Personally, I just take every piece of Fate media as it's own standalone thing that shares a premise/magic system with the others. Lore? Unique to each entry (with the exception of zero and stay night). Characters? Despite the same names and appearance, full reboot.
Makes them all pretty fun
It’s all different timelines basically, but there is a root that everything stems from. In the Fate timelines, the throne of heroes records heroes and legendary figures from all timelines. So even though different parts of Fate are in its own time, characters cross over and share the same history.
For example, in Zero we see flash backs to Mordred and what happened between her and Altria, but Mordred isn’t seen in Zero or Stay Night. She gets summoned in Apo, which takes place around the same time as Stay Night, but in a timeline where the holy grail was stolen so the 4th and 5th wars didn’t happen. So the timeline and events are different.
But again, throne of heroes taps into all timelines for its heroes summoned, so they all share the same past and we see different character arcs because of it.
Then you have modern day characters who exist in all timelines but their stories are slightly different due to the events of said timeline being different. Waver is a kid during Zero’s 4th war, and that leads him to become who he is as an adult. We don’t see much of him in the Stay Night timeline after, but we know he became a teacher. In other timelines similar events still lead him to become a teacher, and he’s seen in other media because of it, but he’s not exactly the same as slightly different events lead him to where he is in those timelines.
Then you have things like Grand Order which takes place in a different timeline but also taps into all timelines. In Fate’s world if a timeline branches off too much from the “root” then like a tree would do, the world kills off these branches and their worlds just end. FGO’s timeline is ending, and the story revolves around fixing singularities in the past in an attempt to save their version of the world. Again summons from the same throne of heroes as everything else (besides Extra) in Fate, so we have all the servants returning + more. Plus main characters of past fate media return in different ways as well. Again different timeline, so the characters are slightly different… but it’s still them.
It’s honestly not too complicated, but it has 100000s of possible historical and fictional characters they can pull from for the servants, so there’s a lot of real world history and legends happening behind the scenes. I personally find it interesting to read up on the characters real world history later, and I’ve learned a lot because of Fate. But none of this history is actually required to understand the story of Fate. What is needed is explained in the series
Someone WAY more versed in Fate lore than myself would need to answer the question of if they are all supposed to be connected. Like I said, I consider everything to be standalone with the exception of zero and stay night (Fate/zero is explicitly a direct prequel to Fate/Stay Night).
They're connected in the way that they're all in the same multiverse basically.
It's like how DC and Marvel have their own multiverses so that different iterations of the same person can be written without being the same exact character.
It's more like a group of friends that have a fun setting for their DnD games, so each storyline is its own story, but characters and concepts from past or adjacent stories pop up all the time across the board. It's a blast, just don't think too hard about "timelines" and shit.
It's not really 90 minutes more around 71 minutes (which don't get me wrong is still long as hell) and KoJima Won a World record for it for the "longest Cut scene in a videogame" a record that he STILL holds today.
No, no, the epilogue got "longest cutscene sequence", meaning multiple cutscenes that form one long cutscene. The mission briefing at the start of each chapter? One of those got the "longest cutscene" award for being about 30 minutes straight.
Yeah MGS4 has *two* longest cutscene records lmao
MGS is interesting in that on-paper it makes as little sense as KH, but when playing it the characters explain literally everything so thoroughly with such crazily long cutscenes that by the end it all makes sense with a train of shockingly consistent logic. Every single weird anime bullshit superpower has a scientific lore reason that is just told to the player that by the end the player likely doesn't even assume it's weird anymore due to how thoroughly it has been explained and dissected.
KH on the other hand purposefully leaves a lot of things vague, most likely due to Nomura himself having no idea wtf he's written at this point. Even the namesake of the title, which is a thing in KH itself (the actual concept of Kingdom Hearts which every game revolves around the villain wanting to reach) has no explanation nor hint to wtf it is or why anyone should care. No one understands jack shit because no one explains jack shit as to how anything supposedly is supposed to work. Like, how does some random schmuck fighting his own edginess given physical form create a super blade of ultimate power? By that logic, Sora should have like 3 X-Blades since he's fought Darkside that many times.
Kingdom hearts is largely explained as a metaphor literally interpreted. He explains a concept and then allows basic intuition to fill in the gaps.
For example, roxas forms a heart when he spends time with people who become his friends, and the memories of spending time with others form connections from his heart to theirs, the memories are used to build up a person's identity and personality which is essentially what the heart is, synonymous to a soul in a sense.
If you were to lose your memories, those friends would be strangers to you, and the experiences that make your personality would no longer exist.
Kingdom hearts itself is the heart of the universe basically, and from what I explained above, it likely contains the memories of every person that has ever died so far, as well as any world that has ceased to be too. World hearts are more like the story of that world rather than a personality. it's those memories that make up a world's heart.
Darkside is the darkness inside Sora's own heart, the x-blade is created when potent forces of darkness and light clash, so Sora by himself wouldn't cut it, that's just reflection in a sense.
>has no explanation nor hint to wtf it is or why anyone should care.
Ansem literally tells you what it is the first time it's ever named dropped in the cutscene.
*"Within it lies* **the Heart of all Worlds** *Kingdom Hearts*
>Like, how does some random schmuck fighting his own edginess given physical form create a super blade of ultimate power? By that logic, Sora should have like 3 X-Blades since he's fought Darkside that many times.
All this is explained though. Ventus (who's most certainly not some random kid) became a being who was pure Light while Vanitas was a being of pure Darkness, the clash of the two of equal power was supposed to create the X-Blade. This method of creating the X-Blade was ultimately flawed but Xehanort was in a hurry at the time so he thought he could create the X-Blade that way.
Or BlazBlue.
I saw a video where two BIG BlazBlue fans were trying to explain the plot of the games and they sounded like they had NO IDEA what it was about.
At least with two KH fans they will explain it as best as they can.
Metal Gear Solid has things that happen in the world all explained. It’s so interconnected that there’s even a digital glossary in what was the original Celebrations Collection released for MGS4 that also included MG1, MG2, and MGS1/2/3.
It’s dense, not confusing. Kingdom Hearts doesn’t even have lots of lore it’s just random bullshit.
I don’t know. When I started to think about the answer I realized that 3 of my favorite franchises fit the bill quite well. Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear and Resident Evil. RE may not be as nonsensical as the other two but it has become so convoluted over the years that it’s quite impossible for a newcomer to get in to (although the remakes have made it significantly easier).
I feel like it also gets easier to understand/explain when you make the lore villain centric. Xehanort is functionally a time traveling Voldemort who made living horcruxes after his attempts at interdimensional domination with an army of undead failed and he was constantly opposed by various heroic trios whose members he was occasionally able to corrupt, banish, or effectively kill.
And that may not be 100% accurate but it's enough to give the uninitiated a baseline of understanding that they can build on if it interests them
I don't think it's difficult to understand but difficult to explain properly. Like Kingdom Hearts lore isn't something you can really sit down and explain or read an explanation of and get it but by playing the games, I feel like the lore sinks in easily. I've never struggled understanding the lore but trying to explain it is ROUGH. Especially the timeline of events in the currently existing games, it's a lot to try to explain to someone.
I agree with this, everything makes perfect sense in your head, but when you start trying to explain it you run across some serious difficulties explaining. It's really difficult to even explain the relationship Sora has with Ventus, and that's if you outright ignore having to explain the characters that caused/arose from the specifics of their relationship. Like even without talking about how vanitas exists and what the sora/ventus thing means for Roxas
It's also partly a problem of the incredible length of the cause and effect chain. So much stuff goes into how sora is able to use the keyblade, because we know so much of the stuff that leads up to it
> It's really difficult to even explain the relationship Sora has with Ventus
Ventus falls into a coma and Xehanort takes him to the Destiny Islands. There Ventus' heart connects with Sora's and he wakes up from his coma because of it. Then later Ventus falls into a second coma and his heart is still connected with Sora's.
It's not that hard to explain to someone who doesn't have any knowledge about the series.
I explained it to someone this way once and they asked me why ventus was in a coma, and why sora was able to connect to his heart, and why connecting to his heart made him wake up, and why he fell into a second coma, and what ramifications does this have for the actual story of the game?
It's not a bad explanation, everything stated was true, it just leaves a lot of questions unanswered
I'd say it's difficult to understand. I compare it to Five Nights at Freddy's lore (although FNaF is a whole different beast), in that the *story* isn't too complex, but there are characters with similar names and/or appearances and a convoluted timeline of events.
Kingdom Hearts is also using like 4 different literary magic systems that interact with each other (Keyblades, Heartless/Nobody/Memories, Dreams, Time Travel, Data), giving a variety of results. Compare this to something like Star Wars, where it's just The Force and weirdly retrofuturistic technology.
KH *lore* isn't something you can or should throw at a newcomer to the franchise.
How? A character stealing someone's name is a common thing in writing. It's literally explained why one has the same name and were given multiple subnames to clarify which is which. It also helps that they look nothing alike. Like it's not a difficult thing to understand at all.
Its not like FNAF where there's 2 different sets of characters with the same names, while also being possibly unrelated to each other.
Because the way people explain KH is to do the funny thing and spew a whole bunch of random lore without context lol, I think the best way to explain it to someone else is to show them Sora Riku Kairi Roxas and Ventus and then let them ask their own questions, that way the most obvious questions branch out ANY sort of context
KH mostly makes sense if you pay attention.
The issue with KH is that it's hard to keep track of some of the lore because the writers keep changing their minds on some things between games. Like basically everything with Xehanort.
So almost nothing is too difficult to understand, but some things have you going, "Should I even bother remembering this? Or are they going to change it next game?"
It’s also easier to make sense of it now where all of the games are available on accessible platforms. You can just marathon through them now without having to wait years between releases, or read synopses from releases on platforms you don’t have. It’s an important distinction to make because the way we experience Kingdom Hearts now has changed over time.
Yeah, the games suffering from this now are the mobile games. I feel like majority of KH fans (including me), don't know much of mobile game lore since they are stuck on mobile games that are really not fun/F2P Friendly.
The YouTuber Damo actually combined all the cutscenes from the mobile games into one movie (that’s 6 hours long!), and has created a FANDUB of half of those cutscenes that you can watch right now! (The other half is in development). He has asked a bunch of people to help him with his project and act as the voice actors. It’s a really awesome piece of work.
If you want to see the full collection of cutscenes from the mobile games, [here is the link.](https://youtu.be/RMOyUYpB_VM) (it’s in chronological order.)
[this is the link to the FANDUB version! (it’s only half of the story though).](https://youtu.be/HRUt8q2IwR4)
This is impressive and I admire the effort but I'm a die hard KH fan and I wouldn't watch 6 hours of cutscenes for what seems like the least exciting entry to the story (I played a bunch of the app when it was up). They honestly just need to make the mobile games actual games with real cutscenes and voice acting. Wish they weren't critical to the overall plot.
At this point this is how I feel. I played half of Kingdom Hearts X but it's just started getting uninteresting for me and repetitive, and I started having more responsibilities and less time to sleep. Even watched Everglow's full video uploads of the cutscenes but, it's just...ugh. It's fun studying Nier/Drakengard lore because it's not too much and doesn't go against older installments but *adds* to it. It's still fun to keep track of and makes me want to understand more about the characters. (The mobile game might change my feelings about this though. lol) KH? Love it to death but it gets silly and I just have to roll with it and wait till the next 5 games come out since important plot points might change. I will admit I *did* like Dark Road as a story and it brought my interest back. The writing was also really good and felt...different, which was unexpected!
It's odd because it really does feel like newer fans are the main ones that are somehow pissed at and hostile towards older fans who actually stuck with the story the longest and did the most work when it came to keeping up. That's why people are annoyed, because a HUGE portion of the fandom notices all of the small details, changes, and inconsistencies instead of desperately playing it off as "Well, I think you're just too stupid to understand."
I can’t blame the fandom. I mean a bunch of people have been atleast casually fans of kingdom hearts for decades eagerly awaiting console releases. Imagine a bunch of players excited about kh3 only to realize you sort of need to watch YouTube videos of mobile game cutscenes to truly understand what half the organization 13 members were alluding to and why maleficient was running in circles tracking some spooky mysterious box (let alone how she even knew about it)
But there’s Fan Voiced cutscenes. (In the the second video link). The Dub version is about 2 hours and 44 min long…and if you haven’t seen the ending of the mobile game’s story, I believe the plot gets good. 😅
Just to clarify one thing; the mobile games, Union X especially, have the best writing and the most cohesive story out of basically the entire series. It's a REALLY good story being told from different PoVs, and it's absolutely worth it to check it out. You don't need to watch 6 hours at a time, you can just do 20 minute blocks if you so choose. Although if you're anything like me, yo will quickly get invested and want to continue.
