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legitimatesatanspawn · 11 months

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Can I write a summary of Kingdom Hearts after 11 pm?

Answer wound up being yes and no. This ended up being a lot longer than I planned but here's the list, with the full info under the cut.

Kingdom Hearts, the nightmare that started it all.

Chain of Memories, the second worst card-based RPG I've played about 4 different times.

Kingdom Hearts II, the Third Game which will confuse you if you skipped CoM.

Kingdom Hearts 385/2 Days, or the Cult's FF7 Crisis Core spinoff.

Kingdom Hearts: Coded, the phone game that no one outside of Japan got to play until they did.

Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, the Prequel that you have to play three times to beat.

Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, or KH with Pokemon.

Kingdom Hearts X (Chi), or the MMO we wanted and regretted getting.

Kingdom Hearts III, the grand finale that said "screw you" to everyone.

Kingdom Hearts, the nightmare that started it all.

The prophesized hero turns out to be a self-absorbed shounen rival character, Riku, who dooms the world to escape his humdrum life and allows the eldritch demons into the global soul on the advice of a sketchy mysterious cloaked figure, Ansem. His idiot best friend Sora goes on an Adventure to save their best (female) friend Kairi and try to find one another. Mickey Mouse is a king, Donald Duck is a wizard, Goofy is a knight, and Pluto is slightly sketchy.

You hop between planets to get their plots back on the traintracks to their happily ever after in spite of the eldritch soul-consuming hell monsters called Heartless that can only be killed with the Mythical Weapon called a Keyblade and Magic (and apparently allies du'jour of said Keyblade).

Disney Villains are all in the know of the Heartless and use them for their own purposes. Except the Queen of Hearts. The Queen of Hearts is not enabling the Heartless to plague her world. Also Gaston. I think Gaston doesn't even exist in the series, honestly.

Finally you reach the hidden world where the Heartless plague is spreading from but Donald and Goofy go off with your now Asshole Rival Ex-Best Friend Riku who claims that he deserves the magic sword not you. So Sora and Beast (aka Prince Adam) get to fight your way through the crazy castle until you reach the place where Riku is dressed in the weirdest outfit seen on a teenager in a Square-Enix game (at that time). Turns out he's been possessed because the creepy shadow person talking to him was Bad News All Along and now seven Disney Princesses (one of which being Kairi because OF COURSE it is) are going to have their souls extracted to create a mega portal to Disney-RPG World Hell in pursuit of Disney-RPG World Heaven "Kingdom Hearts".

In order to keep Kairi safe, Sora have to destroy his own soul with the Keyblade. But she heals your Heartless so you're okay again. Why she never does this again is never explained.

You defeat the possibly Ancient Evil Ansem who turned into a giant hellship monster and then are forced to seal Mickey Mouse (what are you doing there?!) and Riku into Disney-RPG Hell to save the universe.

Chain of Memories, the second worst card-based RPG I've played about 4 different times.

After sealing your friend in Disney-RPG Hell, Sora walks along a lonely road with Donald and Goofy and I think Pluto in a randomly existing grassy field. Eventually you reach a three way fork in the road where some guy in a sketchy looking cloak is all "to lose is to find, to find is to lose, you may find your missing best friend here". Like the world's most obvious cult member.

And of course you go along with it because deep in your heart you know that they're really here.

Except this place is called Castle Oblivion and it works on Card Logic and Memories. No, really. It's kind of like Neverending Story II. Your memories are used to make special cards that either make weapons, allies, or full on locations.

The creepy coat cult do their mysterious villain thing and yell at a innocent girl with blonde hair named Namine and call her a witch. She live-edits your memories so that Namine copy-pastes herself over Kairi. It's a Relationship Sue plot but taken advantage of by the bad guys who all look like anime villains. Because her editing Sora's memories are actually being damaged and for meta-soul reasons it also effects people who've met your character.

