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Kingdom Hearts FAQ #14: Kingdom Hearts 3

You said it, AxelSo, Kingdom Hearts 3 is the first Kingdom Hearts game since 2005, eh? How’s that working out?

Excuse me, but, despite the seemingly simple numbering of the third installment, there have been approximately twelve billion Kingdom Hearts titles in the last (nearly) fifteen years. And that’s something of a problem! All of those titles were very much Kingdom Hearts stories, but all of them (save Dream Drop Distance) primarily featured side characters, like Roxas, Ventus, or Aqua. And, because the Kingdom Hearts franchise has literally no idea how to write an ending, each of those characters wound up with unresolved stories begging for a climax come Kingdom Hearts 3. And does Kingdom Hearts 3 reach that long awaited climax for a cast of at least thirty freeloaders? … Wait, should that be a question?

Does Kingdom Hearts 3 reach that long awaited climax for a cast of at least thirty freeloaders?

Pretty much! It’s actually kind of impressive how many “side stories” have built up over the years, and Kingdom Hearts 3 ties up nearly all of them with a neat little (inevitably heart-shaped) bow during the final world.

Wait… “during the final world”? The game doesn’t gradually solve these problems over the course of the entire 20-30 hour game?

Oh my no. Have you played a Kingdom Hearts game before? All of that messy plot is saved for the final couple of hours, and the rest of the game is having fun around Disney-based worlds while creepy dudes in coats occasionally discuss their favorite Netflix shows (Ansem is apparently really into Ozark).

That sounds… bad.

That’s not a question. It’s a statement. A correct statement.

So is Kingdom Hearts 3 bad?

Poor girlCertainly not. In a lot of ways, Kingdom Hearts 3 is what the Kingdom Hearts titles have been striving for since the initial announcement of Squall Leonheart meets Dumbo. Disney worlds are huge and varied, NPCs actually exist (where appropriate) so Planet Tangled feels populated by actual people (as opposed to the Agrabah Marketplaces of the past that had apparently been struck neutron bombs), and the various worlds often contain mechanics that unmistakably separate the “levels” by something other than your Disney-approved guest characters. There are (relatively) Giant Robots in Toy Store world! A sailing system reminiscent of a mini-Wind Waker in Pirates of the Caribbean world! Big Hero 6 features a Crack Down-esque super-hero city playground! It’s pretty great, and a far cry from the themed hallways of some of the previous titles. In fact, in a weird way, it makes some of the more classically “videogame-y” worlds worse by comparison. Frozen is basically the ice level (complete with ice maze, ice tower, and the return of Square-mandated snowboarding), and Monsters Inc.’s factory stage is another fine showcase for our gaming friend, the conveyer belt. But those worlds aren’t bad! Just kind of ordinary when compared to exploring a gigantic toy store filled with murderous tsum tsums (which is rarely a destination for old-fashioned Chocobros).

So play Kingdom Hearts 3 for the Disney experience?

It’s certainly what is front and center. Four of the worlds are basically “play the movie” experiences wherein Sora gets to tagalong while a film unfolds (and, for some reason, a complete cutscene featuring the entirety of Let it Go), one world serves as a quasi-sequel (and inadvertent condemnation of capitalism), and two worlds seem to be excuses to hang out with a cool cast of characters. And that’s fun! It’s all very entertaining, and the only thing that really separates this whole experience from the much-missed Disney Infinity is that that “real” plot keeps rearing its ugly head (and Anna doesn’t get a grappling hook).

So the Kingdom Hearts plot is the worst part of Kingdom Hearts?

Not exactly. The narrative just…

Kingdom Hearts FAQ #13.8

The gang's all hereQ. Hey, Goggle Bob, there’s that new Kingdom Hearts 2.8 game out. What’s the deal?

A. Well, uh, “new” might not be the right term here.

Q. Explain Yourself!

A. So we’ve got Kingdom Hearts 2.8, and, basically, it’s a HD remake of a 3DS game from nearly five years ago. Dream Drop Distance was itself a kind of “soft” Kingdom Hearts 3 (Dream Drop Distance = D D D = 3D), or, at the very least, the first true continuation of the Kingdom Hearts plot since Kingdom Hearts 2, a game that was released seven years before 3D. For the record, in the real world time between the release of Kingdom Hearts 2 (2005) and Kingdom Hearts 3 (TBA), there have been 12,000 Hyperdimension Neptunia games released. EDITOR’S NOTE: 12,012 since I started this post.

