Kingdom Hearts III Videos Recaps Story of Previous Games - News

Those games came out before most PS4 owners were even alive and/or in kindergarten lol.

You know how most games with massive crossovers have a storyline that's thrown together as an excuse to have a crossover? This isn't like that. In this game, they make an actual attempt to explain why you can hop from movie world to movie world. The gist of it is that each of Disney's and Square Enix's IPs has their own world and they're all connected as parallel universes that you normally can't visit but get connected by some sort of interdimensional space because of some crisis that threatens all the worlds, and you the hero have to save all of existence from "the darkness".

The accusations that the game is nonsense come from the fact that the game takes itself very seriously in trying to explain the mechanics of "darkness" and "light" as physical forces of the universe, but it all just sounds so terribly campy, with entire conversations taking place that simultaneously talk about darkness in light in the "force of the universe" sense, as well as the metaphorical "good vs evil" sense, even though the lore of the game seems to treat light and dark along the lines of Yin and Yang moreso than good and evil, where darkness and light are interconnected and complimentary. Kind of like how Star Wars has a "light" and "dark" side, and they're supposed to be "in balance" even though the story treats the dark side as being a force of evil that needs to be defeated. It should get very interesting if there's a Star Wars world in this one.

TLDR the story isn't necessarily nonsense, but the constant use of the terms "darkness" and "light" sound campy and silly. If you give the game a chance though, the central appeal of "what if I could jump into Disney movies to help the main characters" is still intact and very fun.

Oh, also there's the mechanics of how death works in the series, which is absurdly lore heavy and plays heavily into the story so you can't avoid it. That confuses the hell out of people too.

Thanks man, so actually there is a central plot thro8gh the series. If I play just the first is there a good enoigh closure or I need to play the sequels, prequels, side stories etc?

The first game definitely ends with a hook for the next game, but also gives enough closure that it doesn't feel unfair. I don't want to spoil it beyond that you basically you beat the final boss, have a satisfying reunion with friends, but then get separated in a way that sets up the plot of the next game. If they didn't separate the friends and drop a few hints at what else is still going on, KH 1 could have been a standalone game.

If you want to avoid mindfuck, the first game actually doesn't have much of it. It isn't until the second game that everything suddenly gets complicated and you can't understand the story without understanding the lore. It starts you off with a character you don't know and doesn't explain why he's important before jerking you off back to the main character, who starts off in a location that doesn't make sense unless you played KH: Chain of Memories, then tells you that things you learnt in the first game that seemed canonical were actually lies, and introduces a shitload of lore surrounding the mechanics of death and souls in the KH multiverse that also only fully make sense if you played Chain of Memories, which unfortunately is a very weak game, and several major plot points in KH2 only really make sense if you fully grasp that lore. It is still possible to handwave a lot of it and just have fun visiting the Disney IP worlds and helping the heros of those movies, as it does still boil down to "the bad guys want to destroy all worlds, those are the bad guys, stop them!"

I played both games and most of the spinoffs because I got really invested in the story and lore, but I can easily understand how someone wouldn't, and also how the darkness and light stuff sounds cheesy. I ultimately gave up, however, because I ran out of money to get all the systems required to play all the games. You can now play all the games on PS4, however, through 3 separate collections that turns some of the worst games into movies and remasters Chain of Memories into a much more decent but still not great game.

TLDR, play the first game (probably go with the KH 1.5 collection on PS4) if you're okay with a few loose ends and the hero not being reunited with friends, as it does end with the multiverse being saved (as far as you know). Play the second game if you get invested in the story and lore, or just really like visiting Disney universes. Play all the games if you're very invested in the lore and have no life like me, lol.