"Why does Re:Coded even exist?" people always ask. "Isn't it just a waste of time?"
Well you see, it's all secretly a test to see if you, the player, understand Sora well enough to look past how other characters talk about him and see him for who he truly is. It's a test to see if you can figure out where he (and the story by extension) are going from here.
And just as importantly, it's a test that expects you to fail at it.
All of the pieces are there, the characters are constantly telling you that both the real and digital Sora are the same, you watch them repeatedly give up on trying to figure out something complicated by saying it doesn't matter, because Sora will fix everything, and none of it is supposed to click at first.
Because, well, obviously Sora's the same as he always was! We're just replaying KH1 again with extra steps, and Sora's the protagonist, so obviously he's gonna be the one who fixes everything. Nothing weird about his friends having faith in him, right? Any differences in Sora's priorities or whatever is easily brushed off by the filler-esque plot setup. He's a digital copy who's only here to play the first game again, why should you expect deep character writing?
The game does everything it possibly can to prime you to not take it seriously. To not take Sora seriously. Mickey, Donald, and Goofy take everything at a very surface level, and because they never get any pushback on it, so does the player.
It's only in the final third (or maybe quarter) of the game that it asks you to think a little more critically about what Data Sora's going through, and by then it's arguably too late. Even if you're emotionally affected by his character arc, the game still feels like a side project. It doesn't feel very deep.
I don't think it's a coincidence that it's the game with the highest concentration of Disney character plot relevance. They are, by design, much simpler characters than the Final Fantasy or KH originals, and with them practically being your POV for the game, it sets you up to see Sora the same way they do.
Dream Drop Distance and Kingdom Hearts 3 are there to prove just how big of a mistake it is to see him that way.
On its own, Re:Coded is still a fun and fascinating game to look into on a deeper level. But despite feeling the most isolated of all the games, it's the one that arguably works the least well on its own; it's the setup to DDD's payoff. It's the game that tells you, "if you don't pay attention now, you're going to be blindsided later."
Donald and Goofy don't always pay attention. They're not the most perceptive of Sora's feelings, and Mickey doesn't know him well enough to be any different. Riku, too, has a built-in perception of Sora that puts him on a bit of a pedestal. And boy, were they in for a surprise.
Is there anybody who sees Sora beyond his surface level? Can you, player, see what's different about this Data Sora compared to the real thing? Can you predict that the real Sora might just fail where the fictionalized version of him succeeded? Because if not... they have a few games to show you why, exactly, you failed that test they gave you.
So go ahead, read the material again; can you see what you got wrong the first time?
(No one ever rereads the material. No one realized it was important.)