The villains are killed off one by one and one of them, Axel, actually sets another on fire before he can spill the beans on why one of the memory locations is somewhere you've never been to. There's also Riku who seems to be having memory troubles too and is back in the dumb weird suit and you fight him because he wants to be the blonde girl's best friend and hero.

Meanwhile on the reverse side of the castle, turns out Riku is here after all and isn't the guy you're fighting with since they also fight while NotRiku insists that Darkness is Super Cool. Riku can now inexplicably smell the evil in the place and has to fight the lingering traces of Ansem - the guy who possessed him - and at one point Mickey Mouse left him for hecking dead over the dark evil magic in his soul. But its okay because Friendship.

Eventually you both reach the top floor where the master of the castle Death McFlower Reaper Marluxia wants to turn you into a puppet that'll only do what they want you to, but you are so determined that even if you don't remember what's real or not you will stop him.

And you do. Also, since I forgot to mention it, the copy of Riku died at some point and was revealed to be a imitation puppet made from memories of the guy.

Sora is sealed in a magic crystal pod to help stabilize your body as Namine reassembles your memories because she feels really bad about it.

Kingdom Hearts II, the Third Game which will confuse you if you skipped CoM.

The weird dreams from the first game are back but its some random school kid named Roxas dreaming about Sora. He looks very little like your guy, is dressed some kind of bandkid weird yet cool black-white-gray outfit with checkerboards everywhere.

He and his friends get into some really weird situations as they look into Japanese Urban Legend Mysteries of the city like haunted houses, eldritch locations, and strange reflections. Partway through strange monsters start invading your town and make a mess of things. They aren't Heartless but something else.

Roxas chases them into an abandoned mansion and finds a crack in a wall that leads to an exact copy of where you were. Turns out that your town is a simulation of a real town. That can magically be physically entered by outside forces. Don't think too much on it since its not the only digital world in this game. The other one is Tron.

It also turns out that you're the awake but missing soul, or a Nobody, of the first character who was used by the creepy cult from CoM's larger organization for... reasons. Unclear reasons but it involves your keyblade. And you don't remember it because of reasons. Also Roxas is forced to merge back into Sora, who wakes up with all his stats nerfed. The other Nobodies either look like anime pretty people or the new creepy eldritch monsters based on how much strength of will they have.

You spend the game doing KH1 plot again but this time the worlds have this big to-do regarding memory being a tangible force and the Disney villains are secondary to the evil cult. Of which Axel - guy who murdered the one about to spill-the-beans last game - is obsessed with getting his best friend Roxas out of your soul while Riku is determined to kick his ass because no that's HIS friend's soul, hands off. Also everyone thinks you're an idiot... even though you spent a whole year recovering from shattered memories.

The guy whose mansion you woke up in, DiZ (Darkness Within Zero... also DIZney, don't get me started on this), hates Namine and treats her like garbage, as well as hating Riku for falling for the dark evil magic, all because he is the actual supposedly evil science-king Ansem whose name was stolen by the endgame villain from the first game. Meanwhile Fantasia film Wizard, Yensid aka Disney Backwards, also has Problems but its more to do with relying on a kid. The only sane and kind adult in the know of the Keyblades is Disney's Merlin I swear.

Throughout the game you not only deal with the cult and the Heartless but also the surviving members of the Disney Villain group. Maleficent has become her own villain doing things across the worlds instead of sticking to one place. For some reason she has a bumbling sidekick minion in Pete the Cat.

You finally invade the husk-world that the cult uses as its base where the leader Xemnas is obsessed with the holy moon forged from millions of stolen souls freed when you and Riku murdered the Heartless the past three games. This moon is an artificial path to Kingdom Hearts built on murder. The cult believes that they can only get their souls back by reaching Kingdom Hearts. You kill their members one by one and then Real Ansem blows up the moon while trying to turn it into digital data.

