Quickly, I will respond to
EricTheGamerman
and
Teeb147
on your responses when I get a fair chance to read them so I'm not ignoring any arguments.
Now with our favorite duck lesbian, I need to point out WHY Sora is so popular. They best way for me to explain it (as someone who loved KH up until I tried and failed twice to enjoy Dream Drop Distance and being incredibly disappointed with KH3) is that KH1 was a miracle game: it came out at a time when Disney-raised kids were still young and the PS2 was still hot stuff. It took Disney characters and it made them badasses fighting alongside you to defeat an unending dark force that constantly replenished it's forces. You traveled to Disney worlds you grew up on and it felt like really being there. Sora was bland as a character, but as a kid that allows you to
become the main character. Sora being bland makes him an self-insert, an Isekai if you will: it's not Sora fighting evil Heartless and beating up Disney villains with Donald as a ****ing wizard and Goofy an infallible Captain of the Guard...it's YOU doing all that, and it made you feel badass and cool at the same time as filling you with awe and wonder at your childhood coming to life in a way that was never done before. Sure, KH1 had it's problems, but arguably Sora being a bland character helped the game absorb kids. Chain of Memories kinda kept that magic a bit and let you play as Riku who EVERY kid who grew up with KH thought was cooler than Sora, and then KH2 lost a bit of that magic but held onto most of it and finished the series. It wasn't until Nomura starting doing this bull**** with putting a title on every ****ing console and changing world elements on a scale so much bigger than KH2 and retconning and rewriting and bringing characters back just because they are popular but doing nothing with them and making the story ungodly more convoluted is what the problem is.
But you know what really hurts KH more than anything else? With how Nomura changed the narrative to try and give us more interesting characters and to un-bland Sora, it was no longer the player traveling to worlds and interacting with them, it was Sora. I think that connection was lost, among many other things that were lost in an attempt to be a master storyteller. The last KH game I played out of desire rather than feeling it was required to 'finish and understand' the series was 358/2 Days, and despite (or maybe because of) how boring the gameplay was in the game, I became super emotionally connected to Roxas, Axel and Xion as characters. Not only was it the first and only KH game to have true multiplayer, but I legitimately cried twice at the end of the game. Happens when a bunch of friends are torn apart and the only option is for one of them to die at the hands of the other for the greater good of the multiverse after you have bonded with both characters. I'll go into more detail with you sometime about how hard that plot hit me, but my point is that after what was essentially the fifth game in the series, I stopped playing them. Later on I tried to play Dream Drop Distance, but in an effort to tell a story they made forced game mechanics that made me what to play other games. I caught up on Birth By Sleep only a couple months before KH3 just so I knew what was going on with three characters I didn't even know, and I wasn't super attached to the game by the end and only cared about one of the characters. The rest of the plot is overly convoluted and I couldn't be bothered to give a **** because that magic was gone, but KH3 was that glory game that would bring us all back and things would be great again...and it wasn't even close.
Anyway, some people have dedicated their life to the series at this point, and I think they are pretending that the magic of the first game is still there somewhere and are desperately searching for it in new releases, and while they other games keep feeling more and more deprived of that magic, the glory of who Sora was...which was essentially us being turned into a badass and put in worlds we loved in ways we only dreamed off...that is what still pushes the love for the series and the character.
I used to want Sora in Smash more than anything else for a period, but then I was reminded of SMRPG and KH has fallen very far from grace, so Geno is the only one I really care about.