That just sounds sooo wrongThey can be touched.
Yeah, KH has a lot of interesting and cool ideas, but it doesn't always capitalize on them fully. I'd actually be interested in seeing someone with a better grasp of story telling, structures, tropes and general story telling theories, take a swing at rewriting the Saga.Which speaks to the real missed opportunity here, for the original PoH to engage as proactive characters within the story for once. There are myriad ways they could have come to Sora et al's aid, from helping him or Riku/Mickey to access/navigate the RoD, to holding back the Heartless in the Keyblade Graveyard, to meeting Sora in The Final World and taking on the task of guiding him back to being whole, there are endless options for integrating them organically into the story and making them seem empowered and significant in their role within the universe. Instead, they're minimized through their absence and whatever "power" is ascribed to them is framed solely as, at best, a passive (and passing) conferment of status, and at worst, a vulnerability that makes them eternally subject to pursuit by evildoers.
It's also a disservice to Anna, Elsa and Rapunzel as characters, since they're essentially doomed to never receive any attention beyond incidental mentions in the context of lore relevance, but also because there were so many other interesting methods of folding them into the framework of KH3. Concerns about sequel baiting aside, if Nomura really wanted to run with this motif that Marluxia and Larxene are present in KH3 to signal their future relevance for the Foretellers storyline, why not tie the worlds they visit to that idea explicitly and offer suggestions that they are (either of their own accord or under Xehanort's directive) seeking out Elsa and Rapunzel as an investigation into their extant Disney-provided powers. Rapunzel has the ability to heal any wound and basically keep people from dying altogether; Elsa is aberrational in the sheer prowess of her ice magic (she basically subjects an entire world to an eternal winter); those abilities could easily be married to a kind of "disturbance in the Force" plotline that could incorporate any number of influential factors from the "Age of Fairytales," from the Foretellers themselves to meddling on the part of the MoM to a kind of ripple effect from the (apparently frequent) Keyblade Wars over KH which have taken place over the eons. Maybe it could even have something to do with that diddlying box.
While we're at it, the whole of KH3 could use this sort of thematic renovation. Toy Box could have been a place that interested Xehanort not because the toys live of their own accord, but because they were given life through the sheer belief in them and love for them that existed in the heart of Andy, a child like the children of legend who held the remnants of the world together after it was shattered by the greed of the Keyblade wielders like Xehanort. Monstropolis could have been more than an expository infodump on previous titles if the connection between Boo, Mike and Sully was treated as anything more than ornamental-- that is, if it was treated as what it represents, which is a connection that crosses worlds in direct defiance of the "world order." Monstropolis itself has such massive potential as a world that intersects with (presumably) all others through its doors; you've got the beating heart of a god of death locked in a box in The Caribbean; this stuff writes itself.
You're post here kind of highlights just how well the worlds could have been integrated without making up something about "new PoH"