Q. So, is Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance HD any good?

A. KH3D was a fun little jaunt that featured Sora and Riku working together in a big adventure for the first time. Given Sonic and Shadow were established early in the KH mythos, it’s amazing it took over a decade to get a KH game going where there’s an official team-up. Unfortunately, if there’s one thing Tetsuya Nomura, director of the Kingdom Hearts franchise, loves more than zippers, it’s corrupting the good and true wishes of his loyal audience of children/mouth breathers. So Sora and Riku are working together for this game, but there’s a timer involved, and you can only play as Sora or Riku for a limited time before being forced to switch back to the other hero. I think this was intended as some sort of “hey kids, don’t spend so long staring at a tiny screen” concession for the portable system of the game’s origin, but that doesn’t make much sense in HD land. At least there is a plot excuse for the switching.

Q. What’s the plot this time?

DARKNESS!A. Nomura must have watched a lot of Inception before writing this game, because… well.. it’s exactly that. The conceit of the game is that there are a few worlds that are just resting their eyes before returning to the Kingdom Hearts universe, and, rather than hearing “just five more minutes, mom” from Hunchback of Notre Dame Planet again, Yen Sid decides to send Sora and Riku into the dreams of the sleeping worlds to wake ‘em up. Unfortunately, something goes wrong immediately, so, while Sora is in the sleeping dreams of the worlds, Riku is actually in Sora’s dream (of the sleeping worlds). Or maybe it’s the other way around? Whatever. What’s important is that one character can only operate when the other is asleep, and they can’t actually both be in the same place at the same time, just simulations of the same place and… ugh… Never mind, trying to parse all the little “clues” in this game will give you a headache. What’s important is that Riku and Sora can’t kiss until the ending. Oh, and Ansem is back.

Q. Ansem? Don’t you mean Xehanort?

A. Well, technically, I mean both. Ansem and Xehanort and all the other big bads are back, because you can only die so many times before you come back to life citation needed. At the end of 3D, it is revealed that Ansem/Xehanort’s plan all along, bwa ha ha ha, has been to assemble a council of thirteen versions of him, so that way he can take the most outrageous selfie the universe has ever seen. Included in the new council of Ansems are Heartless Ansem, Nobody Xemnas, Old Man Xehanort, Young Man Xehanort who has control over time for some reason, Xigbar, Lab Coat Xehanort, Lil’ Xehanort with keyblade pacifier action, and Clarabelle Cow. ARGHXehanort (one of ‘em, does it really matter which?) attempted to infect Sora with darkness, so that way he’d have a Xehanort-Sora on the team, but that failed when Riku, Mickey, and Lea saved Sora from almost certain identity crises.

Q. Lea? Who dat?

A. Oh, that’s Axel. Every member of Organization 13 from Kingdom Hearts 2/Chain of Memories appears to be back and alive now. Sora went to all the effort of murdering half of that group, and now they’re all just fine. Boo.

“Lea” is the “uncorrupted” version of Axel. Despite the fact that Axel… let’s see if I can get everything here… betrayed/murdered teammate Vexen, betrayed Organization 13: The New Kids after claiming to betray Organization 13: Original Flavor, betrayed best friend Roxas, kidnapped Kairi, attempted to kill Sora, and then finally betrayed Organization 13 again while dying, he is now a keyblade wielder, and is apparently going to be a permanent fixture of team good guy. Just goes to show, if you’re an absolute heel to everyone and everything you’ve ever encountered, including your best friends, worst enemies, and women you just met, then eventually you’ll be rewarded with the most powerful, coveted weapon in the galaxy. It’s probably because he has cool hair.

Anyway, as you can likely tell, the basic purpose of Dream Drop Distance was to move all the pieces (Sora, Riku, Axel, Ansems) into their proper spots for Kingdom Hearts 3. Given they already used “2.5” for the KH2 rerelease, 2.8 kind of makes sense for a title for this compilation.