Riku shows how cool he's gotten, Maleficent actually holds off enemies for you to go further in, you team up with Riku to kick Xemnas (real name Xehanort)'s ass, and then you learn that Namine is actually a missing soul fragment of Namine from when her soul was inside Sora and could only be created when freed from a soul with some measure of darkness which the Disney Princesses all lack... somehow.

Riku and Sora get temporarily stuck in Disney-RPG Heartless Hell only to get a way back to the real world thanks to Kairi. Somehow. Something something Friendship and Heart. Its all happily ever after as you all return to your homeworld. Only to get a mysterious letter from Mickey Mouse once again.

Kingdom Hearts 385/2 Days, or the Cult's FF7 Crisis Core spinoff.

So remember the cult from CoM and 2? This time you get to see your missing soul fragment's life during his one year of existence. The title is weird and hints at how much time you're playing around in in the game. Unfortunately there's a lot of timeskips in the plot.

Basically Roxas is running around from world to world murdering Heartless for company bucks which you then use to get better stuff to kill them harder with. Sometimes you get even harder special enemies. Mostly you're supposed to avoid the locals because they're not supposed to know you exist.

By being Working Salaryman Monster Hunter, your life is supposed to be so boring and so disconnected from people that you never learn the cult's purpose founded on a carefully build set of lies.

Shortly after Roxas does some missions with the cult members as support/mentors, you get a mysterious new member who you never heard of in the previous games. A girl named Xion who looks exactly like Kairi but with black hair and blue eyes. She also has a keyblade exactly like yours which is supposed to be impossible. Your murder friend, the red haired assassin Axel from CoM and 2, slowly warms up to both of these idiot children. Everyone else also slowly does although there's hints that everyone is seeing something different with the girl whose hood randomly goes up during cutscenes.

Turns out that Xion is a clone puppet just like Riku's in CoM. Except she's a girl when some people look at her and exactly like Sora to others and one guy sees a guy who looks exactly like Roxas but in clothes that look kind of like his amnesiac civilian outfit but are wildly different. Others see just a blank doll shape which is why sometimes her hood is up.

Xion is also slowly siphoning your strength because of magic reasons and she tricks you into killing her so not only do you have the strength to break free from the cult but also help save your other self. But because she was made from stolen memories, memories of Xion fade away leaving everyone super confused and making Axel EXTREMELY obsessed with Roxas due to all that friendship packed into one guy.

You fight against Riku who kicks your ass while blindfolded and drags Roxas to the mansion from KH2 because DiZ/Ansem has convinced him that the only way to help Sora's self is to glue the missing pieces back inside.

Kingdom Hearts: Coded, the phone game that no one outside of Japan got to play until they did.

Kingdom Hearts 1 but its a weird block puzzle game... except its not just the plot but you're all Tron-like NPCs running around trying to save the data from the digitized journal.

The journal is apparently sapient and chose an avatar based off of Riku. Maleficent's henchman Pete the Cat somehow Tron'd his way into the journal because Maleficent thinks that its a magic book she's trying to find and they apparently corrupted it with databugs to take it over. Mockery causes the AI Avatar of Sora to Pinocchio his way into having a REAL copy of the magic sword.

Over time Data Sora also repeats the plot of Chain of Memories and apparently the databug glitches were made by the journal's mystical connection to the real kid.

Mickey reverse-Trons himself back into the real world and some of the data people delete themselves and the whole game explained why Mickey sent the main character a letter at the end of 2.

Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, the Prequel that you have to play three times to beat.

Soooo remember the guy that looked a lot like Roxas but clearly wasn't him?

Game starts off with a flashback sequence where an old man dressed like the first game's villain (but with a shirt on) is watching him die because something happened that should've killed him. Instead his half-living corpse is tossed to the old man's best friend Master Eraqus or SquareEnix Backwards who looks like a wise if stern samurai dad.

Turns out that the keyblade people use to be a Jedi order of paladins with magic armor and some thing that could turn their magic swords into space-bikes. Now you're jealous of them.

