NEXAS - Sorry, missed your post there.
In regards to Sora’s character change. That’s a possibility, I’ll admit, I had not considered, although it still doesn’t sync with the change in Sora’s personality. The Sora of KH2 was greatly lacking in maturity. Basically, Sora went around annihilating the bad guys, simply because we are told they were bad. Now, in the first game, Sora figured alot of things out for himself, such as the true nature of Kingdom Hearts, showing a wisdom beyond his age. The first game featured a Sora, who truly had a “strong sense of justice”, as they say in the game manual. He thought about right and wrong, and we got to see him thinking about it, so we knew more about him, and how he thinks. Sora showed him himself to be very compassionate, and even sympathetic, towards people.
Now, in KH2, most of this is thrown out the window. He comes extremely arrogant, and even more hot tempered, and seems to lose his abiltity to think about things such as right and wrong. When Sora first, meets Pete, he(Sora) informs Pete that Maleficent is "toast. This seriously jarred me, but I could understand a young kid saying something like that about a defeated foe, especially if he is proud of it. I’d say this was the beginning though. Now, almost immediately after Sora defeats Demyx, he shouts, “Anyone from the Organization want to be next?” This is wear the change becomes too much. What have these people done to him? Nothing, really. They had a few heated words in Hollow Bastion/Radiant Garden, and they fought Demyx in the Underworld, but that’s it really. Now, I suppose you could say Sora was angry that his friends in Radiant Garden were currently being attacked, and he thought the Nobodies were behind it, but this is still too much, even Donald chastises him. I can’t see it as merely a slip of anger, because this sort of behavior really seems to show itself in Sora throughout the game, not just in this one instance. Only at the end of the game, do we slightly begin to see the “old” Sora, but by then it’s still not quite right, and it is far to late.
Now, the reason I have trouble accepting this is because, storywise, Sora should have no change from the end of Kingdom Hearts. It’s been a year for everyone else, but Sora has been asleep for that year, and he has no recollection of the events in CoM. So, Sora really shouldn’t mentally change, because to him, nothing has happened since the end of the first game. I also have problems with the idea of Roxas changing his personality, because it is never addressed in the game. If they wanted to go that way, Sora, Donald, of Goofy, should have noted odd changes in Sora’s personality, and wondered why he was acting differently, but instead the changes are accepted without question. Therefore, it makes it seem like Sora was just always this way, when he really wasn’t.
Yes, the did use a rescue idea in actually all three games, but in the numbered two, it was really more of Sora’s personal motivation, to save the world. I think IGN was suggesting a plot where the ultimate goal is a rescue, not to save the world, as it was in KH and KH2.
When I said, mindless, I was referring to the “minion” Heartless, like Shadows. While some people can retain their mind while being a Heartless, most don’t, and the vast majority of the Heartless are driven my instinct and their one goal.
Yeah, I really hope 358/2 Days answers those questions. My problem was that the Organization wasn’t really doing anything in the worlds themselves to cause any kind of threat. Pete and Maleficent were the ones messing up the world in the first half, and even in the second half, the Organization does very little. I guess they were just putting Heartless in the worlds, but that’s really not doing enough, as we’ve seen it before, many times. Plus, like you say it seemed like they were trying to fix a mistake. Is that really that bad? Sure, their methods may not be great, but I would expect Sora to show some kind of sympathy to them.