A Vanitas game with Maleficent & Pete as his party members, making the 3 a dark mirror of SDG. Maybe they join forces because of Ventus/Book of Prophecies BS IDK. Additionally, M&P have lost control of the heartless, some external force is taking said control away & the heartless now obey a mysterious new master. Hence Maleficent is recruiting more allies & minions to replace the heartless as her standing army.
There would be several distinct gameplay mechanics designed to invoke the feeling of playing as a villain: Weapon Switching, Minion Summon, & Boss Form Limit.
Weapon Switch: Early on Vanitas is given a Soul Eater by Maleficent & can swap between keyblade & Soul Eater at anytime by pressing L1/LB/L (covering all the console options). While both weapons are feasible against any enemy, generally the keyblade is stronger against heartless while the soul eater is better for dealing with the forces of good. There can be battles with mixes of both sides involved so constantly changing weapons on the fly is a must. Only Vanitas has this ability.
Minion Summon: Players momentarily take the role of a party member to summon that member's personal henchmen & command them in a semi-RTS style. Minion Summoning has leveling, starting with a few basic baddies & growing to larger & more diverse platoons as it levels up.
Vanitas
Tier 1: Flood
Tier 2: Scrapper
Tier 3: Bruiser
Maleficent
T1: Mace Goon
T2: Spear Goon
T3: Bow Goon
Pete
T1: Beagle Boys (Musketeers variant)
T2: Weasel Soldiers (From "The Prince and the Pauper")
T3: Beagle Boys (Duck Tales variant)
Boss Form Limit: In grand RPG tradition, if the bad guys loses enough HP, they'll go into their "final form". The player again takes control of the normally AI party members while in these forms. For added flair (& because a giant dragon probably can't into every area of the game) activating BFL will transport the party member & all on-field enemies to some arbitrary technicolor battlefield 'cuz that's tends to happen with the final forms of bosses. For even MORE added flair, the BGM changes to a classic KH boss theme as well. The Tier 2 forms are not unlocked until near the end of the story, some of them being held off for plot purposes.
Vanitas
T1: Dual wields Soul Eater & Void Gear,
Enter The Darkness
T2: Chimera, a fusion of many different Unversed into 1 frankensteinian monstrosity.
Unbreakable Chains
Maleficent
T1: Dragon
The Deep End
T2: A hybrid of her witch & dragon forms, looking like a winged fire breathing devil. Another soul eater is grafted to her staff, making it a halbrid.
The Encounter KH2 mix
Pete
T1: Steamboat Willie, fireballs launch out of the boat's smokestacks & land on enemies.
Rowdy Rumble
T2: Julius, which comes with a bit of retconning on Pete's name. There seems to be some precedent for Pete being his last name so Julius could be his actual 1st name.
The Encounter BBS/DDD mix
Naturally guest party members also have minions & Limits too. Which actually makes it pretty tricky to come up with a half-way decent world list since a lot of potential villains don't have both a set of minions & a transformation. So my apologies for having reused worlds listed here. The above mentioned forces of good are world specific enemies that act as that world's local defenders & are listed in the enemies categories below. Heartless appear in every world & thus won't be mentioned in the list of worlds due to redundency.
1. Radiant Garden
Party member: Kuja, a weapons dealer who offers his Black Mages when he sees Maleficent as a client.
-Minions: Black Mages
-Limit T1: Riding on back of Silver Dragon
-Limit T2: Trance
Enemies: Radiant Garden SeeDs, a milita Leon set up to replace the faulty security system.
Bosses:
-Leon+Yuffie+Zell (a rookie RG seeD recruit)
-Squall w/Lion Heart +Shiva (No, I didn't screw up on his name, suppose to be a big character moment for him here)
The Extreme
2. Olympus Coliseum
Party: Hades
-Minions: Undead soldiers
-Limit T1: Red Flames
-Limit T2: Paradox Hades. Hades merges with the Sea of Souls, giving him green flames & a bunch of souls hovering around him that he uses as projectiles.
