To find someone who doesn’t know anything about Kingdom Hearts would not be a very difficult feat. Despite being a marriage between two incredibly popular companies, Square Enix and Disney, Kingdom Hearts can be an incredibly daunting series to confront. Spanning 17 years and 10 games across a myriad of consoles including even a mobile game that can be considered crucial to the plot, many are turned off at the thought of having to play all of these games in order to understand the admittedly simple plot. The Kingdom Hearts series as of “Kingdom Hearts III” (the 10th game in the series) at face value, is genuinely a fairly simple hero’s journey following a boy named Sora through his adventures across Disney worlds as he tries to subdue the darkness. So then, why is Kingdom Hearts constantly revered as a very complex series?

To put it simply, Kingdom Hearts is in fact, not complicated whatsoever. There is nothing complex about the overarching theme of balance between light and darkness over its 10 games. It has about the same amount of depth as a children’s book in its writing and is quite heavy handed with what you’re supposed to be interpreting from the games’ events. What’s hard to understand about the KH series is its constant retcons and heavy-handed character connections. I don’t blame the director of the series, Tetsuya Nomura, for writing the plot into the corner it’s ended up in. In fact, with the structure of the series, it was almost inevitable. The Kingdom Hearts games were not released in chronological order. For example, the definitive edition of the game at which the events hundreds of years before “Kingdom Hearts I” took place, was not released until 2015 and as a mobile game, the story is in fact still ongoing. As such, games that are chronologically earlier in the plot, but chronologically later in release, have many events which completely undo statements from chronologically later. In the first game in the series by release date,  the aforementioned “Kingdom Hearts I”, it is constantly reiterated that the main character Sora is the only person who can wield the keyblade (a very important weapon throughout the series), but by the time you get to the latest game released, “Kingdom Hearts III”, there is a minimum of at least 7 characters who have the ability to wield the keyblade.

The other aspect of Kingdom Hearts that leads to its convoluted plot is its plethora of plot contrivances. The existence of 3 separate yet very unique “Organization XIIIs” that all have very different roles in the plot. The arbitrary choice to eventually have “13 darknesses” and “7 lights” battle it out as the series’ main point. There is almost no sense to some plot devices in the series as the overarching plot of it wasn’t really even thought of until the third game in the series, “Kingdom Hearts 2”. The list of plot contrivances can go on and on and on, but ultimately, none of these actually matter, as you really could explain the ultimate plot of the series in about a sentence; A boy named Sora goes on a journey from his home in order to fulfill a 100-year-old prophecy and save the ones that he loves. Without any of the fluff that’s really all the story boils down to, a textbook hero’s journey that can’t really hold a light to any other game’s plot let alone even its own.

To those who wish to get into the series, don’t be daunted that the games “Kingdom Hearts HD” and “Kingdom Hearts 3D” are the same game simply released on different consoles, Don’t be daunted by the pronunciation of the game title “Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days” being “Kingdom Hearts three five eight days over two”. Don’t be daunted by Disney’s Donald Duck and Final Fantasy VII’s Sephiroth existing in the same universe. And especially don’t be daunted by the fact that the games “Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep” and “Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep -A Fragmentary Passage-” are totally unique games that were released 7 years apart. To those who wish to get into the series and understand it, simply play all of the games in release order. Admittedly, I had only actually started playing these games about 2 weeks ago and only finished playing all of them a few days ago only a week after the 17 year wait for the release of “Kingdom Hearts 3” (though for me the wait was about 3 days), and I had little trouble with understanding all the intricate details of the story. I could spout useless lore about the series with those who have been with the series since day one and only need to be corrected on about 50% of what I know. People don’t play Kingdom Hearts for the plot and writing, which is admittedly very, very, terrible, they play it for the wonder that comes from seeing their favorite characters interact in a way that no one in 2002 would have ever thought possible until the birth of the Kingdom Hearts series. And they continue to stick to it for the memories and people they’ve met across their 17 years of playing the games.