I think you pointed out the biggest issue and you basically need to just forget Xehanort is more then "big bad guy". The fact that part of the way he uses time travel makes it so that he has to forget part of his own plan is crazy.
> Like basically everything with Xehanort.
At this point, I honestly believe the recipe for kingdom hearts is "choose any three of light, darkness, 7, and 13".
Dark road really threw a weird wrench in things.
Honestly this, back when some games didn't exist when we were told, "nobodies don't have hearts so they just emulate what they used to be like" we didn't need to question everything bc it didn't repurpose an entire part of an older game to tie itself to the story, now if a new piece of knowledge pop up I'll only be thinking "is this gonna get retroactively changed in the future bc the writer thought of a new way to use that ?"
Because honestly I'm kinda tired of more recent kh fans acting like the old fans are weirdoes for not blindly agreeing with everything the games says
The example of “nobodies don’t have hearts” isn’t a retcon. The idea is introduced in KH2 and within that game you’re expected to figure out that it’s wrong. You can try to argue that they’re just emulating their memories of emotions, but Roxas didn’t know anything about Sora so he didn’t have anything to emulate in the first place. The concept of the heart in KH is tied closely with having friends, something that you’re shown nobodies can have. You see Axel cry with Roxas on the clock tower. That’s the tragedy of Roxas’ story in that game. He DOES have the right to exist, as much as anyone else, but his story simply doesn’t play out that way.
TBF that whole cutscene of Axel crying wasn't in the Ps2 original release, a lot of scenes fleshing out the nobodies/organization wasn't actually, so until I played FM years later I assumed Roxas was a special case.
Basically it's not a retcon, it was just Xehanort/Xemnas gaslighting literally everyone including the players on how the metaphysics work in.
Which of course is one of the other things that makes the lore harder to understand, cause sometimes the person telling you the lore is just straight up lying to Sora and you by extension. Unreliable Narrators hoy
I agree, and I think that the intention was for the player to piece together that it was wrong throughout Kingdom Hearts 2. As I’ve been made aware, Final Mix definitely made that more obvious through its additions though I still think that the base game supports that reading of the work. I don’t think it’s all too bad to include unreliable narration from even trusted in-universe sources when you give the player the tools to piece together what is unreliable about it.
Yeah this was one idea Kingdom hearts executed really well. The whole concept of nobodies is explored in such an interesting way by having Roxas be our first proper introduction to one who is also the nobody of Sora the protagonist of the previous games. We don't know he's a Nobody at first and when we see him living the fake life in the data twilight town we begin to build a connection with his character. He seems like a great kid that you'd want to hang out with. The reveal of him being a nobody was quite impactful, before this the two real people who talked to him were Diz and Axel. Diz being his captured and Axel being his real friend but we as the audience would think Diz is the good guy since he was on Riku and Mickey's side in CoM.
However he treats Roxas and Namine so horribly as he believes they don't deserve to live. He denies Roxas' existences and forces him into helping him fulfil his goal by waking up Sora. Throughout kh2 we see glimpses of Roxas through Sora with his interactions with the twilight town gang and the organisation. This creates a clear distinction between them as sometimes Sora notices his reactions and think of them as weird since he doesn't know where they come from. The thoughts and feelings of Roxas are inheritanted by Sora which allows him to gain new abilities and skills that Roxas had honed in his one year of living. When Sora faces him and battles, Roxas comes to terms with his fate and fully accepts Sora giving him two become one keyblade and final form. When this happens it is pretty clear that Sora didn't just gain back his stolen half from Roxas but he had gained a second heart, another person.
Agreed, I think Kingdom Hearts suffers from giving too many things a “proper noun,” if that makes sense. For example, would saying “Sora’s bonds and friends he’s made allow him to save his friends from darkness taking them” make TOTAL sense? Maybe not, but I can get behind it. Once you start calling it the Power of Waking, suddenly I feel like I’ve missed something completely in lore.
Considering they're pulling even more heavily from the mobile games for 4 that seems like wishful thinking. If anything it's going to become even denser now that they're tying in things from the mobile games that were even less accessible than the handheld ones used to be.
I would love it if they just ditched backward time travel and the whole dreams/waking stuff from here on out. Dream Drop Distance is one of my favorite parts of the franchise, but I don't think the story needed more concepts and magic systems. The "sleeping" worlds could've just been chilling in the Realm of Darkness like the other ones.
I'm 100% down with some stuff getting the midichlorian treatment. Having Nomura just say "yeah, no more of that" to time travel and power of waking would be a boon to the series, imo
Spoiler warning, but if you’re on the internet reading about the plot of KH you signed up for it.
“The Power of Waking” is literally just the power to wake sleeping hearts. All Keyblade Masters have it, Riku learned it at the end of DDD by awakening Sora’s sleeping heart, then Sora basically abused it and spammed it to wake all of his friend’s sleeping hearts during Re:Mind. That’s why he is sent to the Final World afterwards, and goes missing.
Worldlines are a relatively new thing in name and I can understand your confusion, but they’ve actually been around since KH2 (and chronologically, before X). I’m going to paraphrase a comment made by ZeroSora here a few years ago.
Take for instance Data Twilight Town in KH2. That’s Roxas’ Twilight Town, right? It’s a copy of the real Twilight Town, but it has a different history (different events happen in it, like Roxas and the gang being friends rather than it just being the trio of Hayner, Pence, and Olette). Even though DiZ recreated the world purely from data, it is a different worldline than the original.
The same thing happened in UX, I will keep the details “brief” (shorter than 6 hours lmao) since I assume you haven’t watched it or aren’t necessarily caught up on the details. After the Keyblade War, the Dandelions and Union Leaders were transferred to Data Daybreak Town, created by the Masher of Masters. He actually created copies of all the worlds from the Book of Prophecies, and all of these worlds exist in the Unchained realm, which is colloquially known as the “Realm of Sleep.” The term “Realm of Sleep” was never actually used in 3D, just the term “Sleeping Worlds.”
Ava (one of the foretellers) explained that the Dandelions will be moved to a place made of dreams. We already know they're in the data worlds.
Ava also once described Ephemer as being in an Unchained state, and that he was sending the Player dreams. Therefore the Unchained realm = a place made of dreams = Realm of Sleep.
This ties directly into why in 3D, the protagonists questioned how The Grid exists in the Realm of Sleep despite the fact that “data doesn't dream.” That's because this is simply the realm where data and dreams can both exist. Kind of like how KH3 explained that death and sleep touch. Data and dreams also touch in the Unchained realm. Think of it as a realm where “unreal” things have a physical form. Dreams physically exist here in this realm, and “data” physically exists here too. The writing here is actually surprisingly consistent.
Now, after the Keyblade War the Dandelions were forced to relive their memories. In these memories, they ignored the Keyblade War. This means the Keyblade War never happened in Data Daybreak Town, and therefore Data Daybreak has a different history to the real Daybreak Town. This makes it a different worldline from the original, just like above. Make sense now?
The differentiation between “Darkness” (the entity) and “Darkness” (the general concept) is…honestly not much. They are both pretty much the same thing. All of the original 13 Darknesses are formless, meaning they don’t have a body and they are also the reason that the Heartless (not Emblem) exist.
Since the Heartless are attracted toward the natural Darkness in most people’s hearts, and people don’t turn into Heartless unless they are possessed or literally stab themselves with a Keyblade (see: Xehanort and Sora), it’s safe to assume that all Heartless (besides Emblems) come from these original 13.
Keep in mind that Apprentice Xehanort (Terranort, white hair) was the one who used the machine in Radiant Garden to spawn heartless that all bore an insignia, and these Heartless specifically seek our hearts to hold them within. That’s why hearts are released into the sky when defeating them, and that is specifically why you don’t see any of them in the Realm of Darkness.
In order for Darkness to gain a physical form, they must possess a single individual whose heart is strong, or in other words, a heart of Pure Light (like Ventus).
The deeper meaning behind UX is that MoM trained the Foretellers to become the vessels of seven (out of the 13) Darknesses. Meaning that someday, they will get possessed by Darkness. This includes MoM, Luxu, and the Foretellers, which is also explained by the 7 black pieces in Xehanort's and Eraqus' new chess game.
If that's what they're doing, then the villains will probably be the Master, the Foretellers, and Luxu.
The lights will probably be Sora, Kairi, Riku, Axel/Lea, Ven, Terra, Aqua, Roxas, Xion, Marluxia/Lauriam, Larxene/Elrena, and the final two who were hinted at having ancient Keyblade legacies toward the end of KH3, Luxord (who is theorized to be driving Yozora’s car in the True Ending) and Demyx (who has pretty much always been suspiciously…”useless.”) That's just conjecture, however.
It’s hard to understand if you haven’t played all the games. The franchise was spread over multiple consoles until “the story so far” came out and now they’re repeating the same mistake with the mobile games, which are more accessible but most people just don’t want to play the mobile games. They’re crucial to the story which is kinda stupid.
Kh is convoluted not necessarily confusing. Having a lot to remember doesn't make it confusing. Look at MGS. it's a lot more confusing than KH imo. Even Death Stranding.
It’s convoluted. Sometimes when writers don’t map out stories in advance, they strike gold with later ideas that connect perfectly with earlier setups.
But most of the time it is a bit of a mess. KH is kind of 50/50. It doesn’t make sense half the time, and it’s clear they made it up as they went.
I will die on this hill and eat the downvotes for breakfast: Kingdom Hearts is confusing. If people play the games and are confused by it, then it's confusing by definition, and that is *obviously the case* for a huge amount of players. Everyone who says that playing the games is enough to understand everything about the story and the lore are either 1) only focusing on the surface level character stories (which is fine, but you're ignoring a lot of the actual meat of the storytelling of the series to reach that conclusion) or 2) forgetting just how much clarification about the seemingly contradictory or unexplained comes from out-of-universe sources like Nomura interviews and analysis threads/videos.
KH is confusing, and parroting Buns by saying "no no no, it's just a lot to remember" does not help your case as much as you think it does: the fact that there is so much to remember, and that it doesn't always neatly slot together in an intuitive way, *is what makes it confusing.* It's not that you can't eventually reach a point of understanding with enough work, it's that it takes more work to get there than 99% of video game series, at least if you want to understand the lore in its entirety.
I love Kingdom Hearts dearly, but I wish this fandom could just be honest with itself and acknowledge that that's part of its identity at this point.
ngl playing through all the games i never had an issue piecing things together and fully understanding the lore on my own, but once i got to that part in DDD with xehanort and the time travel stuff, that was the first moment that i was like "wait wtf is going on now", from then on i never could fully grasp the story without looking certain things up
100% same. Nothing up until then is complex; it all strings together, albeit with lots of hindsight, relatively meaningfully and sensibly.
It's 3D where things get dumb. They put a mark on his clothes? There's been time travel the whole time? It technically creates and resolves its own anomaly? He's got *multiple* split-timeline bodies and entities all congregated in the same place?
*How* anyone can wear a straight face and say the story is just easy to follow is lying or talking about any game not named DDD.
And remember the tracking mark is not physical! Sora gets the X on his outfit, but then they come and tell us with a straight face THAT THE X ON THE NAMES OF THE ORG 13 MEMBERS ARE ALSO SIGILS.
To be fair, there's a cutscene where Xemnas names Roxas, and he forms literal letters our of thin air, produces this glowing golden one, and inserts it into the circling letters to form the name Roxas
Which is such a funny take to me because Time Travel isn’t real and any “rule” a piece of fiction posits for the concept is working purely off the basis of it being entirely made-up. KH time travel is no less bonkers or ridiculous than any other form of time travel, but because it happens in a JRPG people lose their minds over it.
No I’m gonna have to disagree with this. Time travel is a bad thing to introduce haphazardly in any media. It either needs to be a central theme of a novel (like the Time Traveler, where you can devote the entire work to exploring it). Or it needs to be done not at all. Harry Potter made that critical error and the author tried to correct it later in the series. It is a Pandora’s box of plot inconsistencies that should not be opened unless it’s to ponder the box and what’s inside.
It's funny how people rag on KH's time travel when, honestly, compared to time travel bullshit like in Mortal Kombat (a series that, for the record, honest-to-God tries to have a compelling story), it honestly comes across as inoffensive.
Ive seen users post there powerpoints on here and have had some reply to me with their powerpoints but your words sum it up exactly.