Q. Compilation? You just got done saying this was one old game.

A. Oh, right, there’s also Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep – A Fragmentary Passage, an Aqua story in there.

Q. Aqua?

A. Aqua was one of the three stars of Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, the designated prequel of the Kingdom Hearts universe. Ten years before Kingdom Hearts 1, Aqua screwed up royally, and her best friends wound up either possessed by unending evil or asleep forever. Aqua herself was sucked into the Realm of Darkness, which is basically Kingdom Hearts Hell.

Q. You mean Anime Expo?

Welcome to HELLA. No. I mean a barren, dark universe where time has no meaning and heartless creatures feed on the discarded remains of lifeless fantasy worlds.

Q. So you do mean Anime Expo?

A. No, dammit. Look, Aqua is trapped in a universe where she is the lone human among the ruins of scattered forgotten worlds. It actually makes for a really interesting Kingdom Hearts experience, as Aqua is totally alone: there are no shops, friendly moogles, NPCs, crowing villains, nothing. All Aqua has to keep her company are armies of mute heartless, and her keyblade, which she uses to slay those armies of mute heartless. Occasionally, she hallucinates her friends, but even they’re pretty silent, and Aqua seems to be well aware that they’re just illusions. If Kingdom Hearts were at all capable of subtlety, I might say this entire adventure is a metaphor for loneliness and/or depression, but it’s a Nomura game, so the dude can’t help but kill the mood.

Q. How does Kingdom Hearts inevitably kill the tone of A Fragmentary Passage?

Nya?A. Remember how you could play dress up with Lightning in Lightning Returns, and with the monsters in Final Fantasy 13-2? Well, you can accessorize Aqua with pretty items you earn for completing random tasks in AFP. Yes, it’s sad that Aqua is completely alone while fighting unending hordes of evil in a waking hell universe, but she’s wearing cat ears, magical translucent wings, and a kicky dress while doing it. Right around the time that Aqua finds out she’s been trapped in this everlasting limbo for ten years, she also earns a Minnie Mouse hat, so, ya know, kind of hard to maintain the mood.

Q. So A Fragmentary Passage sucks?

A. Quite the opposite, really. It’s short (maybe three hours if you’re not trying to find all the “secrets”), but it feels like a legit test run/demo for Kingdom Hearts 3. All of the worlds are recycled, “sad” versions of locales from Birth by Sleep, but they’re completely new maps with new challenges. While it’s not very large, the first area (a ruined town from Cinderella) is so open and interesting that it gives me hope that there will be more than boring hallways in KH3. Additionally, there’s a rail section toward the end of the third world that, with encroaching heartless all around, actually feels like a Disney Land ride, which, whether intentional or not, proves there may be some innovation in those old Kingdom Hearts bones yet. Aside from the fact that the same boss is reused three nebulously different ways, A Fragmentary Passage actually gives me hope that Kingdom Hearts 3 might not just be a long delayed more of the same.

Q. Hey, come to think of it, Aqua is the first starring woman in a Kingdom Hearts adventure that doesn’t have to share the spotlight with more important male leads. Does this improve Kingdom Hearts’ feminism rating?

A. On one hand, the entire point of this story is that Aqua is a badass that is not going to give up in the face of impossible odds. There’s one amazing scene where Aqua struggles to defeat a Darkside Heartless (a creature that is roughly as tall as a house), wins, and then moves forward to find her next challenge is ten Darkside Heartless. Her response is simply, “Okay then,” and then gets to work. Bad. Ass.

And, incidentally, Willa Holland, Aqua’s voice actress (who is probably best known for her role as the occasionally sword-wielding Speedy/Thea on CW’s Arrow) should probably win an award or something for carrying the entirety of this story on her vaguely-defeated-but-still-trying inflections. It’s really noticeable given she’s the only one talking for, oh, 75% of the game, and it’s quite good.

That said, unfortunately, Aqua is still defined by the men in her life, and she spends roughly the entire game either worrying about “her boys” or then, eventually, sacrificing herself for two other men, one of which has prominent, circular ears. Sorry, even with a female lead, this story does not pass the Bechdel Test, because there aren’t any other women at all. Even when Aqua fights a mirror version of herself, she spends the whole time worrying about what that means in the face of not fighting mirror boy creatures. That’s sad.

