By Kotaku | Created at 2026-10-08 14:12:55 | Updated at 2026-10-08 15:02:56
1 hour ago
Hello and welcome to the first entry of Guiding Key, Kotaku’s new Kingdom Hearts book club where we’re going to go through every single game in Square Enix’s Disney/Final Fantasy crossover until we reach Kingdom Hearts IV’s launch in late 2027. Today is October 8, and that means Square just put out the Kingdom Hearts I~III Collection on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch 2, so if you’re looking to take part in our year-long retrospective, there’s a decent place to start. If you’re just following along and have already played these games, we’d definitely still love to hear from you as we go.
To start things off, before we actually get into the whole playing-the-game part in the next entry, I wanted to talk about my history with Kingdom Hearts and what I’m personally hoping to get out of this playthrough leading up to KHIV. Though it’s a bit unorthodox, Kingdom Hearts was actually my first Square game, one my brother and I rented for our PS2 back in the day. This was before we had a memory card, so we just played through the stuff on Destiny Islands and Traverse Town over and over. And even before I could play the rest of the game, I knew this was something that was going to change my brain chemistry.
Even though I was getting into anime such as Pokémon and Dragon Ball Z at the time, I hadn’t much been exposed to the kind of emotionally explosive storytelling Kingdom Hearts loves. The series wears its, er, heart, on its sleeve and at that young age, I hadn’t really encountered anything like it. The game acted as my gateway into Final Fantasy, and was one of my earliest examples of a reasonably complex action RPG. Perhaps the most precious memory I have of it, and of the series as a whole, is that the ending of this game was the first time a video game ever made me cry. I was in the fifth grade and only had so many words for the emotions I was feeling, and the second Utada Hikaru’s “Simple and Clean” kicked in in the final minutes, I was done. I was sobbing in my sister’s bedroom (where the PlayStation 2 was), and I had never done that before.
My relationship with the series was strong for a while. I adored Chain of Memories as a Riku diehard, I scoured the internet leading up to Kingdom Hearts II’s launch in some of my earliest experiences with social media, and Hikaru’s themes remained on repeat in minimized YouTube videos on my Internet browser.
In the years that followed, Kingdom Hearts continued to be a part of my life, but I was never quite in the thick of it as I was for those first three games. I still played them and kept up with the decade-and-change saga that was waiting for the next numbered game. It just wasn’t something I was as deeply invested in, and by the time Kingdom Hearts III came out, I was mostly there to find out if and how Square Enix could wrap up the games’ notoriously convoluted story of light, darkness, and the power of friendship. Like a lot of people, I wasn’t big on Kingdom Hearts III, but would have been pretty content to leave the series behind at that point. Square Enix and Disney were not about to let this train stop there, though, and thus we’re getting a whole new arc. After 25 years, Kingdom Hearts has woven an elaborate tale that is surprisingly complex for something Disney has not only greenlit, but seems to be doubling down on heading into Kingdom Hearts IV.
© Square Enix / KotakuOutside of my writing here at Kotaku, I co-host a book club–style podcast called Normandy FM, and something I talk about there a lot is that, as time goes by, a lot of video games get distorted in the public eye as memes and in-jokes become the common way we discuss them. It’s disheartening to see something people put a lot of work into get boiled down to a caricature of itself, and that’s why I like doing that show: it gives us a chance to interrogate the way people’s tongue-in-cheek shorthand for a creative work somehow becomes all people really every say about it. To me, a lot of the arguments that Kingdom Hearts’ story is “too complicated” feel like that, typically pushed by people whose idea of actual criticism is to simply spout a bunch of out-of-context proper nouns and call it proof that an entire series of games is “too complicated,” because it has words and phrases you won’t understand unless you spend some time with the actual games.
To me, going back and playing through an entire series again is a chance to examine it for what it actually is, rather than what the passage of time and the claims of bad actors say it is. I want to dissect Kingdom Hearts for what Square Enix actually put into the world, and part of that involves talking about its very complex web of stories, but I also want to pinpoint exactly where that complication began. Though Square Enix has gone to great lengths to fill in gaps with complex lore that has expanded Kingdom Hearts’ story far beyond a Disney crossover, it was, at one time, much more straightforward than it eventually became. Something I’m particularly curious to see as we go through these games together is just when it starts to feel like that switch flips. Sora, Riku, and Kairi started out as a bunch of kids who wanted to see other worlds, only to find that their very existence on the beaches of Destiny Islands was far more significant than it seemed at the time. When did this shift start? Were the clues always there, or did Tetsuya Nomura decide at some point to start adding a lot more ingredients to the pie?
We’re all gonna find out this stuff together! I’ll be doing occasional blogs about each game (all will be categorized under the Guiding Key tag) as I go through, with big tentpole check-ins every month. The full Guiding Key schedule is as follows:
- Kingdom Hearts: October-December 2026
- Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories: January 2027
- Kingdom Hearts II: February-April 2027
- Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days and Re:Coded: May 2027
- Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep: June 2027
- Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance and A Fragmentary Passage: July 2027
- A watch through of the unplayable mobile games Kingdom Hearts Union χ Dark Road: August 2027
- Kingdom Hearts III and the Re:Mind DLC: August-October 2027
- Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory: November 2027
- Kingdom Hearts IV: Late 2027
