Kingdom Hearts

The series exists because two executives shared a lift. Square and Disney had offices in the same Tokyo building, Shinji Hashimoto met a Disney executive there, and the result put Final Fantasy characters and Donald Duck in the same combat system. It has since become the series most often described as impossible to follow.

An accident of Tokyo real estate

Square was in trouble in 2000 after the failure of its animated film. Disney had never licensed its characters into another company's role-playing game.

Tetsuya Nomura took the project and made a decision that carried everything: play it straight. The Disney worlds are not parody, and a teenager with a key-shaped sword talks to Donald Duck about grief without a wink to the audience.

Kingdom Hearts came out in 2002 and has sold more than four million copies on the PlayStation 2 alone. Nobody had asked for the crossover, and Square had no comparable success that year.

Thirteen years between the second game and the third

Kingdom Hearts II arrived in 2006. Kingdom Hearts III arrived in 2019. The gap was not idle: seven games came out in between, on the Game Boy Advance, the Nintendo DS, the PlayStation Portable, mobile phones and the 3DS.

Those were not side stories. Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep in 2010 explains where the villain comes from, and Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance in 2012 sets up the final game directly.

A player who bought only the numbered entries missed the plot, having done exactly what the numbering told them to do. Square eventually reissued the handheld games as remastered collections, which is an admission rather than a favour.

The jokes about the story are the marketing now

The naming reached a point of self-parody: 358/2 Days, Re:coded, Unchained X, Melody of Memory. Square has released collections whose subtitles are longer than some games' names.

Kingdom Hearts III scored well in 2019 and disappointed a section of the audience that had waited thirteen years for answers, some of which arrived in downloadable content four months later.

The series now trades openly on its own reputation for incomprehensibility. Square's own trailers make the joke, which is a strange asset and a real one.

What Disney learned from lending its characters

Before 2002, Disney licensed its properties into games that stayed inside a single film. Kingdom Hearts proved the characters could carry an original story written by someone else without damaging them.

The arrangement paved the way for what Disney does routinely now across parks, crossovers and streaming: treat the catalogue as one shared world rather than a shelf of separate titles.

A Japanese studio in financial difficulty worked that out first, in a game where Donald Duck casts spells badly.