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you call that nightmare fuel

@yamibakura - The worlds have more or less always been just sandboxes. Even in KH3, they dolled the worlds up more than ever before, but they're still empty outside of the storytelling bringing them to life. In Chain of Memories there's a gameplay meets storytelling tragedy to Sora having to go through worlds filled with illusions of the people he met in KH1 born of his own memories of them. Aerith's self awareness is essentially Sora's brain trying to warn him of how he's being manipulated, but Sora being Sora brashly chooses to keep on going in hopes of finding Riku and Mickey, and then of course to save Namine the more she messes with his memory. This gameplay meets storytelling tragedy continues in the Riku campaign Reverse/Rebirth in a different way; as we get Maleficent playing the same role as Aerith does in Sora's campaign, but in reverse, where Aerith is Sora's brain trying to warn him of how he's being manipulated and he chooses to ignore it, Maleficent is Riku using his own brain to berate himself through the avatar most familiar to him from his time under the influence of darkness. The voice that he keeps chatting with in Hollow Bastion is another example of this. It's left ambiguous who the voice belongs to, but it's easy enough to guess that it's Ansem SoD (namely while he was just a sentient heart inside the brown robe). Then Riku goes about mowing down the versions of the villains he allied with in his efforts to get Kairi her heart back in a very blatant reflection of his private self loathing for his prior actions, as he tries to reunite with Mickey, come to terms with the darkness that still lingers in him plus what to do with it hereafter, and find out who/what landed him in Castle Oblivion to begin with. @RugratsNappiesFanatic - The sandbox worlds of Recoded actually feature a lot of design depth that helps them feel less like a collection of corridors which is actually way better than what was done for Chain of Memories in the both the original and the remake. For starters KH1 is known for being one of if not the most platforming and puzzle heavy KH game and Recoded really doesn't shy away from following up on that. Chain of Memories very much does. Particularly true for the remake where not much of anything is going on in the rooms of each world unless those worlds are story related (it really shows in Reverse/Rebirth in particular since Riku never really took any time in KH1 to bond (for better or worse) with any of the villains he allied himself with in his efforts to get Kairi her heart back (outside of Maleficent and Ansem) thus he's literally going through the memory worlds mowing down these characters he wishes he never had anything to do with once he reaches their boss room). However Chain of Memories is the finest example of hardware and game type limitations come to life. It was something of a side scroller in the original version so no real need for platforming or puzzles (outside of customizing Sora's deck) was present nor needed. In the remake we still have a gameplay puzzle element at play in that we still get to customize Sora's deck, but now we have the bare bones minimum tools for platforming and puzzle solving in a springboard here and there to jump on and an object to slide or place into specific places.

you could say the same about recoded too. it features watered down versions of kh1 worlds, even more so than recom if I'm being really honest too. what do you think?

I saw it the other day! I honesty loved it. it was definitely good to have something original which is rare nowadays.

I can't believe nobody has commented it. Haven't you noticed that the whole part where Bugs and LeBron use Marvin Martian's ship to travel to different worlds based on the franchises of Warner Bros is incredibly similar to how Sora travels to different Disney Worlds with the Gummi Ship? In the Serververse we had worlds based on DC Comics, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and others. So, I don't see why Kingdom Hearts can't have worlds based on Marvel and Star Wars.