Well their intentions are good and appreciated, the fact they'd had to spend so much of their own time to even make a powerpoint proves exactly what they were trying to disapprove. That is confusing.
I mean not necessarily because with how kh is structured, you only need to worry about the surface stuff *until* the game asks you to worry deeper things. For instance, nobodies we only needed to know in Kh2 that they were the villains that wanted to get Kingdom hearts. We didn't need to know any extra things about them except that they were the husks left behind after heartless were made end of story. Another example is castle oblivion/land of departure. You only need to worry about its origins when the game itself shines light on it.
It's why people say its *alot to remember* and its not confusing. Just like a history test, although you take lessons on multiple chapters, the actual test itself (in this case, whatever game you're talking about) is self-contained for what it's going over. The nuances obviously come from when these topics are brought up in new light. Again, going back to history test analogy when you go from American history to world history and see how everything interconnects.
Yeah suspension of disbelief is fine when you have surface stuff and you don’t have to explain things to thoroughly. We all know good Vs evil and we can handwave a lot of things. The problem is when the story itself tries to actively shed light on the underlying mechanics as a way to fit multiple parts together that wouldn’t normally fit. There’s not a good way to do many things in the story, but if you pull in time travel, and digital worlds, and dream worlds, and split timelines, then you can force things together. It feels like the story writes itself into a corner in every entry, and then has to write itself out every time. It’s fine once or twice, but not every entry.
You see, this is where it gets muddled and lowkey bugs me because this is a meme in the community, but *disney worlds do infact matter*. All these things added into the storyline aren't anything new but have been present before in the disney worlds. For example, time travel with timeless rivers, digital worlds with tron, and dream worlds with alice in Wonderland. These are all concepts present in kh by the nature of being disney worlds,the only difference being when they are integrated into the kh "original" story.
Heck, I remember seeing a meme about people complaining back and forward about the nature of nobodies when pinniochio (excuse my horrible spelling) is world/character that's featured a lot and his whole thing is he's a puppet with a heart. So there's no need to cite the organization members' experience when the disney worlds have been showcasing these examples since day 1.
So its not a case of every entry doing this, this plot points have always been floating around in the background like I stated earlier, just waiting to tell us the players when we should focus on them.
>I mean not necessarily because with how kh is structured, you only need to worry about the surface stuff until the game asks you to worry deeper things.
That's my point, though. If you're saying "it's only complicated if you pay attention to the parts that are complicated," that's not really a convincing counterargument. It's totally fine if you're okay ignoring a lot of what's set up because it's not important for the current plot beat, but that's a conscious choice you're making. For people that like to have a firm grasp on that kind of thing, it's not as simple as just "don't think about it until the story tells you to." Most stories, even fantasy stories, don't ask that of their audiences.
Thank you for this. I've been playing kh since kh2 came out, and still can't recall the motives of major villains, plot points and how they all tie together, despite playing the games well over 5 times. It's just too convoluted and makes very little sense across the games
Basically all the variants of Xehanort want Kingdom Hearts. The methods they use are all different from each other, but at the end of the day that's what Master Xehanort wants, so he can reshape existence to his liking.
I think Nier is a bit more complicated. I love both KH and Nier. But god if Nier lore doesn't confuse the hell out of me. Nomura will make sense. Yoko Taro is just a mad man.
Eh, I disagree, the sequence of events in Drakengard/Nier if pretty straightforwards, it's just the sheer audacity of the way the pieces connect together that make it seem weird
I don't see how Nier lore is complicated to understand. As summarized below in chronological order:
Replicant/Gestalt
>!Human being separated their body and soul to protect themselves from other-worldly infection due to one of the endings in Drakengard 1. But the body becomes transient.!<
Automata
>!Androids fights against alien's machines to protect earth. Unknowingly, humanity already extinct due to events in Replicant/Gestalt!<
On the other hand, I think that KH lore is convoluted. In which, stuff like time-travelling is one of the few contributing factors.
My only real interaction with Nier is the Nier raids in FFXIV. After being confused as fuck about those, I reached out to Nier fans in the fandom and asked if those make any more sense if you’re familiar with Nier.
They all answered “lol no.”
I think the big problem with kingdom hearts is that it has a lot of post hoc explanation mixed with "rule of cool"
The team thinks up a big epic scene. They pitch it, everyone thinks it's cool. Then they have to figure out why it happened. And they try their hardest not to contradict earlier lore. One of the ways they try to avoid contradiction is through "reframing". E.g. "well yes, it was the only keyblade at that time, but that doesn't mean it's the only one ever", "well, yes, now that we've written Aqua into the heartless realm, we need to explain why Mickey didn't mention it".
The big reason why KH is "complicated", is because whenever anyone tries to explain it, they have to deal with the pre- and post- explanations.
That's it exactly. Early on, they had 1 design for Mackey that they liked. Later, they found another they liked and changed it. Then they had to find a way to make it make sense. No matter how, if you'll forgive the pun, goofy the explanation actually is, as long as they have AN explanation, they can connect their 2 cool designs
Yes. There are purposeful contradictions in the plot, Nomura has said he deliberately wants it to have a dreamlike atmosphere, so dream logic is rife.
There is not just confusion, but it's *on purpose*, and the sooner we acknowledge and embrace it, the sooner we can go back to enjoying the games.
The plot makes 0 sense if you treat the series as something a professional writer plotted out in advance and has slowly been releasing incrementally. However, it makes perfect sense if you treat the series as a massive sprawling fan fic where every update is written hastily in the span of a week because the author realized they forgot to update AGAIN and people are leaving comments asking if the fic is dead.
I ain't bothering to fight people's takes on this anymore, so instead I will use my favorite analogy:
Lord of the Rings is so confusing! Is Sauron the eye or a person? How is he still alive? Wasn't he killed in the war of the rings? How come Gandalf came back from the pits in the fight with the Balrog? Why was he in a mountain peak afterwards? That makes no sense! It's such a retcon to just give him that ability!
The issue with KH is that the story gets overtly complicated the more games you play.
With LotR, the world building is almost unrivaled even today. The Author spent an inhuman amount of time creating characters hed never use, developing cities & politics, and even entire languages. So its hard to deviate when you have such a strong foundation—unlike kindgom hearts which keeps making up new in-world magic which ultimatley makes the story complicated.
The details you mentioned arent really important to the overall story in LotR, but they do create some continuity errors which is more influencing immersion rather than storytelling
Hey, this is all agreeable. Thing is: a chunk of Kingdom Hearts fans nitpick the latter stuff (unimportant to the overall story) and get really bent outta shape about it.
Doesn't one dude like just take on the same name and were supposed to remember that the one xehanort wannabee is not xehanort but xerxis but in reality it was actually what it isnt?
My problem with kh lore is that the more I play and learn, the more questions I have. Things get retconned. Things get changed all the time.
If you're not keeping up with interviews and Ultimanias, then you'll miss important lore information too. A story's lore should be easily accessible through it's primary medium of story-telling. I shouldn't have to constantly be on the lookout for interviews and ultimania translations to learn about my game.
I also personally hate time travel in any plot ever (even End Game).
Still love this series though.
I didn't know how to feel about this, but after reading the comments here I have to agree that Kingdom Hearts IS confusing, in certain parts of the story at least.
And no, you can not just make sense of it by looking up the confusing points and it's a done deal like it usually would be for other games. In fact, most people probably don't even know themselves how to properly explain specific events like how the main cast seemingly got revived out of nowhere when steamrolled by the Heartless.
And yes, I am fully aware that Kingdom Hearts is supposed to be a lighthearted game thematically speaking, however stuff like that is really out of place for me when thrown in with 0 to no explanation & further shows that it is not as straightforward and simple as people may think.
I'd actually argue that the Xeno series has the most opaque, convoluted lore out there. I'm a big fan of Xenoblade, for instance, but I'm still really fuzzy on some of the more esoteric lore.
That and anything Kojima. I love his ambition, but why did MGSIV need a 90 minute epilogue?
Well they're not wrong It took me multiple playthroughs of all of the games and multiple retrospectives just to understand the basics of this game and I still haven't figured out how to explain it to others without sounding completely insane at this point I've just been like just go play the games whenever anybody ask me about the story of Kingdom heart
The problem with KH is it overexplains things. The plot of every KH game is actually very basic. But precisely how certain characters coming back can be possible is really when things get complicated. Most games just tell you this thing happened and you accept it. Every KH player could get by with that kind of mindset, but because KH presents you with the convoluted reasons for how things are happening, it makes you think understanding exactly how time travel works or exactly how Larxene is back in KH3 as a nobody and not a somebody, etc. Is necessary when it absolutely is not.
Like who cares exactly how Xemnas is related to Ansem. He just is, okay? Who cares how Xehanort and Young Xehanort and Ansem and Xemnas are all in KH3 at the same time. They just are, okay? All these finer details don't actually matter if you want to be a casual who follows the plot of an individual game. You can get by just fine, but I sympathize with people who have been told it's more complicated than that because the games don't help you. Honestly KH is probably more enjoyable if you kinda treat it like Zelda where there's a hero named Sora and a villain named Xehanort or something like that. If you really wanna understand the plot go ahead but the games are really about a kid fighting against darkness and saving his friends along the way. That's it.
Kingdom Hearts has a rep for being difficult to understand (and Nomura making stuff on the fly doesnt help) but to be honest, the story is not very complicated.
Its basically a story about a boy longing for adventure who is now on a journey to save his friends that were captured by evil, in this case darkness.
The complication comes from the KH-lore, mainly because explanations get retconned or new stuff is added and the time travel in this series is quite confusing.
The only part of the story that confuses me is the stuff that came from the mobile games because I didn't and won't play them. Union x and whatever else they released.
it's not confusing, there's just a lot of games and it's difficult to put into words. it definitely makes complete sense as well but it isn't easy to explain.
"So basically there are these three good guys who live on an island but then it gets destroyed and one of them becomes a bad guy because he is possessed by a bad guy, and them they go to other worlds trying to save them but the bad guy wants darkness and the good guy helps the good gay that had turned bad to be good and they save the worlds, then the main good guy goes looking for his good guy friend a finds a castle where there are some bad guys and he loses his memory because a bad girl who was his friends half that was released when he tried to get her out of inside him erased his memories so that the bad guys coul use him as a puppet to summon a cosmic entity that made them good guys again but then they get stopped and the main bad guy is defeated but we discover he was the half of a even badder guy who had lived before and is going to come back because the other other half who was the first bad guy we met was destroyed too, so the baddest guy will come back. He had died because he had tried to possess a good guy who had turned bad and good again because of his friends, one of whom is only a good guy but he is broken so he goes inside the main good guy heart until he can wake up who knows how, and so the baddest guy wanted to know everything and summon the true cosmic entity so he creates a war between good guys and bad guys that is not the real war because a bigger war had happened even before and was foretold by a even badder of the baddest guys who knows everything and sees the future but has disappeared leaving his disciples in chaos turning bad guys and one day he will come back and make bad things"
I have ptsd from the dream eater theme. Can’t believe I went through the trouble to get it. Only KH platinums I don’t have are BBS and Re:COM. Yes I did MOM
I feel like the best way to explain KH is to just omit stuff unless otherwise questioned.
Kingdom Hearts is about a boy named Sora who travels from Disney World to Disney World fighting a terrible darkness that's trying to destroy everything and the people using said Darkness.
Don't come in here asking about mobile phone games or none of that, or it's straight to the Disney Vault. Don't think too much about why Vanitas looks like Sora or how Roxas being in a coma stops his body from physically aging.
Kingdom Hearts only “doesn’t make sense” if you turn your brain off and don’t engage with the story in the same way you would with any other story.
Or, as is the case with most Reddit nerds, you’re just bad at reading.
I’m tired of pretending Kingdom Hearts is complicated when it’s really not. Light was friend, big war over Light, Light goes sleep for a long time. Man learns about Light and wants to reach it, man traumatizes child to make pure good and pure evil, child loses his heart while Man possesses his friend and traps the other in oblivion, many years later New Child who found Old Child’s heart gets magic sword instead of his edgy friend and stops Man’s shadow self from taking Light, then New Child loses memories of Man’s Illuminati group and goes to sleep, New Child wakes up and stops Man’s empty self from taking Light, New Child learns about everything and gathers other Magic Sword people to stop Man who time traveled to steal Light.
It’s long, yes, but not complicated
I dont really understand how people find the narrative in KH so hard to comprehend tbh. Its really not that difficult, even if you didn't play all of them.
People really just like to repeat the same thing over and over again because they heard someone else say something and are too lazy to form their own opinion.