Oh well, at least there’s the implied promise that Aqua will return for Kingdom Hearts 3, so maybe we’ll see some actual girl power in that game.

Q. Oh yeah, how does A Fragmentary Passage fit into the Kingdom Hearts mythos?

A. Basically, the whole thing is a prequel to Kingdom Hearts 1, with this story ending at the exact same time as Kingdom Hearts 1’s finale. AFP finally provides an explanation on why Mickey Mouse wasn’t wearing a shirt at the end of KH1. Yes, I’m being completely serious.

Q. So what happens to Aqua, the heroine of this whole story?

A. Oh, she’s still stuck in Hell, but at least now she has DiZ (Ducks Intuiting Zaffer) to keep her company. And, again, there are good odds she’ll be rescued by the real (incidentally male) heroes later.

Q. Anything else on Kingdom Hearts 2.8?

Twilight Sparkle BladeA. There are also HD cutscenes from the browser/cell phone based Kingdom Hearts (Unchained) χ. It’s the story of how a bunch of wannabe furries attempt to save the world from a global war by creating factions that are forbidden from cooperating with each other. It doesn’t work out. I’d get into it more, but I find cell phone games to be repugnant, useless, and they take up my Pokémon Go time, so screw that noise. Even I have limits.

Kingdom Hearts FAQ #13.1: It All Goes Wrong

Run, child, runQ. Where did it all go wrong?
OR
Q. What is your favorite Kingdom Hearts moment?

A. Two questions, same answer!

I will always maintain that Kingdom Hearts 1 was a straightforward game with a straightforward plot. Well, straightforward for a JRPG’s descendant, at least. In a nutshell, the universe is in danger, and it appears the Disney Council of Evil, with Maleficent at its head, is to blame. Honest, noble, and fairly mundane Sora, his best friend and rival Riku, and Kairi, his makeshift girlfriend, are all caught up in the crossfire when their world (hometown) is destroyed. Sora answers the call of the hero, Riku is seduced by the darkside, and Kairi flops around like a fish. At about the same time the trio finally works through their issues, the true evil is revealed: a scientist king who gazed into the darkness too long, and sacrificed his kingdom, people, and sanity for the sake of learning more about an unspeakable horror. In his final moments, the evil king is defeated not because of Sora’s strength, but ultimately because he believed the core of the universe, the core of humanity, was darkness, but, no, it was light, and he was obliterated mentally and physically by the revelation. The worlds are restored, but the trio is still separated in the final moments, because adventures are always to be continued; so the last we see of Sora is a boy who just saved the universe exploring a whole new world joyously with his new (duck ‘n dog) friends. Fade to black, let’s call it a day.

And then it all goes straight to Hell.

In North America, if you played Kingdom Hearts 1 with some dedication (saved all the worlds and saved all the puppies… not certain which one is more important…), you would receive a bonus movie that acted as a teaser for (presumably) Kingdom Hearts 2. I literally am incapable of describing the impact of seeing this movie after devoting forty nearly continuous hours to earning it. After a story where there are implied to be two keyblades in the universe, one of which is wielded by Mickey Mouse, here’s a warrior in a strange cloak utilizing two keyblades at the same time. And he’s fighting heartless we’ve never seen before. And he can run straight up a building! SO COOLAnd who’s that other guy? He’s wearing a blindfold? OMG is that supposed to be Riku? Did he get blinded by the light at the core of the universe? But now he’s free? How did he escape? What happened to Mickey? Did the other dude steal his keyblade? Is that Oathkeeper? Why are there so many heartless? What happened? What’s going on!?

Practically days after Kingdom Hearts was first released, the Internet was ablaze with theories and conjecture for what was coming next. No two people could agree on one solid theory as to what was coming. There were even naysayers that claimed nothing could live up to the potential of that one teaser movie.

Who could have guessed that that was the right answer?

Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, the GBA game that followed Kingdom Hearts 1, was a tremendous tease. Kingdom Hearts 2, Squaresoft knew, was to be the next big thing, so this “side story”, even though it directly continued the plot of KH1, had to pace itself to only tantalize the audience for the upcoming hotness. Organization XIII was born here, and it’s clear they were created with an emphasis on “mystery” and not much else. Anyone in the Disney or Square pantheon could be under those hoods, and the fact that Axel and Vexen both resembled ersatz Final Fantasy 7 characters only fanned the fandom’s fanatic speculation that Organization XIII was some big crazy melting pot of Disney/Square characters hiding under hoods. Chain of Memories’ (second) ending introduces DiZ (Delightfully Immature Zealot), a character wrapped in bandages in an effort to hide a face the player had never seen, but, oh, he’s mysterious, so what’s hiding under there? Come to think of it, I don’t think CoM introduced a single new character that is actually operating under their “real” given name.

And then came Kingdom Hearts 2, which, to its credit, did finally give answers to all the questions that had been asked thus far. The bad news? It approached those answers in the worst possible way.

Looking so smug.  Maybe?Let’s revisit Ansem. As I mentioned earlier, in KH1, “Ansem” is simply (?) a scientist king that goes too far in his research of heartless. It is clearly stated throughout that Ansem did not create the heartless (he created some heartless, but he didn’t originate the idea), he just found them, labeled them, and enhanced them until they ran amuck over his world and others. Again, during the KH1 finale, Ansem is evaporated by the light of his own hubris. There was, in short, no reason for Ansem to return. Even if we wanted to revisit the heartless (which, according to that bonus movie, was always the intention), Ansem was not at all necessary, all we needed was some other loser to find a door to darkness and release them, or even go the extra mile and dig out some even greater evil and claim that the newbie is the real origin of the heartless, Ansem was only a misguided, weak fool, bwa ha ha and whatnot. But, no, Kingdom Hearts 2 brought back Ansem in the form of Xemnas. Yes, you watched Dark Ansem die, but this is Twilight Ansem, and he’s just as murderous as the last Ansem.

The insanity didn’t stop there. Just to confuse everyone further, Ansem was revealed to not be Ansem, but actually Ansem’s apprentice, Xehanort, and the real Ansem was that guy all wrapped up in the bandages. I’ve given it a lot of thought, and, even after years, I still have no idea why this “twist” was introduced. It’s the kind of plot twist that makes everyone look like an idiot (so Leon, Cid, Aeris, and all of Ansem’s subjects had no idea what the guy looked like? They just loathe anybody with the same name?), outright contradicts preestablished, straightforward facts (Xehanort wrote about Ansem meeting King Mickey in the first person… so… Xehanort was confusing his own identity?), and alienates anyone who just enjoyed KH1 but hadn’t yet played KH2 (“Man, that Ansem is a jerk.” “Weeeeeell…”). It adds practically nothing to the story, aside from exonerating an Ansem #2 that was just created, and, perhaps worst of all, it further complicates a plot into “Who’s on first” wordplay territory. The literal plot of Kingdom Hearts 2 can be explained as, “Ansem is dead, and in his absence, Ansem hatches a new plan, but Ansem, Ansem’s former mentor, thwarts Ansem’s efforts, losing his life in the process, and Ansem dies shortly before Ansem is finally killed.” The only benefit to introducing Ansem the Wise is that it gives DiZ (Delicious, Inviting Zest) an interesting reveal to hide under those bandages. But that wouldn’t be necessary if that stupid mummy hadn’t been introduced in the final moments of CoM, anyway!

All shiny and redEver hear of Vader Syndrome? Well, remember Empire Strikes Back? Where that big scary dude reveals he’s actually that blonde kid’s father? It is an amazing, Alderaan-shattering moment because it completely flips the dynamic of everything that has ever occurred before and after in the story. And it’s a neat trick, but you can only do it once, or you very quickly get diminishing returns. Imagine if the series went on to explain, I don’t know, that the princess was also related to blondie and the scary dude, or something even dumber, like one of the robots was also the son of the scary dude. It wouldn’t enhance the story in any significant way, it would just pile some dumb trivia into a universe that shrinks and shrinks because it seems like there’s only one important family in an entire far, far away galaxy.

