Getting into Kingdom Hearts in 2022 is no easy task

digitaltrends.com:

In the Kingdom Hearts games, players adventure through a galaxy made of various Disney properties, defeating all kinds of monsters as movie stories play out. In Kingdom Hearts III, for instance, players beat the snot out of Heartless, the franchise’s faithful group of punching bags, as the stories of Frozen and Tangled played out in the background.

While that gameplay might be good fun (it wasn’t in Kingdom Hearts III, but that’s another article entirely), everything happening between its big RPG battles makes the franchise so difficult to get into. After seeing Kingdom Hearts 4‘s impressive trailer, though, anyone new to the franchise may be looking to get into it now. Longtime fans of the series are certainly saying that now is the best time to jump headfirst into the two-decade-old franchise.

What they won’t tell you is that if you really want to know what’s going on in Kingdom Hearts 4, you’ll have to play the two mobile games that were also announced in the franchise’s 20th-anniversary showcase, along with 14 other entries in it. Now may be the best time to hop into Kingdom Hearts, but it’s also the hardest.

The story in Kingdom Hearts is, arguably, its biggest point of contention. It’s a long tale of the conflict that JRPGs seem to love: Light against dark. Along with that exceptionally tired conflict, the franchise’s story spans decades, encapsulating multiple wars involving dozens upon dozens of characters.

According to the Kingdom Hearts Wiki, the game’s story can be split into seven separate major events, stretching from the First Keyblade War to Sora’s Disappearance, with that latter plot point being told in an expansion for Kingdom Hearts III. If you want to understand the First Keyblade War, you’ll have to