We Have Untangled The Very Confusing World Of ‘Kingdom Hearts’ So You Don’t Have To

Kingdom Hearts is one of the dumbest games of all time. It is also one of my favourite games. A faulty neuron in my brain keeps firing telling me I adore and would die for this series of ridiculous cartoonish games, of which I hated almost every second of playing.

Last weekend a friend who had never played the game asked me what Kingdom Hearts was about, and I became so immediately overwhelmed at the gravity of this question I had to go have a lie-down. I don’t know. Nobody knows. Kingdom Hearts is much like the concept of aviation – yeah, I can read all the science behind it, but deep down we all know it isn’t real and nobody understands it and it’s just a miracle any of it works.

The simplest thing you can say about KH is it’s your standard Light vs Dark story. There’s sweet boy Sora, there’s Donald and Goofy, there’s a bunch of Final Fantasy characters with stupid hair, there are Disney heroes to help you along the way. There are also 8 million other key figures and if you don’t know each and every one of their character arcs, I cannot help you. But I’m going to try.

What is Kingdom Hearts?

First up, there’s the Keyblade. It is a big idiotic weapon, comically larger than the boy who wields it, it locks stuff and I guess you brutally bludgeon enemies to death with it? Unclear how this functions.

A very long time before Sora’s adventures began there was the X-blade. It was created by a union between the perfect dark heart and the perfect pure light heart, and protected the worlds called Kingdom Hearts. Naturally, a Keyblade War broke out over this because [extremely Galadriel voice] men, above all else, desire power. So the blade shattered into shards of light and darkness, the light shards became hearts of princesses and the dark ones disappeared into the abyss.

We’re not even at the first game yet, keep up.

Who is in Kingdom Hearts?

So there’s a bad guy named Xehanort, he now wants to create a new X-blade because he thinks the war left things unbalanced in favour of the light side. In 2019 Xehanort would hate the ‘mainstream media’ and think it’s all ‘too PC these days.’ So he attempts to make this new X-blade and in doing so, splits the essence of his apprentice in half forming two new beings: Ventus and Vanitus. Alright then. Okay. Sure.

Ventus is good, Vanitus is bad. Ventus kills Vanitus and then ends up in a coma. And Xehanort also gets split in two for some reason (good GRIEF), and this creates a Heartless and a Nobody.

What’s a Heartless? What’s a Nobody? Who am I?

A Heartless, who are the weird dark beings you’ll fight throughout the games, are what is created from the evil within someone’s heart, overwhelming their heart and turning them into a being of pure darkness, heaps evil. A Nobody, on the other hand, is the body and mind of the person who became a Heartless.

So anyway, the Heartless version of Xehanort now calls himself Ansem, which was the name of his own master for some godforsaken pointless reason that adds NOTHING TO THE STORY and WHY IS THIS HAPPENING and the Nobody calls himself Xemnas.

Ansem sets out collecting the sweet princesses to get their sweet light shards, and Xemnas sets up Organisation XIII, a group of Nobodies who are basically just a bunch of emo kids in trench coats getting about stealing hearts, but not in a Brandon Urie kind of way.

WHY IS KINGDOM HEARTS?

WE MADE IT to Kingdom Hearts 1, where Sora lives on an island with his best friend Riku who is really kind of a dick, and Kairi whom they both have a major friendzone complex about.

They want to go on an adventure, then some heartless attack and Kairi falls into darkness. Sora follows because she’s a total snack and ends up in Traverse Town, where he meets Donald and Goofy and not once questions neither why cartoon animals are speaking to him, nor why Donald is wearing a shirt but no pants.

You go on a cute little adventure and fight Disney villains while Donald fails miserably at healing you. Get out of my party, you useless little pantsless man. Meanwhile, evil Disney villainesses led by Maleficent are kidnapping Disney Princesses to harness their power. Riku is with them and he’s now massively emo, a real Anakin Skywalker type. They’ll tell you he has become a host body for Ansem and lured into the darkness, but really he just sucks.

Meanwhile, it turns out Kairi was a princess of heart all along, and during the big darkness her heart was separated from her body. Her heart latched itself onto Sora. Why? DON’T KNOW. So now Ansem/Riku tries to rip that out of Sora and fails. Big dramatic battle, Riku is free now, and Sora wants to give precious Kairi her heart back. So he totally guts himself with the keyblade (looks blunt man, really, I don’t know) and physically gets it out. But now he and Kairi are split into their respective Nobodies, Namine and Roxas. For fuck’s sake.

ANOTHER GAME? I DON’T UNDERSTAND YET

It’s Kingdom Hearts 2 time, and Jesse McCartney-voiced Roxas is here. After KH1, Roxas joined Organisation XIII and someone bad called Marluxia uses Namine, who can manipulate memories, to mess with Roxas to overthrow the Organisation. So this new useless but brave boy figures it out, wins the battle, and gets Namine to restore his memories while he is placed in some kind of pod just like the one in Austin Powers.

Now you get to spend 5 hours doing useless and irritating summer tasks with his friends who turn out to be complete hallucinations. He wakes up in his gross pod, now he’s Sora again, why have I spent a significant number of hours of my life playing this hallowed game, a true abomination against God?

Deep breath. Sora teams up with Donald and Goofy again to stop the Organisation and Xemnas who has decided he wants to be some sort of God now, there are Disney adventures, you beat Xemnas. Happily ever after? No, in the later non-Playstation games we find out Xehanort is whole again and wants to make his stupid X-blade. Give it a rest, man.

Conclusion??? Closure???

There is no closure. There will be none. We will all play a new Disney game for children every 13 years and understand none of it until we die.

 

Lucy Valentine is a freelance writer, political satirist, podcast co-host and all round Melbourne stereotype. She is extremely online and tweeting at @LucyXIV