Enemies: Centurions (no comments about they're roman, not greek. Centurion just sounds cool)
Bosses:
-Hercules
-Zeus
3. Neverland
Party: Captain Hook
-Minions: Pirates
-Limit T1: flight via stolen pixi dust
-Limit T2: Uses his ship to bombard enemies
Enemies: Lost Boys
Bosses:
-Peter Pan
4. Agrabah
Party: Jafar
-Minions: Mamluks
-Limit T1: Giant Snake
-Limit T2: Genie Jafar
Enemies: Palace Guards
Bosses:
-Aladdin w/Carpet
-Genie
5. Castle Wyvern (Gargoyles)
Party: Xanatos
-Minions: Steel Clan
-Limit T1: Battle Armor
-Limit T2: Tag Team with Fox
Enemies: Generic Wyvern Clan Gargoyles
Bosses:
-Goliath
Gargoyles is an example of a problematic world for my premise: if Xanatos' armor is a Limit, then how does he fight normally? But if he uses the armor as his normal means of combat, then what's his limit? My solution? Nort him. I think it would be great if he was a past ally of MX and was 1 of the potential candidates for the Neo Org13. So yeah, Xanatos gets a keyblade to fight with then.
& then there's also the fiddling with the Wyvern Clan population numbers just to justify some more generic enemies.
6. Land of Dragons
Party: Shun Yu
-Minions: Huns
-Limit T1: Engulfed in Darkness
-Limit T2: Horseback
Enemies: Chinese Army
Bosses:
-Captain Shang+soldiers
-Mulan w/Mushu
7. Far Away Galaxy (Sorry, but Star Wars works well for this game)
Party: Darth Vader
-Minions: Stormtroopers
-Limit T1: TIE Advanced Fighter
-Limit T2: Forced Unleashed (ditches lightsaber to double down on force powers)
Enemies: Rebel Alliance
Bosses:
-Han Solo & Chewbacca
-Luke Skywalker
8. Arendelle
Party: Hans
Minions: Arendelle Soldiers
Limit T1: ?
Limit T2: ???
Enemies: Snow Creatures
Bosses:
-Marshmallow
-Elsa
Hans sucks a party member, but Elsa as a boss is irresistible. Also starting to notice how many medieval soldier types are showing up as minions or enemies. I was figuring these would be more diverse.
9. Prydain (The Black Cauldron)
The Horned King is the one who is stealing control of the heartless away from Maleficent & the Organization, using the power of the Black Cauldron to do so.
Party: Xenmas
-Minions: Nobodies
-Limit T1: Armor Xenmas
-Limit T2: Zebra Xenmas
Enemies: Gwythaints, guards, Cauldron Born
Bosses:
-Horned King
-The Phantom (Horned King's alter ego from
Land of Illusion
-Ansem SoD, who is just as much under Horned King's control as any other heartless.
Presumably many of these worlds would have heartless bosses, which I had some ideas for but don't feel like going into detail today. Also original characters like Sora & Riku would be sprinkled throughout the game but I'm not entirely sure where they would appear.
Now I can't really say for sure how this game would really end as that requires knowing how KH3 will play out. So instead I'm going with a placeholder endgame: The villains' complete takeover of Disney Castle/Town. Maleficent gathers her alliance of villains & minions & launches a full scale invasion on Mickey's home.
10. Disney Castle & Town
Party: a different one for each area of the world.
-Hades in downtown
-Kuja in the residential area
-Hook in the beachfront
-Shun Yu in mainstreet
-Jafar in castle gate
-Hans in castle halls
-Darth Vader in throne room
-Xanatos in Cornerstone Chamber
-Xenmas on Castle rooftops
Enemies: Broomsticks, generic Musketeers, gummi drones, reformed blotlings
Bosses:
-Reformed Shadow Blot
-Sorcerer Mickey
-Sora+Donald+Goofy
-Final Form Sora
In the ending, the Cornerstone of Light is destroyed, allowing for Maleficent to unleash the heartless onto the world. The inhabitants of Disney Town are forced to flee their home. Traverse Town becomes the new home of the refugees (which as a convenient reason for revisiting Traverse in future games). Vanitas is inducted into the Organization as it's new 13th member.