You get to pick one of three characters to play as who have slightly different storylines while still running around the same worlds trying to solve problems for Disney characters and fix the inexplicably similar but different eldritch soul monster invasion. They're now called Unversed.

The shortest character is the happy carefree boy who looks exactly like Roxas. Ventus holds his keyblade backwards, plays the most similar to Sora/Roxas, and uses air magic and blitz strikes. The girl character Aqua looks vaguely but not really like an adult version of Kairi, is more of a mage than a swordsman so let's just call her a spellblade, and is closer to a shoujo hero (minus the romance plot) and just wants everyone to be happy and safe even if she has to kick their asses over it. The third character, Terra (not to be confused with FF6 Terra), is a very tall and buff offensive-heavy swordsman who favors earth magic. He is the shounen/seinen hero of the cast and a bit of a naïve doof.

The two older students take a test to prove their mastery of the keyblade and that they are ready to be called a master and roam the worlds helping them. There's three thrones but the other old master Yensid is not present and I don't know whether Merlin has a magic sword... probably not actually. But you have Master Dad Eraqus and Master Obvious Villain and guess who makes the test harder just to mess with you?

Master Obvious Villain, who is dressed like the Ansem and shares a name with the KH2/385 cult leader's real name from before he usurped Ansem's name and titles. Master Xehanort. The super obviously evil guy.

Aqua passes, Ventus cuts in to help save his friends, and Terra fails because he accidentally taps into the Dark Side of the Force.

They hop between worlds, doing the thing but with a new set of monsters and some new worlds. It's a case of each of them trying to catch up with each other and talk sense into one another over going home or getting help or finding the other one. It doesn't help that Terra keeps meeting the Disney Villains and and believes their takes on everything while Aqua and Ventus are being good heroes and occasionally lost but helpful nice people.

While Xehanort eggs people on, you run into the cult members while they were still alive and generally happier. You also run into a mysterious boy who's dressed almost exactly alike the time Riku was possessed by the soul-ghost of "Ansem". But with a helmet on to hide something. Vanitas keeps insulting people and is pretty much KH1 Riku all over again but with less reasons to be a jerk.

It turns out that Xehanort originally had Ventus spit his soul in half to make Masked Boy Vanitas who, without his helmet, looks exactly like an evil Sora instead because TURNS OUT that the reason why this Ventus looks Roxas is because when Sora was a literal baby, his soul offered to help heal the damaged soul of Ventus and that's why Ventus didn't die like Xehanort thought he was going to. Ventus and Vanitas are being set up to fight by Xehanort to make the ultra special holy magic sword keyblade "the XBlade" (read: ChiBlade, which sounds like Keyblade) in order to make a path to Kingdom Hearts. Yes its here again.

Also the monsters in this game are the soul-damage bleeding out from Vanitas since his half of the soul wasn't nursed back to health beyond making sure it didn't fall apart. Good job, Xehanort, you ruined one now two perfectly good boys at this point in time.

Now because this is a prequel you know this doesn't work. But because this is a prequel, I'm sure you wonder why you've never heard of any of these people.

Murder. The answer is murder.

Terra is tricked into killing Jedi Dad Eraqus, whose soul hops into him to help protect him from the evil magic slowly corrupting him. Terra is then possessed by Xehanort making him now look exactly like KH2/358's cult leader Xemnas... and loses his memories because Terra's soul is being already possessed by Eraqus so there's a constant war in his soul for control leaving the body with no idea who he is. It takes an already partially possessed cult member to help set things up in addition to all the nonsense going on in the background to keep the plan on track.

Ventus's soul gets damaged again and is lost, but actually goes off into Sora's soul to heal. This is why Sora has a keyblade at the beginning of the series because it turns out that the reason why everyone thought that Riku was the prophesized savior was because he was intentionally blessed with a keyblade by Terra for... some reason, probably to do with his desire to protect his friends. Sora has no idea he even has a keyblade until his world is torn apart by Riku out of impatience because he's been waiting for Terra to show up and teach him how to keyblade. This is how Fake Ansem convinces him to break the world.