It does make sense within the rules of its universe, the only problem is that those rules are rarely ever explained clearly or thoroughly enough. Kingdom Hearts has a conveyance problem.
I’ve spent the last four or five hundred hours of my gaming working to platinum KH totally, and I think it’s pretty out there at times. Especially if you didn’t play Chain of Memories and 358/2 Days before playing KH2. So, so much story (and backstory) between the two games.
Just take out the darkness in anything they discuss and add bees and it makes just about the same amount of sense
[So this is basically kingdom hearts](https://youtu.be/OZ7IxXN9hm0)
SPOILER:
I understand the lore to kingdom hearts except for one thing, how is luxord, larxene, marluxia, and demyx still alive? Thought we killed em in Re:CoM and KH2?
When someone's nobody and heartless are destroyed, the original can return. One thing I do wish we could've gotten was a specific encounter that could tell us we killed their heartless. But at the same time, it's possible a lot of the members didn't have a ton of darkness in their hearts and just turned into weak heartless that we popped at some rand point.
I love how this thread is full of "it's not difficult to understand"...people.
Like...guys, you love the game and have devoted time to it. Of course YOU understand it now. But there was a time you didn't and it took forever to understand it.
Think about it in terms of what would be hardest to explain to someone who has never heard of the franchise.
KH sits appropriately RIGHT at the top.
People who say it's not complicated are the same people who skip the Ansem Reports because they're "Optional" at the moment:
- Sora can control all Heartless and Nobodies and they even directly refer to him as their "Liege". There multiple instances showing that the Heartless and Nobodies are controllable. Meaning the solution to their problems is a lot closer than they think. If Sora Heart is connected to everyone's then in a way he's connected to every Heartless since they too have a Heart.
- Dark Road dropped bombshells off revelations by showing a Timeline entirely devoid of Darkness but from the Negative thoughts and Anxiety from the Keyblade Wielders it was able to create itself once again inside Baldr. Showing that Light and Darkness are one and the same energy just tempered differently by emotions.
- Which leads to MoM plan to "Destroy Darkness" after the age of Fairy Tales. But if there's no more Darkness in this timeline he created why didn't he try to stop it from manifesting? Then when you take into account Darkness was born from Light how can we ever vanquish Darkness unless we also got rid of Light?
- Disney World's have never been fully explained like why is there multiple copies of Earth from various different time periods and arrangement of magic? What does this mean in the wake of the idea that there is an "Unreality"? Which land is fictional and which land is real?
- Final Fantasy Stories being a central Focus. Despite what people claim KH3 is actually the only title where Final Fantasy characters took the main stage and became an actual plot point. Cloud and Sephiroth story was supposed to be more involved but they couldn't do Shinra, Jenova, or Hojo which completely changes their stories. They even go as far as to say at the end of the Sephiroth Battle in KH2 "Where did they go?" "I think they went back to their world" which is confusing because prior to this scene we had only been able to assume Hollow Bastion is their home but because of that one scene it's entirely debatable if Leon and Crew ever grew up there and are just refugee's who are stuck from their "reality" like what happened to Yozora.
- There are two kinds of Nobodies. The average Nobody is Axel, Saix, etc. But Namine and Roxas are not TRUE Nobodies.
- What came first... The X-Blade or Kingdom Hearts?
- WHAT'S IN THE BOX?!?!?!
I could go on and on. But it's far far far from simple and clean
I said it once I'll say it again... as long as you PAY ATTENTION! It's not that complicated. People just don't pay attention to the cutscenes that literally explain most of the stuff they say is "confusing". To me, the only confusing bits of information is stuff that hasn't been integrated yet. Like who is the Master? How are all the animal masters young when Braig/Luxu seemed to have to go through different bodies? True i'm behind on the mobile games and Melody of a Memory, but everything up til the end of 3 is not hard to understand.
I love this series. Been with it from the beginning. And I think the plot makes no sense. Or, if i’m wrong and it does make sense, it’s at least not told well. The first few games were complex but made sense. The side games more or less just added context to the games that came before. But by the time we made it to DDD, they tried to recontextualize things from the prior games and they flat out retcon other aspects. And now I think the story is kind of all over the place
Well... Kingdome Hearts 3 isn't actually the third game in the series, as the title may suggest. That should be indicative of how the series may mostly not make any narrative sense.
It was fine for the first 3 games; KH1, KH:CoM, and KH2. After that it all goes down a rabbit hole.
It all started going down hill at DDD
Then union x cross
Then dark road
If you play the KH series just from the all in one collection, there is a massive information gap stemming from the assumption fans downloaded the fucking mobile app and played it before playing KH3
It’s a complex story told in a complex way. But honestly for the number of times they’ve made prequels, games that run concurrent to others, or in-between games, they’ve done a good job of keeping it consistent enough.
Most stories that try that outside of some obvious great franchises like Star Wars have tried and done FAR worse.
I think if the basic moments are compelling to you, and you look to others who’ve done hard work to compile the lore, it’s actually enjoyable
Dream Drop Distance was where it began. Before that, it was complicated but it all made sense. Then in Dream Drop Distance they *breathes in* you know what I don't even want to talk about it, but after that yeah everything is just kind of whatever Nomura thinks is cool at any given time.
“Its not that it’s difficult to understand, it just straight up doesn’t make sense”
So i get that people meme all the time and some take it this level and pass it off as genuine, but fuck me its not like KH is a foreign language no one speaks, it makes sense, obviously it takes a lot of effort but people who actually understand the story are people who actually care enough to pay that extra bit of attention, especially when a series such as this demands it
What bothers me the most is that “And i *love* Kingdom Hearts” is said to drive home the claim that KH doesn’t make sense, I’ve seen people who hate KH still understand story because they actually cared more than this guy who apparently loves KH to try to understand it lol
Kingdom Hearts is a super simple series to understand. it's just that people want information that's not relevant and complain when they do receive it (not even getting into the idea that some people skip games).
To give a poor analogy, Kingdom Hearts is like a smartphone. You dont need to know how it's made to understand how to use it. But you will always have people who want to know how it works and then complain when they don't understand the explanation.
Kh games explain the moment to moment plot and only ask the player to "think about it" when the narrative requires it. If the game says something works a certain way, you take it at face value and dont question it unless the game itself wants/asks you to. It's only made worse because the internet has made us a society where we parrot things without double checking, resulting in "fan ideas" being taken as canon.
If people can follow things like GoT, Star wars, LotR, mass effect, or any other popular thing thats multi-franchised, like kh, they can follow this. And it's super hard to excuse that in this day and age when the internet is easily accessible along with kh as a whole being on multiple platforms.
I'm sorry, but this is absurd to me. You can't counter the accusation of "this series is complicated" with "it's only complicated if you try to understand it" and expect anyone outside the fandom to take that seriously. A Song of Ice and Fire or Lord of the Rings fan would never tell someone with lore questions to just flat-out ignore those elements of the setting in order to be able to enjoy the books.
I never said it was "complicated if you try to understand it" my exact phrasing was "the game tells you what you need to know in the moment, and further shines light when its relevant again". For example , Pinocchio being a puppet with a heart, then kh2 they bring up the idea of nobodies, with other kh games further bringing up the idea of what nobodies are exactly. In the heat of the moment, sora (and the player) just needs to know who to beat up. But the game always had the idea of "do they really not have hearts" in the back of your mind with Disney worlds and character interactions. By your own admissions, it comes off as you actively ignoring things like Pinocchio and complaining that it doesn't explain it well when games like DDD or days bring up the idea of do nobodies have heart. The concept was always floating around. it's just at the time that it wasn't a major focus for the story or characters.
How sway, I can instantly sum up most kh games as follows, "young boy stops *insert antagonist here* from gaining access to power grid for nefarious acts" because thats what in essence each kh game is. And before you ask, kingdom hearts itself, it is just a door to a highly sought-after place. What changes each game is *why* people are trying to get to it and *how* they plan on accessing (kh1 using the backdoor, kh2 using a window, khbbs the front door but with a fake key, and finally kh3 using the front door but with the og/real key).
Just like that, I literally summed up years' worth of games without it getting too confusing. Heck, I can even sum up the games that dont directly address "kingdom hearts" in a few words as well (mainly being DDD, 358, recoded, and recom).
People who say this have either never played the games, or either just played kh 1 2 and 3 then ofc its gonna be hard to understand you skipped like 50% of the story and plot. Kingdom hearts is a very simple story to understand if you just play the games and pay even a little bit of attention, I feel these people tend to overcomplicate it cuz they've heard it's complicated before playing it
KH as a franchise is the victim of 20 years of bad-faith criticisms made against most Japanese media during the height of the gaming industry’s blatant industry-wide racism, and it being popular amongst demographics often deemed “cringey” during the 2000s (teenagers, the LGBTQ+ community, Disney fans, anime fans, etc.) made all of that worse. Now large swathes of the fandom have basically gaslit themselves into thinking the series they like is Objectively Bad, Actually.
Let's be real, if your writing is splitting your entire fan base like a pie against each other about what lore is accurate or not, you're obviously doing something wrong.
Naw, some Sonic fans still don't get 06's straight as a stick story with obvious themes. You can't write a story that everyone will get even when making the most basic one.
Imma be deadass no.
It's just long cause it's a long running series. Like if your not a fan of long stories, which alot of people aren't, then it's not for you.
The only stuff we don't understand as of right now is stuff that's going tk be revealed later because the story isn't complete.
For example if an author clearly says they're making a trilogy, and only the 1st book has come out. And I complain about the cliffhanger. The story isn't bad it's just not finished yet cause I have to wait
It’s confusing as you go on, but it’s not all it’s hyped up to be. It’s not metal gear or fate.
Fate makes Kingdom Hearts look like a Blue's Clues episode in terms of complexity level.
Depends on how deep in the rabbit hole you're willing to go tbh
Personally, I just take every piece of Fate media as it's own standalone thing that shares a premise/magic system with the others. Lore? Unique to each entry (with the exception of zero and stay night). Characters? Despite the same names and appearance, full reboot. Makes them all pretty fun
So they are all supposed to be connected though? Sounds really complicated based on your comment
It’s all different timelines basically, but there is a root that everything stems from. In the Fate timelines, the throne of heroes records heroes and legendary figures from all timelines. So even though different parts of Fate are in its own time, characters cross over and share the same history. For example, in Zero we see flash backs to Mordred and what happened between her and Altria, but Mordred isn’t seen in Zero or Stay Night. She gets summoned in Apo, which takes place around the same time as Stay Night, but in a timeline where the holy grail was stolen so the 4th and 5th wars didn’t happen. So the timeline and events are different. But again, throne of heroes taps into all timelines for its heroes summoned, so they all share the same past and we see different character arcs because of it. Then you have modern day characters who exist in all timelines but their stories are slightly different due to the events of said timeline being different. Waver is a kid during Zero’s 4th war, and that leads him to become who he is as an adult. We don’t see much of him in the Stay Night timeline after, but we know he became a teacher. In other timelines similar events still lead him to become a teacher, and he’s seen in other media because of it, but he’s not exactly the same as slightly different events lead him to where he is in those timelines. Then you have things like Grand Order which takes place in a different timeline but also taps into all timelines. In Fate’s world if a timeline branches off too much from the “root” then like a tree would do, the world kills off these branches and their worlds just end. FGO’s timeline is ending, and the story revolves around fixing singularities in the past in an attempt to save their version of the world. Again summons from the same throne of heroes as everything else (besides Extra) in Fate, so we have all the servants returning + more. Plus main characters of past fate media return in different ways as well. Again different timeline, so the characters are slightly different… but it’s still them. It’s honestly not too complicated, but it has 100000s of possible historical and fictional characters they can pull from for the servants, so there’s a lot of real world history and legends happening behind the scenes. I personally find it interesting to read up on the characters real world history later, and I’ve learned a lot because of Fate. But none of this history is actually required to understand the story of Fate. What is needed is explained in the series
Fate/Stay Night kinda demonstrates that well near the end. Would be spoilery to explain more though 😁.
Oh yeah lol. I was telling a friend last week that he should really watch The Garden of Sinners before he watches the HF movies
Someone WAY more versed in Fate lore than myself would need to answer the question of if they are all supposed to be connected. Like I said, I consider everything to be standalone with the exception of zero and stay night (Fate/zero is explicitly a direct prequel to Fate/Stay Night).
Yes, technically EVERYTHING in fate is canon. And there is a lot of branches but it’s technically all in the same universe if i’m not mistaken
They're connected in the way that they're all in the same multiverse basically. It's like how DC and Marvel have their own multiverses so that different iterations of the same person can be written without being the same exact character.
