I might've said this before, but I think that KH4 is the sole instance I've seen so far where a normally bright, cartoony series switching to a more grounded, realistic, and muted art style actually benefits the story being told and I kinda love it.
Quadratum is pitched to us as a world of fiction, as "unreality," and such a description might make you think of something fantastical, but. KH is already like that. It wouldn't really stand out as something totally foreign to everything we knew from KH's primary reality if it was all magical or even futuristic; it being Regular Tokyo was probably the most standout, off-putting decision they could have made.
And it immediately creates intrigue, too, because like. KH is fictional to us. But a world that looks and functions just like ours is fictional to the characters. That's a solid contrast! And it makes the overarching question of the whole series of "what makes something real" a lot more potent in my opinion.
It just kinda feels like it forces the player to be more involved in thinking about the question, too. like. Sora shows up in something so close to our reality that we can locate his exact apartment in Tokyo and everyone in the series calls it Unreality. It's so pointed and fascinating and I'm so curious where they'll go with it.
The art style isn't even Hyper Realism - Sora doesn't have the face model of a real person or anything, he's still visibly an anime character. But he's a much more realistic anime character than he's ever been, and this is where the style change goes from a quick way to create contrast to a genuinely inspired creative choice.
Rule #1 of main character design is to have a distinct silhouette, so that they can be not just easy to recognize, but easy to understand the core of. Sora has this in spades; big pointy anime hair, poofy pants, gangly limbs with big hands and shoes, a huge crown necklace that jingles whenever he moves. He's very unique, and clearly blends the design philosophies of both Final Fantasy and Disney - too much of a cartoon to be a standard FF character, way too anime to be a part of Disney's classic lineup.
KH4 Sora, on the other hand, looks like he's doing a closet cosplay of himself.
Real hair of his texture doesn't get that tall, so he just has some parts in the back slicked up a bit to get some of that point. Most people don't have balloon pants or that very specific kind of waist-length, short-sleeved hoodie in their closet, so he has to settle for wide-legged jean shorts and a three-quarter sleeve jacket. The clown shoes are definitely not something you can find in stores, so instead he has regular yellow sneakers. And where are you going to find a necklace with a chain that big? So it's an itty bitty, regular-looking chain necklace, instead.
And that concept alone, that Sora is awkwardly trying and failing to fit into his own skin, to look or feel like himself after what's happened to him, is positively gripping to me. Peel back all the bright, exaggeratedly cartoony surface-level traits of his, and who even is Sora? Just some teenager swinging a giant key around?
It makes perfect sense, too, that his new clothes and proportions aren't limited to Quadratum, even if the graphical fidelity seems to be, at least somewhat. Because he doesn't look like this because of some world transformation, like in KH3's Pirates of the Caribbean - Sora himself has changed. He can't just go back to the way he was before by changing locations.
What I'm most looking forward to is getting the answer to the question this design naturally brings up to me, which is: does this design change represent Sora being distinctly unlike himself? Or is this going to be the most authentic we've ever seen him? Maybe both, somehow?
So yeah, I really like the stylistic choices this game is making so far. I don't think it's soullessly chasing realism to be "trendy" with modern games or anything, I think there's genuine care and purpose behind it. And that's all I want from any artistic decision, really
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