Image credit: Square Enix
If you know nothing about the Kingdom Hearts series, you probably know that the story can get a bit convoluted. It’s now gotten to the point where Square Enix has finally hired a Loremaster to keep everything straight for the dev team, as things risk ballooning out of control. With Kingdom Hearts 4, the series enters into a new saga, and there should be something of a reset that might allow new fans to start catching up with the old.
Except that’s not the case, as from the trailers we’ve seen for Kingdom Hearts 4, things might actually be more inaccessible for new fans than ever, and even include elements that might be difficult for old fans to parse. It’s not that Kingdom Hearts is the only series that requires you to do homework to understand, but I think the series is in a particularly difficult position that might make the bridge hard to cross.
Dark Road and Union Cross
The biggest issue on my mind when it comes to Kingdom Hearts is the increasing relevance of the mobile games, Union Cross and Dark Road. Previously, these games have existed in their own sphere for the most part, creating a grand backstory to the setting but without needing to peek its head into the actual narrative for the most part.
The most relevance that Union Cross has managed, as far as I’m aware, is to crop up as some otherwise out-of-nowhere cameos in Kingdom Hearts 3, which means a lot to those in the know but otherwise can be shrugged off. Dark Road otherwise acted as an expansion to the backstory of Xehanort, the main villain of the original Kingdom Hearts saga, but was hardly necessary reading.
However, from the Kingdom Hearts 4 trailers that we’ve seen, these periphery stories, only for the die-hard fans, might suddenly be important. Characters from Union Cross are appearing in the unreal world of Quadratum, and Xehanort, the main villain of the series’ previous saga, has reared his head again. Except this time it might be his younger version from Dark Road, because Xehanort has many versions and the ability to travel through time?
It’s certainly raising more questions than you might want for a game that’s supposedly a new start to the series, but that’s alright. We can just go back and play all the previous games to figure out the story so far. Except, of course, we can’t, as Union Cross and Dark Road have shut down completely.
Forgetting the past – but not
Kingdom Hearts has so many different games now across over two decades of releases that the fact that some of the games are no longer playable just has to be accepted. Expecting to be able to access DS titles like Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days legally is just foolhardy, as much as fans wish it were possible.
In many cases, Kingdom Hearts has sought to preserve its history and its storyline. The original Chain of Memories and Dream Drop Distance are now extremely difficult to get, but they have found remasters and re-releases as part of different Kingdom Hearts collections on modern hardware.
Other games like 358/2 Days haven’t fared as well, having been reduced to written summaries and some cutscenes, but at least the resources are technically there. You’d be better off just going to a fan wiki or watching a lore summary on YouTube, but the option is available.
Less so for the increasingly important Union Cross and Dark Road. A basic summary of Union Cross, called Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover, can be found in the third collection of Kingdom Hearts games, Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue. How immediately off-putting that sentence is turns out to be only half the problem, however. The hour-long cutscene only covers part of the Union Cross story, and not even the part that would be relevant for the series going forward.
Dark Road doesn’t even have that pointless luxury, and right now the only way to understand any of the story involved is to have someone else explain it to you. There is an upcoming Kingdom Hearts anime that many players suspect may be linked to Dark Road, but we have no way of knowing. Even if it is connected, we’ve seen from Final Fantasy XV that the multimedia approach doesn’t always help a story. So if you’re just trying to get into the series, good luck.
Fixing a problem like Sora
In truth, Kingdom Hearts is about as inaccessible a series as there ever was to new players, and that’s been true since the beginning. Even by the time of Kingdom Hearts 2, you were already missing half the picture if you hadn’t picked up Chain of Memories in between. It’s an unavoidable fact that the game has become too dense to get away with surface-level knowledge.
Let’s take just the basic starting premise of Kingdom Hearts 4, for example. Our protagonist, Sora, is in Quadratum. Who is Sora? At the most basic level, an extremely shounen-coded character with access to a magic weapon. However, explaining how he got that weapon, and why he’s in Quadratum, would require more space than this article would allow, and involve introducing at least four other characters.
So onto Quadratum, what is that? Well, it’s a world referenced in Kingdom Hearts 3 as a video game within the world of Toy Story, and referenced within the rhythm game Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory as a ‘Realm of Unreality’ that doesn’t actually exist. It seems to function as an afterlife as well, for some reason, as well as a potentially digital world.
Both of these are only half the story, though, if that. I love Kingdom Hearts, and it’s not actually as complicated as it all sounds, but this is not the kind of story you can just jump to the end when bringing someone on board. Square Enix will have an uphill struggle on their hands to be able to let this new saga exist on its own merits. Right now, this game seems like it might only be comprehensible for the fans.
FAQs
The officially released Kingdom Hearts 4 worlds are Quadratum, Coco’s Land of the Dead, and Hercules’ Underworld. There are other worlds that have now been leaked, but have not been announced officially, so it feels rude to put them here.
Officially, no, but it’d be hard to describe them as just friends after all that’s happened.
The new “Lost Masters” arc seems like it will focus on the Master of Masters and the Foretellers from Union Cross as the main threat. It’s not yet revealed in what capacity, though.
Unsurprisingly, Yozura, the secret boss from the Kingdom Hearts 3 Re Mind DLC, is considered the strongest and most difficult boss of the series. However, previous entries like Sephiroth and the Lingering Will also have a good shot.