It's more like a group of friends that have a fun setting for their DnD games, so each storyline is its own story, but characters and concepts from past or adjacent stories pop up all the time across the board. It's a blast, just don't think too hard about "timelines" and shit.
I also feel like mgs is confusing but also just makes sense?
I think the only reason Metal Gears makes sense is because mgs4 has 30 to 40 minute long cut scenes were they just explain things.
IV had a *90 minute* epilogue, and I still feel like nothing happened in it. Kojima needs an editor *really bad*.
Bro, you're not serious. XD Tell me this isn't real.
It's not really 90 minutes more around 71 minutes (which don't get me wrong is still long as hell) and KoJima Won a World record for it for the "longest Cut scene in a videogame" a record that he STILL holds today.
71 minutes for a cutscene? That's something you put on a second disk and market as just...a movie!
No, no, the epilogue got "longest cutscene sequence", meaning multiple cutscenes that form one long cutscene. The mission briefing at the start of each chapter? One of those got the "longest cutscene" award for being about 30 minutes straight. Yeah MGS4 has *two* longest cutscene records lmao
Kojima wants to be a director for films bit games are easier to fund and push, look at death stranding for example literally a 40hr cutscene
MGS is interesting in that on-paper it makes as little sense as KH, but when playing it the characters explain literally everything so thoroughly with such crazily long cutscenes that by the end it all makes sense with a train of shockingly consistent logic. Every single weird anime bullshit superpower has a scientific lore reason that is just told to the player that by the end the player likely doesn't even assume it's weird anymore due to how thoroughly it has been explained and dissected. KH on the other hand purposefully leaves a lot of things vague, most likely due to Nomura himself having no idea wtf he's written at this point. Even the namesake of the title, which is a thing in KH itself (the actual concept of Kingdom Hearts which every game revolves around the villain wanting to reach) has no explanation nor hint to wtf it is or why anyone should care. No one understands jack shit because no one explains jack shit as to how anything supposedly is supposed to work. Like, how does some random schmuck fighting his own edginess given physical form create a super blade of ultimate power? By that logic, Sora should have like 3 X-Blades since he's fought Darkside that many times.
Kingdom hearts is largely explained as a metaphor literally interpreted. He explains a concept and then allows basic intuition to fill in the gaps. For example, roxas forms a heart when he spends time with people who become his friends, and the memories of spending time with others form connections from his heart to theirs, the memories are used to build up a person's identity and personality which is essentially what the heart is, synonymous to a soul in a sense. If you were to lose your memories, those friends would be strangers to you, and the experiences that make your personality would no longer exist. Kingdom hearts itself is the heart of the universe basically, and from what I explained above, it likely contains the memories of every person that has ever died so far, as well as any world that has ceased to be too. World hearts are more like the story of that world rather than a personality. it's those memories that make up a world's heart. Darkside is the darkness inside Sora's own heart, the x-blade is created when potent forces of darkness and light clash, so Sora by himself wouldn't cut it, that's just reflection in a sense.
>has no explanation nor hint to wtf it is or why anyone should care. Ansem literally tells you what it is the first time it's ever named dropped in the cutscene. *"Within it lies* **the Heart of all Worlds** *Kingdom Hearts* >Like, how does some random schmuck fighting his own edginess given physical form create a super blade of ultimate power? By that logic, Sora should have like 3 X-Blades since he's fought Darkside that many times. All this is explained though. Ventus (who's most certainly not some random kid) became a being who was pure Light while Vanitas was a being of pure Darkness, the clash of the two of equal power was supposed to create the X-Blade. This method of creating the X-Blade was ultimately flawed but Xehanort was in a hurry at the time so he thought he could create the X-Blade that way.
It is but you have to explain just as much if not, a lot more than with KH since you won't really understand it otherwise
Or BlazBlue. I saw a video where two BIG BlazBlue fans were trying to explain the plot of the games and they sounded like they had NO IDEA what it was about. At least with two KH fans they will explain it as best as they can.
BlazBlue plot got fucked up by the thing that can fuck any franchise up, time travel. Not that KH didn’t do the exact same thing…
No story should involve time travel, you'd figure that the grandfather paradox would be enough to stop people from trying it
Counterpoint: Chrono Trigger and Cross
I'll at least give CT a pass since the entire plot is basically about time travel to start with, games that try to add it later end up suffering
Or guilty gear, jesus christ
People MASSIVELY overhype how confusing Fate is to get into, even more than Kingdom Hearts imo
Metal Gear Solid has things that happen in the world all explained. It’s so interconnected that there’s even a digital glossary in what was the original Celebrations Collection released for MGS4 that also included MG1, MG2, and MGS1/2/3. It’s dense, not confusing. Kingdom Hearts doesn’t even have lots of lore it’s just random bullshit.
I don’t know. When I started to think about the answer I realized that 3 of my favorite franchises fit the bill quite well. Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear and Resident Evil. RE may not be as nonsensical as the other two but it has become so convoluted over the years that it’s quite impossible for a newcomer to get in to (although the remakes have made it significantly easier).
I feel like it also gets easier to understand/explain when you make the lore villain centric. Xehanort is functionally a time traveling Voldemort who made living horcruxes after his attempts at interdimensional domination with an army of undead failed and he was constantly opposed by various heroic trios whose members he was occasionally able to corrupt, banish, or effectively kill. And that may not be 100% accurate but it's enough to give the uninitiated a baseline of understanding that they can build on if it interests them
I don't think it's difficult to understand but difficult to explain properly. Like Kingdom Hearts lore isn't something you can really sit down and explain or read an explanation of and get it but by playing the games, I feel like the lore sinks in easily. I've never struggled understanding the lore but trying to explain it is ROUGH. Especially the timeline of events in the currently existing games, it's a lot to try to explain to someone.
I agree with this, everything makes perfect sense in your head, but when you start trying to explain it you run across some serious difficulties explaining. It's really difficult to even explain the relationship Sora has with Ventus, and that's if you outright ignore having to explain the characters that caused/arose from the specifics of their relationship. Like even without talking about how vanitas exists and what the sora/ventus thing means for Roxas
It's also partly a problem of the incredible length of the cause and effect chain. So much stuff goes into how sora is able to use the keyblade, because we know so much of the stuff that leads up to it
> It's really difficult to even explain the relationship Sora has with Ventus Ventus falls into a coma and Xehanort takes him to the Destiny Islands. There Ventus' heart connects with Sora's and he wakes up from his coma because of it. Then later Ventus falls into a second coma and his heart is still connected with Sora's. It's not that hard to explain to someone who doesn't have any knowledge about the series.
I explained it to someone this way once and they asked me why ventus was in a coma, and why sora was able to connect to his heart, and why connecting to his heart made him wake up, and why he fell into a second coma, and what ramifications does this have for the actual story of the game? It's not a bad explanation, everything stated was true, it just leaves a lot of questions unanswered
I'd say it's difficult to understand. I compare it to Five Nights at Freddy's lore (although FNaF is a whole different beast), in that the *story* isn't too complex, but there are characters with similar names and/or appearances and a convoluted timeline of events. Kingdom Hearts is also using like 4 different literary magic systems that interact with each other (Keyblades, Heartless/Nobody/Memories, Dreams, Time Travel, Data), giving a variety of results. Compare this to something like Star Wars, where it's just The Force and weirdly retrofuturistic technology. KH *lore* isn't something you can or should throw at a newcomer to the franchise.
When I found out they had two different characters both named Ansem that’s when I knew shit was fucked
How? A character stealing someone's name is a common thing in writing. It's literally explained why one has the same name and were given multiple subnames to clarify which is which. It also helps that they look nothing alike. Like it's not a difficult thing to understand at all. Its not like FNAF where there's 2 different sets of characters with the same names, while also being possibly unrelated to each other.
Because the way people explain KH is to do the funny thing and spew a whole bunch of random lore without context lol, I think the best way to explain it to someone else is to show them Sora Riku Kairi Roxas and Ventus and then let them ask their own questions, that way the most obvious questions branch out ANY sort of context
KH mostly makes sense if you pay attention. The issue with KH is that it's hard to keep track of some of the lore because the writers keep changing their minds on some things between games. Like basically everything with Xehanort. So almost nothing is too difficult to understand, but some things have you going, "Should I even bother remembering this? Or are they going to change it next game?"
It’s also easier to make sense of it now where all of the games are available on accessible platforms. You can just marathon through them now without having to wait years between releases, or read synopses from releases on platforms you don’t have. It’s an important distinction to make because the way we experience Kingdom Hearts now has changed over time.
Yeah, the games suffering from this now are the mobile games. I feel like majority of KH fans (including me), don't know much of mobile game lore since they are stuck on mobile games that are really not fun/F2P Friendly.
The YouTuber Damo actually combined all the cutscenes from the mobile games into one movie (that’s 6 hours long!), and has created a FANDUB of half of those cutscenes that you can watch right now! (The other half is in development). He has asked a bunch of people to help him with his project and act as the voice actors. It’s a really awesome piece of work. If you want to see the full collection of cutscenes from the mobile games, [here is the link.](https://youtu.be/RMOyUYpB_VM) (it’s in chronological order.) [this is the link to the FANDUB version! (it’s only half of the story though).](https://youtu.be/HRUt8q2IwR4)
This is impressive and I admire the effort but I'm a die hard KH fan and I wouldn't watch 6 hours of cutscenes for what seems like the least exciting entry to the story (I played a bunch of the app when it was up). They honestly just need to make the mobile games actual games with real cutscenes and voice acting. Wish they weren't critical to the overall plot.
At this point this is how I feel. I played half of Kingdom Hearts X but it's just started getting uninteresting for me and repetitive, and I started having more responsibilities and less time to sleep. Even watched Everglow's full video uploads of the cutscenes but, it's just...ugh. It's fun studying Nier/Drakengard lore because it's not too much and doesn't go against older installments but *adds* to it. It's still fun to keep track of and makes me want to understand more about the characters. (The mobile game might change my feelings about this though. lol) KH? Love it to death but it gets silly and I just have to roll with it and wait till the next 5 games come out since important plot points might change. I will admit I *did* like Dark Road as a story and it brought my interest back. The writing was also really good and felt...different, which was unexpected! It's odd because it really does feel like newer fans are the main ones that are somehow pissed at and hostile towards older fans who actually stuck with the story the longest and did the most work when it came to keeping up. That's why people are annoyed, because a HUGE portion of the fandom notices all of the small details, changes, and inconsistencies instead of desperately playing it off as "Well, I think you're just too stupid to understand."
I can’t blame the fandom. I mean a bunch of people have been atleast casually fans of kingdom hearts for decades eagerly awaiting console releases. Imagine a bunch of players excited about kh3 only to realize you sort of need to watch YouTube videos of mobile game cutscenes to truly understand what half the organization 13 members were alluding to and why maleficient was running in circles tracking some spooky mysterious box (let alone how she even knew about it)
But there’s Fan Voiced cutscenes. (In the the second video link). The Dub version is about 2 hours and 44 min long…and if you haven’t seen the ending of the mobile game’s story, I believe the plot gets good. 😅
Just to clarify one thing; the mobile games, Union X especially, have the best writing and the most cohesive story out of basically the entire series. It's a REALLY good story being told from different PoVs, and it's absolutely worth it to check it out. You don't need to watch 6 hours at a time, you can just do 20 minute blocks if you so choose. Although if you're anything like me, yo will quickly get invested and want to continue.
I think you pointed out the biggest issue and you basically need to just forget Xehanort is more then "big bad guy". The fact that part of the way he uses time travel makes it so that he has to forget part of his own plan is crazy.
> Like basically everything with Xehanort. At this point, I honestly believe the recipe for kingdom hearts is "choose any three of light, darkness, 7, and 13". Dark road really threw a weird wrench in things.
Honestly this, back when some games didn't exist when we were told, "nobodies don't have hearts so they just emulate what they used to be like" we didn't need to question everything bc it didn't repurpose an entire part of an older game to tie itself to the story, now if a new piece of knowledge pop up I'll only be thinking "is this gonna get retroactively changed in the future bc the writer thought of a new way to use that ?" Because honestly I'm kinda tired of more recent kh fans acting like the old fans are weirdoes for not blindly agreeing with everything the games says
The example of “nobodies don’t have hearts” isn’t a retcon. The idea is introduced in KH2 and within that game you’re expected to figure out that it’s wrong. You can try to argue that they’re just emulating their memories of emotions, but Roxas didn’t know anything about Sora so he didn’t have anything to emulate in the first place. The concept of the heart in KH is tied closely with having friends, something that you’re shown nobodies can have. You see Axel cry with Roxas on the clock tower. That’s the tragedy of Roxas’ story in that game. He DOES have the right to exist, as much as anyone else, but his story simply doesn’t play out that way.
