Kingdom Hearts has this problem of building up a ton of cool premises that could lead into really fascinating philosophical and sociological musings… and then dropping them like lead weights before they’ve really had time to develop. Worse, they often just refuse to capitalize on them.

This game is one of the first examples of that, particularly with Namine. As Sam noted in the episode, if you never saw or played Chain of Memories until this point, you’d have no real idea how tragic a backstory Namine has.

There’s also the moral and ethical discussions pertaining to rewriting and manipulating other people’s memories. This is the only game where this conversation could even possibly come up, because the whole concept gets swept under the rug in every future game.

I understand that this game only exists to setup Kingdom Hearts 2 and to explain why Sora is at level 1 at the start of it. In that sense, I shouldn’t be surprised we don’t indulge in this conversation. At the same time, this is a intriguing enough premise to spin that debate off from, that it’s immensely frustrating when the game chooses not to.