The Kingdom Hearts series celebrated its 20th anniversary this weekend, and Square Enix had decided to celebrate this anniversary as it should. A video event with great fanfare was the occasion for the publisher to announce the release of two mobile games, Kingdom Hearts Union x Dark Road and Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link, but above all the arrival (on an unknown date) of kingdom hearts 4.
This saga has, since the first episode, an incomparable magical aura: it looks like a childhood dream come true, in which all the heroes can rub shoulders, a dream that the arrival (desired and logical) of Sora in Super Smash Bros Ultimate seems to perpetuate. During these twenty years, the saga has been particularly prolific, since there will be no less than twenty episodes with the two moving parts to come, including the compilations. A rather ironic situation when we know that Tetsuya Nomuradirector/concept designer/screenwriter of the game, wasn’t sure if he could do a sequel when the first part came out.
The result is a real problem: how to synthesize the whole story for the uninitiated, and even for the initiated, many of whom will probably not have played all the opuses, or will not remember the details of games from 20 years ago.
Kingdom Hearts – The Story So Far is a compilation of compilations, released shortly before Kingdom Hearts 3, which included all the games released before the latter and was intended to make them available to newcomers. The fact remains that this is a time-consuming activity to be able to enjoy a new title. And when we know that there have been fifteen years (and ten games) between the second and the third opus, we can imagine that there will be new episodes before the release of Kingdom Hearts 4.
In the latest canonical opus to date, the “Memory Archives” were short videos to refresh your memory, but they were far from providing a complete summary of previous episodes to discover this abundant universe.
Square Enix’s solution could lie elsewhere, in a certain detachment from the story of the existing trilogy. The trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4 indeed begins with an evocative title going in this direction: “The Lost Master Arc”. This fourth episode would therefore constitute the beginning of a new arc, and would at the same time allow you to discover the rest of the story without needing to know it in detail.
Tetsuya Nomura has accustomed us, in its creations, to rich, but too often cryptic stories, like the end of Final Fantasy VII Remake. It is one thing to encourage players to research and reflect, it is quite another to deliberately deprive them of keyblades keys allowing the good comprehension of a work.
However, it would be a shame to be deprived of the fabulous background of this series, and we hope for our part that Nomura and his team will offer us a fun way to relive the essentials of Sora’s adventures before launching ourselves, hearts and souls, into Kingdom Hearts 4.