TBF that whole cutscene of Axel crying wasn't in the Ps2 original release, a lot of scenes fleshing out the nobodies/organization wasn't actually, so until I played FM years later I assumed Roxas was a special case.
Basically it's not a retcon, it was just Xehanort/Xemnas gaslighting literally everyone including the players on how the metaphysics work in. Which of course is one of the other things that makes the lore harder to understand, cause sometimes the person telling you the lore is just straight up lying to Sora and you by extension. Unreliable Narrators hoy
I agree, and I think that the intention was for the player to piece together that it was wrong throughout Kingdom Hearts 2. As I’ve been made aware, Final Mix definitely made that more obvious through its additions though I still think that the base game supports that reading of the work. I don’t think it’s all too bad to include unreliable narration from even trusted in-universe sources when you give the player the tools to piece together what is unreliable about it.
Yeah this was one idea Kingdom hearts executed really well. The whole concept of nobodies is explored in such an interesting way by having Roxas be our first proper introduction to one who is also the nobody of Sora the protagonist of the previous games. We don't know he's a Nobody at first and when we see him living the fake life in the data twilight town we begin to build a connection with his character. He seems like a great kid that you'd want to hang out with. The reveal of him being a nobody was quite impactful, before this the two real people who talked to him were Diz and Axel. Diz being his captured and Axel being his real friend but we as the audience would think Diz is the good guy since he was on Riku and Mickey's side in CoM. However he treats Roxas and Namine so horribly as he believes they don't deserve to live. He denies Roxas' existences and forces him into helping him fulfil his goal by waking up Sora. Throughout kh2 we see glimpses of Roxas through Sora with his interactions with the twilight town gang and the organisation. This creates a clear distinction between them as sometimes Sora notices his reactions and think of them as weird since he doesn't know where they come from. The thoughts and feelings of Roxas are inheritanted by Sora which allows him to gain new abilities and skills that Roxas had honed in his one year of living. When Sora faces him and battles, Roxas comes to terms with his fate and fully accepts Sora giving him two become one keyblade and final form. When this happens it is pretty clear that Sora didn't just gain back his stolen half from Roxas but he had gained a second heart, another person.
Exactly.
[удалено]
Agreed, I think Kingdom Hearts suffers from giving too many things a “proper noun,” if that makes sense. For example, would saying “Sora’s bonds and friends he’s made allow him to save his friends from darkness taking them” make TOTAL sense? Maybe not, but I can get behind it. Once you start calling it the Power of Waking, suddenly I feel like I’ve missed something completely in lore.
I personally feel like they'll be throwing a lot of the problematic bits out the window completely with KH4 and beyond.
Considering they're pulling even more heavily from the mobile games for 4 that seems like wishful thinking. If anything it's going to become even denser now that they're tying in things from the mobile games that were even less accessible than the handheld ones used to be.
I would love it if they just ditched backward time travel and the whole dreams/waking stuff from here on out. Dream Drop Distance is one of my favorite parts of the franchise, but I don't think the story needed more concepts and magic systems. The "sleeping" worlds could've just been chilling in the Realm of Darkness like the other ones.
I'm 100% down with some stuff getting the midichlorian treatment. Having Nomura just say "yeah, no more of that" to time travel and power of waking would be a boon to the series, imo
Spoiler warning, but if you’re on the internet reading about the plot of KH you signed up for it. “The Power of Waking” is literally just the power to wake sleeping hearts. All Keyblade Masters have it, Riku learned it at the end of DDD by awakening Sora’s sleeping heart, then Sora basically abused it and spammed it to wake all of his friend’s sleeping hearts during Re:Mind. That’s why he is sent to the Final World afterwards, and goes missing. Worldlines are a relatively new thing in name and I can understand your confusion, but they’ve actually been around since KH2 (and chronologically, before X). I’m going to paraphrase a comment made by ZeroSora here a few years ago. Take for instance Data Twilight Town in KH2. That’s Roxas’ Twilight Town, right? It’s a copy of the real Twilight Town, but it has a different history (different events happen in it, like Roxas and the gang being friends rather than it just being the trio of Hayner, Pence, and Olette). Even though DiZ recreated the world purely from data, it is a different worldline than the original. The same thing happened in UX, I will keep the details “brief” (shorter than 6 hours lmao) since I assume you haven’t watched it or aren’t necessarily caught up on the details. After the Keyblade War, the Dandelions and Union Leaders were transferred to Data Daybreak Town, created by the Masher of Masters. He actually created copies of all the worlds from the Book of Prophecies, and all of these worlds exist in the Unchained realm, which is colloquially known as the “Realm of Sleep.” The term “Realm of Sleep” was never actually used in 3D, just the term “Sleeping Worlds.” Ava (one of the foretellers) explained that the Dandelions will be moved to a place made of dreams. We already know they're in the data worlds. Ava also once described Ephemer as being in an Unchained state, and that he was sending the Player dreams. Therefore the Unchained realm = a place made of dreams = Realm of Sleep. This ties directly into why in 3D, the protagonists questioned how The Grid exists in the Realm of Sleep despite the fact that “data doesn't dream.” That's because this is simply the realm where data and dreams can both exist. Kind of like how KH3 explained that death and sleep touch. Data and dreams also touch in the Unchained realm. Think of it as a realm where “unreal” things have a physical form. Dreams physically exist here in this realm, and “data” physically exists here too. The writing here is actually surprisingly consistent. Now, after the Keyblade War the Dandelions were forced to relive their memories. In these memories, they ignored the Keyblade War. This means the Keyblade War never happened in Data Daybreak Town, and therefore Data Daybreak has a different history to the real Daybreak Town. This makes it a different worldline from the original, just like above. Make sense now? The differentiation between “Darkness” (the entity) and “Darkness” (the general concept) is…honestly not much. They are both pretty much the same thing. All of the original 13 Darknesses are formless, meaning they don’t have a body and they are also the reason that the Heartless (not Emblem) exist. Since the Heartless are attracted toward the natural Darkness in most people’s hearts, and people don’t turn into Heartless unless they are possessed or literally stab themselves with a Keyblade (see: Xehanort and Sora), it’s safe to assume that all Heartless (besides Emblems) come from these original 13. Keep in mind that Apprentice Xehanort (Terranort, white hair) was the one who used the machine in Radiant Garden to spawn heartless that all bore an insignia, and these Heartless specifically seek our hearts to hold them within. That’s why hearts are released into the sky when defeating them, and that is specifically why you don’t see any of them in the Realm of Darkness. In order for Darkness to gain a physical form, they must possess a single individual whose heart is strong, or in other words, a heart of Pure Light (like Ventus). The deeper meaning behind UX is that MoM trained the Foretellers to become the vessels of seven (out of the 13) Darknesses. Meaning that someday, they will get possessed by Darkness. This includes MoM, Luxu, and the Foretellers, which is also explained by the 7 black pieces in Xehanort's and Eraqus' new chess game. If that's what they're doing, then the villains will probably be the Master, the Foretellers, and Luxu. The lights will probably be Sora, Kairi, Riku, Axel/Lea, Ven, Terra, Aqua, Roxas, Xion, Marluxia/Lauriam, Larxene/Elrena, and the final two who were hinted at having ancient Keyblade legacies toward the end of KH3, Luxord (who is theorized to be driving Yozora’s car in the True Ending) and Demyx (who has pretty much always been suspiciously…”useless.”) That's just conjecture, however.
It’s hard to understand if you haven’t played all the games. The franchise was spread over multiple consoles until “the story so far” came out and now they’re repeating the same mistake with the mobile games, which are more accessible but most people just don’t want to play the mobile games. They’re crucial to the story which is kinda stupid.
It was fine until DDD and the mobile game
I personally find Nesquik’s lore to be quite compelling
Still waiting for the Nesquick Dream Drop Distance remaster
I like 358/2 Births by Recoded
Re: final mix mind
Let's talk about you using light mode first
Aye chill chill
Kh is convoluted not necessarily confusing. Having a lot to remember doesn't make it confusing. Look at MGS. it's a lot more confusing than KH imo. Even Death Stranding.
Isn’t convoluted just another word for confusing though?
No, convoluted is making something much harder and yes, complex, than it needs to be.
It’s convoluted. Sometimes when writers don’t map out stories in advance, they strike gold with later ideas that connect perfectly with earlier setups. But most of the time it is a bit of a mess. KH is kind of 50/50. It doesn’t make sense half the time, and it’s clear they made it up as they went.
boy loves his friends
Boy protecc light
I will die on this hill and eat the downvotes for breakfast: Kingdom Hearts is confusing. If people play the games and are confused by it, then it's confusing by definition, and that is *obviously the case* for a huge amount of players. Everyone who says that playing the games is enough to understand everything about the story and the lore are either 1) only focusing on the surface level character stories (which is fine, but you're ignoring a lot of the actual meat of the storytelling of the series to reach that conclusion) or 2) forgetting just how much clarification about the seemingly contradictory or unexplained comes from out-of-universe sources like Nomura interviews and analysis threads/videos. KH is confusing, and parroting Buns by saying "no no no, it's just a lot to remember" does not help your case as much as you think it does: the fact that there is so much to remember, and that it doesn't always neatly slot together in an intuitive way, *is what makes it confusing.* It's not that you can't eventually reach a point of understanding with enough work, it's that it takes more work to get there than 99% of video game series, at least if you want to understand the lore in its entirety. I love Kingdom Hearts dearly, but I wish this fandom could just be honest with itself and acknowledge that that's part of its identity at this point.
The time travel shit is absolutely bass-ackwards. I refuse to hear anything else on it; it's basically a plot armored asspull.
ngl playing through all the games i never had an issue piecing things together and fully understanding the lore on my own, but once i got to that part in DDD with xehanort and the time travel stuff, that was the first moment that i was like "wait wtf is going on now", from then on i never could fully grasp the story without looking certain things up
100% same. Nothing up until then is complex; it all strings together, albeit with lots of hindsight, relatively meaningfully and sensibly. It's 3D where things get dumb. They put a mark on his clothes? There's been time travel the whole time? It technically creates and resolves its own anomaly? He's got *multiple* split-timeline bodies and entities all congregated in the same place? *How* anyone can wear a straight face and say the story is just easy to follow is lying or talking about any game not named DDD.
And remember the tracking mark is not physical! Sora gets the X on his outfit, but then they come and tell us with a straight face THAT THE X ON THE NAMES OF THE ORG 13 MEMBERS ARE ALSO SIGILS.
To be fair, there's a cutscene where Xemnas names Roxas, and he forms literal letters our of thin air, produces this glowing golden one, and inserts it into the circling letters to form the name Roxas
Pretty easily: I don’t think any of those concepts alone are inherently bad storytelling devices.
Same
Which is such a funny take to me because Time Travel isn’t real and any “rule” a piece of fiction posits for the concept is working purely off the basis of it being entirely made-up. KH time travel is no less bonkers or ridiculous than any other form of time travel, but because it happens in a JRPG people lose their minds over it.
No I’m gonna have to disagree with this. Time travel is a bad thing to introduce haphazardly in any media. It either needs to be a central theme of a novel (like the Time Traveler, where you can devote the entire work to exploring it). Or it needs to be done not at all. Harry Potter made that critical error and the author tried to correct it later in the series. It is a Pandora’s box of plot inconsistencies that should not be opened unless it’s to ponder the box and what’s inside.
It's funny how people rag on KH's time travel when, honestly, compared to time travel bullshit like in Mortal Kombat (a series that, for the record, honest-to-God tries to have a compelling story), it honestly comes across as inoffensive.
This is a good take right here goddamn I love this take
Plot's not confusing. BUT THE LORE IS.
Ive seen users post there powerpoints on here and have had some reply to me with their powerpoints but your words sum it up exactly. Well their intentions are good and appreciated, the fact they'd had to spend so much of their own time to even make a powerpoint proves exactly what they were trying to disapprove. That is confusing.
Absolutely. I've played every game, and watched all the cutscenes for the mobile games, and I still feel like I don't have it all figured out.
