Why I didn’t like Kingdom Hearts 2 reason #2: The Villains
Next, in no particular order, I’ll bitch about the bad guys. It’s bad enough that the bad guys were nobody in particular (no subtle metapun intended, I promise), but it’s even worse that we don’t have any reason in particular to be fighting them. It turns out that the Big Bad Plan the Big Bad Villains are pursuing is… they want a place to live where they won’t be persecuted and treated like second-class citizens by everybody around them. Uh, yeah, damn them to hell for their sinister ambitions.
See, the bad guys are The Nobodies, who are people with no heart. In this way they differ from The Heartless (the bad guys from the first Kingdom Hearts) in that the Heartless evidently do have hearts. Never mind that it makes no fucking sense at all that the Heartless have goddamn hearts and you’ll pretty much spot right off that the new villains are exactly identical to the old villains, whereas the old villains get promoted to "kinda-sorta villains" since now they do have hearts.
But wait, it gets dumber. There’s a group called Organisation XIII that’s basically the brains behind the evil plot to get the nobodies a home – as the name implies, there are thirteen of them, and they’re the Big Bad Villains that Sora needs to fight on his way though the game. The thing is, seven of them start play dead. Now that’s as maybe, you say; who really cares? It’s just damn odd how much attention the game pays to this storyline involving some weird rebellion in the past that resulted in half of the group getting killed off when it has no bearing whatsoever on the game – it’s almost like the designers were more interested in telling this weird story they made up about office politics among people with no hearts in a strange universe of Disney characters than they were in making a coherent game. Nobody cares about Organisation XIII because we never have a reason to care – they’re just pop-up bosses standing between us and the excuse they came up with for recycling the boss from the original Kingdom Hearts even though he damn well got melted.