Kingdom Hearts has a terminal case of Vader Syndrome. Every game since Kingdom Hearts 2 has introduced new characters that, presumably in an effort to endear them to the audience, are just new versions of previously existing characters. There are three playable characters in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, all of them all new, and 66% of them are either Ansem or Sora. Remember “the other guy” from that teaser movie I so loved? He was a Sora. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days introduced an entirely new character into the timeframe between Chain of Memories and KH2, and, surprise, she was just another Sora, but in the shape of another Kairi. Even more confusingly, “Ansem” also seems to be aging in reverse, he’s at his oldest when Sora was born, and by the time Sora is fifteen, he appears to be just old enough to rent a car.

None of this is a bad thing from a story telling perspective. Oh, who the hell am I kidding? Of course it’s a bad thing: it’s needlessly convoluted and even requires dedicated fans to create new and interesting descriptors for characters so we’re not just talking about Ansem being at odds with Ansem all the time. But, to return to the original point of this paragraph, you want to tell a story with such needlessly complicated plots, that’s your business, but it’s terrible for this franchise. Look at Kingdom Hearts 3. It is confirmed that it will No plot relevance at all, I'm surefeature Big Hero 6 and Tangled, and it would be insane for them to ignore Frozen, the entire Pixar library, and let’s throw the Marvel and Star Wars cinematic universes in there. I know an eight year old that loves all of those things, and has the Legos to prove it. By the time the game is finally released, let’s say he’ll be ten, just a perfect age for a Disney crossover game that could be an ideal gateway to the more heady Square-Enix JRPGS of yesterday and today. But I could not, in any kind of good conscious, recommend Kingdom Hearts 3 to the kid, because, holy cow, he’d have to read my thirteen part Kingdom Hearts FAQ just to begin to understand what’s going on. No child should be subjected to that. I shouldn’t be subjected to this!

So, it is with that, that I leave you, Kingdom Hearts. You looked too deeply into the darkside of complicated plots and complex character relations, failed to come up for air at any point in the last fifteen years, and drowned in the darkness, finally swallowed by an impenetrable black. You’ve sacrificed your kingdom, people, and sanity all for the sake of mystery. Maybe, one day you’ll realize that Kingdom Hearts should be… light.

Thanks for reading!

Kingdom Hearts FAQ #12: Titles

A door to knowledge?Q. Why did they number the Kingdom Hearts games so dumb and weird?

A. Here are the ridiculous title explanations you were waiting for.

Kingdom Hearts, aka Kingdom Heats 1, is the most straightforward of the bunch. As a reminder, yes, Kingdom Hearts is revealed to be an actual object in the game/series, and is not just some random nonsense title. Gilgamesh is not searching the multiverse for the Final Fantasy, and Benjamin does not live in Final Fantasy, USA.

Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories is the Gameboy Advance game that was kind of a retelling of Kingdom Hearts 1, kind of its own original story. So, the “Chain of Memories” is a gentle reminder that you’ve seen everything in this game once already, and a descriptor for how the plot of the game involves Naminé, the slave witch, altering Sora’s memories by inserting herself into key moments. She is breaking Sora’s chain of memories, while you are trying to get a chain combo going through your own memories of a game you already played. Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories was the PS2 remake of the game that has a title based on an email subject misunderstanding.

Quirky?Kingdom Hearts 2 is the sequel to Kingdom Hearts, and the last time we saw a straightforward title in this series (it’s been almost a decade!). The “2” here could also be a clever reference to the fact that Sora and Kairi are both accidentally duplicated for the entirety of the game (Roxas and Naminé, respectively), or how Sora wields a pair of keyblades during special occasions. Also, every world winds up getting visited twice, so Kingdom Hearts 2 is twice as padded as Kingdom Hearts 1.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days for the DS is where we start sliding off the rails forever. This impossible to abbreviate title features Roxas (Sora clone) and new character Xion (… also a Sora clone) palling around with Organization XIII for the period of time between Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2. We’re talking about 358 Days, and since the relationship between Roxas and Xion is central to the plot, it is 358 days divided by two people. Also, a DS screen can be used by better games (thinking of Contra 4 here) as a sort of giant screen divided into two. It all adds up to KH358/2D being titled unusually so as to discourage people from playing that turd.