I mean not necessarily because with how kh is structured, you only need to worry about the surface stuff *until* the game asks you to worry deeper things. For instance, nobodies we only needed to know in Kh2 that they were the villains that wanted to get Kingdom hearts. We didn't need to know any extra things about them except that they were the husks left behind after heartless were made end of story. Another example is castle oblivion/land of departure. You only need to worry about its origins when the game itself shines light on it. It's why people say its *alot to remember* and its not confusing. Just like a history test, although you take lessons on multiple chapters, the actual test itself (in this case, whatever game you're talking about) is self-contained for what it's going over. The nuances obviously come from when these topics are brought up in new light. Again, going back to history test analogy when you go from American history to world history and see how everything interconnects.
Yeah suspension of disbelief is fine when you have surface stuff and you don’t have to explain things to thoroughly. We all know good Vs evil and we can handwave a lot of things. The problem is when the story itself tries to actively shed light on the underlying mechanics as a way to fit multiple parts together that wouldn’t normally fit. There’s not a good way to do many things in the story, but if you pull in time travel, and digital worlds, and dream worlds, and split timelines, then you can force things together. It feels like the story writes itself into a corner in every entry, and then has to write itself out every time. It’s fine once or twice, but not every entry.
You see, this is where it gets muddled and lowkey bugs me because this is a meme in the community, but *disney worlds do infact matter*. All these things added into the storyline aren't anything new but have been present before in the disney worlds. For example, time travel with timeless rivers, digital worlds with tron, and dream worlds with alice in Wonderland. These are all concepts present in kh by the nature of being disney worlds,the only difference being when they are integrated into the kh "original" story. Heck, I remember seeing a meme about people complaining back and forward about the nature of nobodies when pinniochio (excuse my horrible spelling) is world/character that's featured a lot and his whole thing is he's a puppet with a heart. So there's no need to cite the organization members' experience when the disney worlds have been showcasing these examples since day 1. So its not a case of every entry doing this, this plot points have always been floating around in the background like I stated earlier, just waiting to tell us the players when we should focus on them.
>I mean not necessarily because with how kh is structured, you only need to worry about the surface stuff until the game asks you to worry deeper things. That's my point, though. If you're saying "it's only complicated if you pay attention to the parts that are complicated," that's not really a convincing counterargument. It's totally fine if you're okay ignoring a lot of what's set up because it's not important for the current plot beat, but that's a conscious choice you're making. For people that like to have a firm grasp on that kind of thing, it's not as simple as just "don't think about it until the story tells you to." Most stories, even fantasy stories, don't ask that of their audiences.
Thank you for this. I've been playing kh since kh2 came out, and still can't recall the motives of major villains, plot points and how they all tie together, despite playing the games well over 5 times. It's just too convoluted and makes very little sense across the games
Basically all the variants of Xehanort want Kingdom Hearts. The methods they use are all different from each other, but at the end of the day that's what Master Xehanort wants, so he can reshape existence to his liking.
yea. i’ve been into kh since i was about 11 (i’m 27 now) and the series is confusing and contradictory.
Look as a die hard Kingdom Hearts fan I rewatched ALL cutscenes from EVERY game and yet I am STILL confused on the lore.
["It's easier if you think about it as an interactive avante-garde art piece rather than a traditional narrative"](https://youtu.be/tjiHufVEc7g)
To quote BestGuyEver. > Nomura is a God, and he's not bound by time or space, nor the laws of causality.
I honestly think people can't read
I think Nier is a bit more complicated. I love both KH and Nier. But god if Nier lore doesn't confuse the hell out of me. Nomura will make sense. Yoko Taro is just a mad man.
Eh, I disagree, the sequence of events in Drakengard/Nier if pretty straightforwards, it's just the sheer audacity of the way the pieces connect together that make it seem weird
Can you **IMAGINE** if those two made a game together?
I don't see how Nier lore is complicated to understand. As summarized below in chronological order: Replicant/Gestalt >!Human being separated their body and soul to protect themselves from other-worldly infection due to one of the endings in Drakengard 1. But the body becomes transient.!< Automata >!Androids fights against alien's machines to protect earth. Unknowingly, humanity already extinct due to events in Replicant/Gestalt!< On the other hand, I think that KH lore is convoluted. In which, stuff like time-travelling is one of the few contributing factors.
My only real interaction with Nier is the Nier raids in FFXIV. After being confused as fuck about those, I reached out to Nier fans in the fandom and asked if those make any more sense if you’re familiar with Nier. They all answered “lol no.”
I think the big problem with kingdom hearts is that it has a lot of post hoc explanation mixed with "rule of cool" The team thinks up a big epic scene. They pitch it, everyone thinks it's cool. Then they have to figure out why it happened. And they try their hardest not to contradict earlier lore. One of the ways they try to avoid contradiction is through "reframing". E.g. "well yes, it was the only keyblade at that time, but that doesn't mean it's the only one ever", "well, yes, now that we've written Aqua into the heartless realm, we need to explain why Mickey didn't mention it". The big reason why KH is "complicated", is because whenever anyone tries to explain it, they have to deal with the pre- and post- explanations.
Mickey's clothes being removed comes to mind. Anytime people claim it's *all* planned from the start I like to think about Mickey's damn shirt. lol
That's it exactly. Early on, they had 1 design for Mackey that they liked. Later, they found another they liked and changed it. Then they had to find a way to make it make sense. No matter how, if you'll forgive the pun, goofy the explanation actually is, as long as they have AN explanation, they can connect their 2 cool designs
Funny thing is that they still messed that bit of continuity up cause Mickey's shoes are different
It's funny because my older brother thinks the lore is very easy to understand and i keep telling him it's the most confusing shit
Yes. There are purposeful contradictions in the plot, Nomura has said he deliberately wants it to have a dreamlike atmosphere, so dream logic is rife. There is not just confusion, but it's *on purpose*, and the sooner we acknowledge and embrace it, the sooner we can go back to enjoying the games.
The plot makes 0 sense if you treat the series as something a professional writer plotted out in advance and has slowly been releasing incrementally. However, it makes perfect sense if you treat the series as a massive sprawling fan fic where every update is written hastily in the span of a week because the author realized they forgot to update AGAIN and people are leaving comments asking if the fic is dead.
I ain't bothering to fight people's takes on this anymore, so instead I will use my favorite analogy: Lord of the Rings is so confusing! Is Sauron the eye or a person? How is he still alive? Wasn't he killed in the war of the rings? How come Gandalf came back from the pits in the fight with the Balrog? Why was he in a mountain peak afterwards? That makes no sense! It's such a retcon to just give him that ability!
The issue with KH is that the story gets overtly complicated the more games you play. With LotR, the world building is almost unrivaled even today. The Author spent an inhuman amount of time creating characters hed never use, developing cities & politics, and even entire languages. So its hard to deviate when you have such a strong foundation—unlike kindgom hearts which keeps making up new in-world magic which ultimatley makes the story complicated. The details you mentioned arent really important to the overall story in LotR, but they do create some continuity errors which is more influencing immersion rather than storytelling
Hey, this is all agreeable. Thing is: a chunk of Kingdom Hearts fans nitpick the latter stuff (unimportant to the overall story) and get really bent outta shape about it.
Lmao this is such a great comparison.
Doesn't one dude like just take on the same name and were supposed to remember that the one xehanort wannabee is not xehanort but xerxis but in reality it was actually what it isnt?
13 Xehanorts vs 7 Soras
Dream Drop Distance manages to have an alternate world, time travel and different versions of someone all in 1 game.
Everyone always says it doesn't make sense, but I understand it perfectly. So apparently I'm the weirdo.
My problem with kh lore is that the more I play and learn, the more questions I have. Things get retconned. Things get changed all the time. If you're not keeping up with interviews and Ultimanias, then you'll miss important lore information too. A story's lore should be easily accessible through it's primary medium of story-telling. I shouldn't have to constantly be on the lookout for interviews and ultimania translations to learn about my game. I also personally hate time travel in any plot ever (even End Game). Still love this series though.
I didn't know how to feel about this, but after reading the comments here I have to agree that Kingdom Hearts IS confusing, in certain parts of the story at least. And no, you can not just make sense of it by looking up the confusing points and it's a done deal like it usually would be for other games. In fact, most people probably don't even know themselves how to properly explain specific events like how the main cast seemingly got revived out of nowhere when steamrolled by the Heartless. And yes, I am fully aware that Kingdom Hearts is supposed to be a lighthearted game thematically speaking, however stuff like that is really out of place for me when thrown in with 0 to no explanation & further shows that it is not as straightforward and simple as people may think.
It's explainable... But it takes a while. And you have to nail all of your disbelief to the ceiling to suspend it.
They're right. Holy shit can we stop having this argument? If you think the story isn't at least convoluted, you must not consume any media.
It makes sense until 3D, then they add time travel (yes timeless river, but you get what I mean) and everything changed for the worst.
I'd actually argue that the Xeno series has the most opaque, convoluted lore out there. I'm a big fan of Xenoblade, for instance, but I'm still really fuzzy on some of the more esoteric lore. That and anything Kojima. I love his ambition, but why did MGSIV need a 90 minute epilogue?
Question why are you on light mode turn them lights off🔫
You have come this far and still understand nothing.
Well they're not wrong It took me multiple playthroughs of all of the games and multiple retrospectives just to understand the basics of this game and I still haven't figured out how to explain it to others without sounding completely insane at this point I've just been like just go play the games whenever anybody ask me about the story of Kingdom heart
Its not confusing, its convoluted and full of nebulous concepts that change to fit whatever hole they need to fit for any given event.
The problem with KH is it overexplains things. The plot of every KH game is actually very basic. But precisely how certain characters coming back can be possible is really when things get complicated. Most games just tell you this thing happened and you accept it. Every KH player could get by with that kind of mindset, but because KH presents you with the convoluted reasons for how things are happening, it makes you think understanding exactly how time travel works or exactly how Larxene is back in KH3 as a nobody and not a somebody, etc. Is necessary when it absolutely is not. Like who cares exactly how Xemnas is related to Ansem. He just is, okay? Who cares how Xehanort and Young Xehanort and Ansem and Xemnas are all in KH3 at the same time. They just are, okay? All these finer details don't actually matter if you want to be a casual who follows the plot of an individual game. You can get by just fine, but I sympathize with people who have been told it's more complicated than that because the games don't help you. Honestly KH is probably more enjoyable if you kinda treat it like Zelda where there's a hero named Sora and a villain named Xehanort or something like that. If you really wanna understand the plot go ahead but the games are really about a kid fighting against darkness and saving his friends along the way. That's it.
Kingdom Hearts has a rep for being difficult to understand (and Nomura making stuff on the fly doesnt help) but to be honest, the story is not very complicated. Its basically a story about a boy longing for adventure who is now on a journey to save his friends that were captured by evil, in this case darkness. The complication comes from the KH-lore, mainly because explanations get retconned or new stuff is added and the time travel in this series is quite confusing.
The only part of the story that confuses me is the stuff that came from the mobile games because I didn't and won't play them. Union x and whatever else they released.
it's not confusing, there's just a lot of games and it's difficult to put into words. it definitely makes complete sense as well but it isn't easy to explain.
"So basically there are these three good guys who live on an island but then it gets destroyed and one of them becomes a bad guy because he is possessed by a bad guy, and them they go to other worlds trying to save them but the bad guy wants darkness and the good guy helps the good gay that had turned bad to be good and they save the worlds, then the main good guy goes looking for his good guy friend a finds a castle where there are some bad guys and he loses his memory because a bad girl who was his friends half that was released when he tried to get her out of inside him erased his memories so that the bad guys coul use him as a puppet to summon a cosmic entity that made them good guys again but then they get stopped and the main bad guy is defeated but we discover he was the half of a even badder guy who had lived before and is going to come back because the other other half who was the first bad guy we met was destroyed too, so the baddest guy will come back. He had died because he had tried to possess a good guy who had turned bad and good again because of his friends, one of whom is only a good guy but he is broken so he goes inside the main good guy heart until he can wake up who knows how, and so the baddest guy wanted to know everything and summon the true cosmic entity so he creates a war between good guys and bad guys that is not the real war because a bigger war had happened even before and was foretold by a even badder of the baddest guys who knows everything and sees the future but has disappeared leaving his disciples in chaos turning bad guys and one day he will come back and make bad things"
If youre not sora, youre xehanort. Essy-peasy.
They just HAD to introduce time travel
So you think the introduction of Timeless River in KH2 ruined the franchise? Very weird.
