets kicked off the mountain. And this happens again. Still determined to find Elsa, he continues his search, finally finding her, but at this point the story is already resolved. He doesn't talk to any of the characters, just fights a random boss, and then he is back in his ship.
Why on Earth was Sora here? The world didn't need his help, and he didn't have any objective to go there, and he didn't gain anything out of the journey. He just goes, falls off the mountain a couple times, then is back in his ship.
My problem is that all the worlds are like this (though not quite as bad). They just feel like time wasters to pad out the game before you get to the actual KH plot. With a story as convoluted and involving as many characters as KH, I wish they would have spent more of the game on the actual story, instead of trying to cram it all into the end.
So many of the boss fights were also just straight up not fun. Enemies with incredulous reach or who spam stun locking attacks (or both). At the same time though you have to actually go out of your way to die the game is so easy.
The cutscenes are terrible at times. In the beginning with Mickey and Riku in the world of darkness, Riku looks behind him to see the swarm of darkness coming to attack him, and he literally stands there for a solid several seconds until it finally attacks him. Like, just move out of the way. Or in the Toy Story world at the end, when all three of Donald Goofy and Sora are holding back the Organization 13 guy by simply pushing their weapons against his. He could just jump backwards and they would all probably fall on their faces. I wish they would've put more effort into the cutscenes. The disparity between everybody's combat abilities in game and in cutscenes is jarring at times.
The ending I didn't care for much either. It is the supposed end of this trilogy. Have Kairi and Sora finally be together at the end. Instead it ends the same as KH1. Sora seperated from Kairi (and his friends). Considering his goal from the first game was to find his friends I don't feel like this is any proper conclusion.
Game looks great though and the music is great too.