Aqua meanwhile accidentally blessed Kairi with a keyblade, but she's so busy looking for Ventus and Terra that when she sees Possessed Terra nearly murder them, she ships off Ventus's soulless body to their home world which gets turned into Chain of Memories memory-card castle Oblivion for his body's protection. Then she goes to fight Terra and free him, only to get tossed into Disney-RPG Hell where she spends the next... ten years? Something like that, of nonstop fighting and struggling to survive there. It's implied to only have Heartless so your guess is as good as mine how she ate or if she ever slept. (Turns out Time is nonlinear in Disney-RPG Hell so some people spend long amounts of time there and others spend days but come out years later.)

Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, or KH with Pokemon.

It's time for Sora and Riku to take their Master Jedi test! To do this, they are told by Yensei to enter a magical dream world where all worlds that are still trapped in darkness as they recover from the Heartless invasion are 'sleeping'.

For some reason this means there's magical monsters that look vaguely like Heartless but are actually some kind of Nightopian Nightmaren setup of magic soul fragments called Dream Eaters. Also The World Ends With You cast are running around the dream worlds like it is UG Tokyo. Which raises questions in my head about the Reapers and whether this means Joshua is an avatar of Kingdom Hearts.

For some even stranger reason, their test is a lot harder than the one given to the Birth by Sleep students. Like a lot. Terra and Aqua just had to prove their skill and self-control while slapping magic light with their keyblades. These guys are told they have to save seven sleeping worlds instead. In spite of all the times they've saved the entire universe as well as directly saved the worlds.

This is the game where I start to hate Yensid.

Sora and Riku now in addition to running around the forgotten worlds and sleeping memories have to fight Fake Ansem, Xemnas, Master Xehanortt, and some mysterious teenager who are all there to gatecrash the test once again because it worked in Birth by Sleep. While fighting them, it turns out that the Xehanort has access to time travel magic and that's why every version of himself was working towards the same goal of reaching Kingdom Hearts off the deaths of every single being in the universe if necessary. The teenager is his past self. Young Xehanort.

The real goal of the cult is to make perfect host bodies for pieces of Xehanort's soul. To this end, this requires a weakened will and/or incomplete soul that he can suppress and fill with his own. He plans to turn Sora into his latest host since Riku has been successful in keeping him out.

Meanwhile in the living world, it turns out that murdering the Heartless that has someone's soul and then murdering their Nobody makes their real self alive again. So the cult's members who you killed are back to their real selves. Most of the fans' favorites are alive and looking for the missing members. Also Queen Minnie Mouse was kidnapped by Maleficent to blackmail Mickey Mouse into giving her access to the Journal again only for her to get inexplicably beaten up by the Revived Axel who had zero business on that world.

Mickey gets into the dreamworld in time to help stop the resurrection of Xehanort because at this moment he's still kinda-sorta dead. The plan with the hosts is to create the holiest of keyblades by forcing hearts of pure evil and hearts of pure light to fight in the hopes that that will make the holy keyblade appear and thus lead him to Kingdom Hearts because he wanted to see the super keyblade having heard stories of the keyblade war. We all want to see the Keyblade War but he took it too far.

In spite of doing nothing wrong and being in a coma during this whole encounter with Xehanort, Yensid claims that Sora screwed up and doesn't deserve the title of master yet gives it to Riku. Also it turns out that the Assassin Friend Axel now has a keyblade. Because of course he does.

Which is perfect because they need seven keyblade users to fight the thirteen superdark hosts of Xehanort. Which... just plays into the villain's hands.

Kingdom Hearts X (Chi), or the MMO we wanted and regretted getting.