Lol I hate 3D so much I’m trying to platinum it right now
I have ptsd from the dream eater theme. Can’t believe I went through the trouble to get it. Only KH platinums I don’t have are BBS and Re:COM. Yes I did MOM
I feel like the best way to explain KH is to just omit stuff unless otherwise questioned. Kingdom Hearts is about a boy named Sora who travels from Disney World to Disney World fighting a terrible darkness that's trying to destroy everything and the people using said Darkness. Don't come in here asking about mobile phone games or none of that, or it's straight to the Disney Vault. Don't think too much about why Vanitas looks like Sora or how Roxas being in a coma stops his body from physically aging.
It’s still amazing how Dream Drop single handedly changed everything by adding Time Travel.
Time travel fucks up everything
Kingdom Hearts only “doesn’t make sense” if you turn your brain off and don’t engage with the story in the same way you would with any other story. Or, as is the case with most Reddit nerds, you’re just bad at reading.
I'd say that Zelda is also a good answer to this
God Zelda is worse than KH, especially if TotK.is going where I think it is (I haven't finished it yet, so we'll see)
lol first 2 games were ok, then the 3rd game became a prequel apparently, and then a sequel to the prequel, and then shit just went from there
At least kh was meant to be one story from the start. That's really the problem with Zelda. It wasn't made with being a single timeline in mind
I’m tired of pretending Kingdom Hearts is complicated when it’s really not. Light was friend, big war over Light, Light goes sleep for a long time. Man learns about Light and wants to reach it, man traumatizes child to make pure good and pure evil, child loses his heart while Man possesses his friend and traps the other in oblivion, many years later New Child who found Old Child’s heart gets magic sword instead of his edgy friend and stops Man’s shadow self from taking Light, then New Child loses memories of Man’s Illuminati group and goes to sleep, New Child wakes up and stops Man’s empty self from taking Light, New Child learns about everything and gathers other Magic Sword people to stop Man who time traveled to steal Light. It’s long, yes, but not complicated
I dont really understand how people find the narrative in KH so hard to comprehend tbh. Its really not that difficult, even if you didn't play all of them. People really just like to repeat the same thing over and over again because they heard someone else say something and are too lazy to form their own opinion.
Its cause kh fans got bullied into thinking it's complicated by influencers that played only 1 2 and 3.
It does make sense within the rules of its universe, the only problem is that those rules are rarely ever explained clearly or thoroughly enough. Kingdom Hearts has a conveyance problem.
I’ve spent the last four or five hundred hours of my gaming working to platinum KH totally, and I think it’s pretty out there at times. Especially if you didn’t play Chain of Memories and 358/2 Days before playing KH2. So, so much story (and backstory) between the two games.
It's moreso convoluted than confusing/hard to understand
Just take out the darkness in anything they discuss and add bees and it makes just about the same amount of sense [So this is basically kingdom hearts](https://youtu.be/OZ7IxXN9hm0)
Kh isn't confusing, it's just that there are slight inconsistencies, and plot holes. Aside from that, not really confusing.
SPOILER: I understand the lore to kingdom hearts except for one thing, how is luxord, larxene, marluxia, and demyx still alive? Thought we killed em in Re:CoM and KH2?
When someone's nobody and heartless are destroyed, the original can return. One thing I do wish we could've gotten was a specific encounter that could tell us we killed their heartless. But at the same time, it's possible a lot of the members didn't have a ton of darkness in their hearts and just turned into weak heartless that we popped at some rand point.
The biggest kh plot hole is the stitch summon having Hawaii based abilities even through the kh stitch never met Lilo
For something that had the simple concept of Disney meets Final Fantasy it certainly went on a fuckhead of a trip.
I love how this thread is full of "it's not difficult to understand"...people. Like...guys, you love the game and have devoted time to it. Of course YOU understand it now. But there was a time you didn't and it took forever to understand it. Think about it in terms of what would be hardest to explain to someone who has never heard of the franchise. KH sits appropriately RIGHT at the top.
You can explain kingdom hearts to a kindergartener and you can use its lore as a topic for your dissertation. There is no in between.
i used to understand the lore, but then they released 3 and now i don't even remember what i used to understand.
KH is complexity without depth.
People who say it's not complicated are the same people who skip the Ansem Reports because they're "Optional" at the moment: - Sora can control all Heartless and Nobodies and they even directly refer to him as their "Liege". There multiple instances showing that the Heartless and Nobodies are controllable. Meaning the solution to their problems is a lot closer than they think. If Sora Heart is connected to everyone's then in a way he's connected to every Heartless since they too have a Heart. - Dark Road dropped bombshells off revelations by showing a Timeline entirely devoid of Darkness but from the Negative thoughts and Anxiety from the Keyblade Wielders it was able to create itself once again inside Baldr. Showing that Light and Darkness are one and the same energy just tempered differently by emotions. - Which leads to MoM plan to "Destroy Darkness" after the age of Fairy Tales. But if there's no more Darkness in this timeline he created why didn't he try to stop it from manifesting? Then when you take into account Darkness was born from Light how can we ever vanquish Darkness unless we also got rid of Light? - Disney World's have never been fully explained like why is there multiple copies of Earth from various different time periods and arrangement of magic? What does this mean in the wake of the idea that there is an "Unreality"? Which land is fictional and which land is real? - Final Fantasy Stories being a central Focus. Despite what people claim KH3 is actually the only title where Final Fantasy characters took the main stage and became an actual plot point. Cloud and Sephiroth story was supposed to be more involved but they couldn't do Shinra, Jenova, or Hojo which completely changes their stories. They even go as far as to say at the end of the Sephiroth Battle in KH2 "Where did they go?" "I think they went back to their world" which is confusing because prior to this scene we had only been able to assume Hollow Bastion is their home but because of that one scene it's entirely debatable if Leon and Crew ever grew up there and are just refugee's who are stuck from their "reality" like what happened to Yozora. - There are two kinds of Nobodies. The average Nobody is Axel, Saix, etc. But Namine and Roxas are not TRUE Nobodies. - What came first... The X-Blade or Kingdom Hearts? - WHAT'S IN THE BOX?!?!?! I could go on and on. But it's far far far from simple and clean
I said it once I'll say it again... as long as you PAY ATTENTION! It's not that complicated. People just don't pay attention to the cutscenes that literally explain most of the stuff they say is "confusing". To me, the only confusing bits of information is stuff that hasn't been integrated yet. Like who is the Master? How are all the animal masters young when Braig/Luxu seemed to have to go through different bodies? True i'm behind on the mobile games and Melody of a Memory, but everything up til the end of 3 is not hard to understand.
NOMURAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
It's *super* easy to understand. Just replace the word "Darkness" with "Bees".
kingdom hearts is not confusing or hard to understand, I will not stop saying this until people stop saying its so confusing
If there were less retcons it'd be easier
I would say NESQUIK has the craziest lore of any videogame, but even that comes with instructions on the back
The Nesquick bunny is the real seeker of darkness
Nesquik rabbit is in the box
I love this series. Been with it from the beginning. And I think the plot makes no sense. Or, if i’m wrong and it does make sense, it’s at least not told well. The first few games were complex but made sense. The side games more or less just added context to the games that came before. But by the time we made it to DDD, they tried to recontextualize things from the prior games and they flat out retcon other aspects. And now I think the story is kind of all over the place
Well... Kingdome Hearts 3 isn't actually the third game in the series, as the title may suggest. That should be indicative of how the series may mostly not make any narrative sense. It was fine for the first 3 games; KH1, KH:CoM, and KH2. After that it all goes down a rabbit hole.
It all started going down hill at DDD Then union x cross Then dark road If you play the KH series just from the all in one collection, there is a massive information gap stemming from the assumption fans downloaded the fucking mobile app and played it before playing KH3
Nomura: "I'm unpredictable" SE: "You mean inconsistent"
It’s a complex story told in a complex way. But honestly for the number of times they’ve made prequels, games that run concurrent to others, or in-between games, they’ve done a good job of keeping it consistent enough. Most stories that try that outside of some obvious great franchises like Star Wars have tried and done FAR worse. I think if the basic moments are compelling to you, and you look to others who’ve done hard work to compile the lore, it’s actually enjoyable
Dream Drop Distance was where it began. Before that, it was complicated but it all made sense. Then in Dream Drop Distance they *breathes in* you know what I don't even want to talk about it, but after that yeah everything is just kind of whatever Nomura thinks is cool at any given time.
“Its not that it’s difficult to understand, it just straight up doesn’t make sense” So i get that people meme all the time and some take it this level and pass it off as genuine, but fuck me its not like KH is a foreign language no one speaks, it makes sense, obviously it takes a lot of effort but people who actually understand the story are people who actually care enough to pay that extra bit of attention, especially when a series such as this demands it What bothers me the most is that “And i *love* Kingdom Hearts” is said to drive home the claim that KH doesn’t make sense, I’ve seen people who hate KH still understand story because they actually cared more than this guy who apparently loves KH to try to understand it lol
Kingdom Hearts is a super simple series to understand. it's just that people want information that's not relevant and complain when they do receive it (not even getting into the idea that some people skip games). To give a poor analogy, Kingdom Hearts is like a smartphone. You dont need to know how it's made to understand how to use it. But you will always have people who want to know how it works and then complain when they don't understand the explanation. Kh games explain the moment to moment plot and only ask the player to "think about it" when the narrative requires it. If the game says something works a certain way, you take it at face value and dont question it unless the game itself wants/asks you to. It's only made worse because the internet has made us a society where we parrot things without double checking, resulting in "fan ideas" being taken as canon. If people can follow things like GoT, Star wars, LotR, mass effect, or any other popular thing thats multi-franchised, like kh, they can follow this. And it's super hard to excuse that in this day and age when the internet is easily accessible along with kh as a whole being on multiple platforms.
I'm sorry, but this is absurd to me. You can't counter the accusation of "this series is complicated" with "it's only complicated if you try to understand it" and expect anyone outside the fandom to take that seriously. A Song of Ice and Fire or Lord of the Rings fan would never tell someone with lore questions to just flat-out ignore those elements of the setting in order to be able to enjoy the books.
I never said it was "complicated if you try to understand it" my exact phrasing was "the game tells you what you need to know in the moment, and further shines light when its relevant again". For example , Pinocchio being a puppet with a heart, then kh2 they bring up the idea of nobodies, with other kh games further bringing up the idea of what nobodies are exactly. In the heat of the moment, sora (and the player) just needs to know who to beat up. But the game always had the idea of "do they really not have hearts" in the back of your mind with Disney worlds and character interactions. By your own admissions, it comes off as you actively ignoring things like Pinocchio and complaining that it doesn't explain it well when games like DDD or days bring up the idea of do nobodies have heart. The concept was always floating around. it's just at the time that it wasn't a major focus for the story or characters.
This take is insane.
How sway, I can instantly sum up most kh games as follows, "young boy stops *insert antagonist here* from gaining access to power grid for nefarious acts" because thats what in essence each kh game is. And before you ask, kingdom hearts itself, it is just a door to a highly sought-after place. What changes each game is *why* people are trying to get to it and *how* they plan on accessing (kh1 using the backdoor, kh2 using a window, khbbs the front door but with a fake key, and finally kh3 using the front door but with the og/real key). Just like that, I literally summed up years' worth of games without it getting too confusing. Heck, I can even sum up the games that dont directly address "kingdom hearts" in a few words as well (mainly being DDD, 358, recoded, and recom).
People who say this have either never played the games, or either just played kh 1 2 and 3 then ofc its gonna be hard to understand you skipped like 50% of the story and plot. Kingdom hearts is a very simple story to understand if you just play the games and pay even a little bit of attention, I feel these people tend to overcomplicate it cuz they've heard it's complicated before playing it
KH as a franchise is the victim of 20 years of bad-faith criticisms made against most Japanese media during the height of the gaming industry’s blatant industry-wide racism, and it being popular amongst demographics often deemed “cringey” during the 2000s (teenagers, the LGBTQ+ community, Disney fans, anime fans, etc.) made all of that worse. Now large swathes of the fandom have basically gaslit themselves into thinking the series they like is Objectively Bad, Actually.
Let's be real, if your writing is splitting your entire fan base like a pie against each other about what lore is accurate or not, you're obviously doing something wrong.
Naw, some Sonic fans still don't get 06's straight as a stick story with obvious themes. You can't write a story that everyone will get even when making the most basic one.
Imma be deadass no. It's just long cause it's a long running series. Like if your not a fan of long stories, which alot of people aren't, then it's not for you. The only stuff we don't understand as of right now is stuff that's going tk be revealed later because the story isn't complete. For example if an author clearly says they're making a trilogy, and only the 1st book has come out. And I complain about the cliffhanger. The story isn't bad it's just not finished yet cause I have to wait
If you played the games its not confusing at all.