LIAR!Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep is the prequel of the series, thus the whole “Birth” thing. Aggravatingly, this is not the origin story of the main villain of the series, Xehanort, so we’re probably going to see another, earlier prequel somewhere down the line to cover the Birth of Darkness. Interestingly, while this game is mostly in media res because someone lost the ability to tell stories with concrete beginnings, the game does open with the literal birth of Sora, which causes Ven, an identical cousin of Sora, to awaken from a deep sleep. The game is then bookended with Ven knocking back into a coma while his heart flutters off to hang out with child Sora, so “Birth by Sleep” actually makes a sort of sideways sense. If you squint. Note that, thanks to its plot placement before Kingdom Hearts 1, BBS is sometimes referred to as Kingdom Hearts 0, which will be important in a moment.

Kingdom Hearts Coded was a damn episodic cell phone game that got rereleased as a complete DS game named Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded. This is the story of Mickey Mouse trying to get with the times and digitizing Jiminy Cricket’s dusty old journal which, naturally, leads to the world nearly being destroyed, because technology is scary and somehow scanning a book creates sentient life, most of it malevolent. “Coded” is referring to the scanning (coding) process here, and “code” is also a synonym for “puzzle” according to Word’s thesaurus, which alludes to the fact that this is a puzzle game. “Re:coded” is just what those whacky programmers were complaining about when they were informed the game would be reheated for the DS.

When your hero doesn't understand...Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance is just… ugh… still mad at this one. First of all, yes, if you abbreviate the title, it just appears as Kingdom Hearts 3, which we… *cough*… I mean fans have been clamoring for since Kingdom Hearts 2 six years prior. Now, to be annoyed by the very next letter, it’s “3D” not just because it’s in 3-D, but because the subtitle is three sequential D’s: Dream Drop Distance, which is a previously unmentioned keyblade ability that allows the user to drop into the dreams of the heart… which are… just regular dreams. Anyway, to the game’s credit, it does continue the “story” of Kingdom Hearts, so it did work out like a pseudo-Kingdom Hearts 3. Of course, now we’re all excited about the real Kingdom Hearts 3, and nobody cares about the 3DS anymore, so let’s resubtitle the game as 2.8, since we already used 2.5 for the Kingdom Hearts 2 HD release, and we can’t exceed three. There are an infinite amount of numbers between two and three, and I’m betting 2.9 is reserved for some kind of prologue cell phone game released three months before KH3. Or a paid demo! The possibilities are endless!

Speaking of lousy promotional games, Kingdom Hearts χ was a browser based game set ages before the events of any given Kingdom Hearts, pre-Keyblade War, which was fought over the χ-blade. For those of you without a doctorate in Kingdom Hearts History, this would be akin to setting a Star Wars game a thousand years before the birth of Chewbacca. Kingdom Hearts χ is a nothing of a game, basically meant for playing around the Kingdom Hearts universe while your boss is off hitting on Debra in accounting (think about it, Kingdom Hearts was released in 2002, the teens that played that game and bought Nobody hoodies and custom zippers are well into their cubicles today). There were a few inklings of the plot in there, though, so those scenes are being repackaged as the movie Kingdom Hearts χ in the new set, like 358/2 Days in KH1.5HD and Re:Coded in KH2.5HD. Wow, Team Kingdom Hearts really has this down to a science.

And χ is pronounced “key”, of course.

Moving right alongFinally, we have Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep: A Fragmentary Passage. Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep (KH0) ends with Aqua sucked into the Realm of Darkness, which is also where a whale of a lot of worlds also wound up during the time period between BBS and Kingdom Hearts 1. This means that we can just reuse Aqua’s BBS HD Remake model and animations to explore a whole host of “lost” worlds that are just reused assets from previous KH games modified to a darker palette for inclusion in the Realm of Darkness. It’ll be Birth by Sleep 0.2 alright, as the whole game will likely involve two new worlds, one new Square guest star (let’s say… Laguna?), and the other 80% will be stuff we’ve already seen.

I’ll buy it day one.

Q. Any handy visual aids available for the series?

A. Here’s the boxart for Kingdom Hearts 2.5 HD

The Whole Gang

Highlighted below are all the characters that are, or have ever been, Sora.

The Soras

Now here are all the characters that are, or have ever been, Xehanort.

The Xehanorts

And, finally, here are all the characters that are… female.

Kinda Lonely

That help?