We always wanted three things: To see the keyblade war because it sounded really really cool. A game where keyblade players got to fight. An MMO where we got to explore the worlds with friends. We got it. As a gacha mobile rpg where we were told that one of the five player factions was led by a lying traitor to Ancient Past Keyblade Jedi Leader and pitted against each other to see who got the most light fragments.

The fact that each of the faction leaders were all named after the Seven Deadly Sins while also taking design cues from our favorite Keyblade Characters did not help one bit.

Leopard was led by a boy named Gluttony who looked like Roxas/Ventus. Unicorn by Not-Riku whose name sounded like Wrath. Snake by Aqua "Envy". Fox by Kairi "Greed". And "Sloth" Terra leads Bear. Since one faction being led by a villain would've made at least a tenth of the playerbase complicit in villainy, instead the traitor was a mysterious sixth apprentice Luxu or Light or maybe a reference to Lucifer and the whole thing was arranged on purpose by the master whose keyblade looks suspiciously like the Xehanort's right down to the evil eyeball.

All faction members (who are all children) are given a magic not-moogle cat monster that help them as they run around fighting monsters that should not exist at this point in time.

It turns out that suspicion has caused the apprentices to turn on each other an that there's a whole Puella Magi setup with the monsters you're fighting being fallen corrupted members of the factions whose hearts have been consumed by dark magic.

It also turns out that the Keyblade War was fought between the factions over who was the traitor. The player character is offered a chance to go to the future in the hopes that scattering a few selected faction members whose loyalty and skill have been proven can help save the future from destruction.

Fun fact: it turns out that the player character, regardless of what faction you're in, is reborn as Xehanort. Some members are tossed into the future but become the villain's cult members such as Marluxia. Also the whole game is a data copy preserved in a different magic book that seems to be the one Maleficent has been seeking this whole time.

Kingdom Hearts III, the grand finale that said "screw you" to everyone.

Because I don't have a PS4/PS5, I've yet to play this one. That said I know some key facts anyway because of spoilers.

Sora is treated like crap and taunted by everyone because he was almost possessed by Xehanort, in spite of him doing more than anyone else to save the worlds while everyone else who did get hurt or possessed by Xehanort were also played by Xehanort so that's a weird hangup to have. The Grande Finale involves everyone involved in the main plot, although most of the Final Fantasy cameo characters are no longer in use for some reason. Sora, Riku, Kairi, and multiple ex-cult people all have keyblades. Aqua gets pulled out of Heartless Hell but she had turned Dark for a moment, Terra's willpower possessed armor the optional boss from KH2 who we see form in BbS shows up to bodycheck his villain possessed body, Ventus wakes up, Vanitas is still around.

By the way since Heartless Hell is nonlinear, this means that anyone chilling out in it - Riku, Mickey, Sora, Real Ansem, Xemnas, Roxas - could've saved Aqua at literally any point in time. Its not even a question of keeping the timeline secure since characters can and do abuse time travel. Mainly Xehanort but there are a couple bits by the heroes like in KH2 when they hop between Disney Castle World and Steamboat Willy River. Sucks to be her.

Actually all the characters who supposedly died or were lost are back. All of them. A lot of them are possessed by Xehanort as his new host bodies. Others are brought back from the dead at the end of the game even when they already exist (ex: Axel and his original self Lea, while Xion and Namine and Roxas all gain their own existences).

Xehanort turns out to have been Good All Along and has had good reasons for trying to destroy the universe. He and Eraqus go off to Kingdom Hearts or some other happy afterlife hand-in-hand.

Sora, meanwhile, pretty much kills himself saving everyone so he's even more of a Messianic figure in the series than shounen protags tend to be. Goofy almost dies and Donald whips out Zettaflare - a power that outstrips anything seen in any Final Fantasy game before.

In the end it also turns out that the character helping keep Xehanort's plot on track was Luxu all along. Also the Union Faction Leaders are back, thus setting up the next arc of God knows how many more games. Which begins with a music-based rhythm game and possibly also Super Smash Bros Ultimate.

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