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Charlie Mengel
@chazman1227
SMT Engineering PM. / Ast. Coach GLHS Men’s Varsity Basketball Team. GHHS 04’ NCSU 08’
Fuquay-Varina, NC
Joined September 2012
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The promise has been made.
Final Fantasy VII Revelation launches both physically and digitally on April 8, 2027.
Princeton Review on NC State:
- #6 best value for students with no demonstrated financial need
- #9 best public school value
- #11 best public alumni network
- #15 best public school for internships
Currently across the pond on vacation, still found a bar to watch the start of the season! Go Pack!!!
@PackFootball
Cale Makar - $20.4 million
Jaccob Slavin, K'Andre Miller, Sean Walker, Shayne Gostisbehere, Jalen Chatfield, Joel Nystrom - $25.02 million
State fans not getting over this anytime soon
3 minutes of Tim Curry holding back laughter while filming scenes for Red Alert 3
“Gee I wonder why they eliminated the Pro Bowl”
Just renewed my passport online (thanks Biden). Took less than ten minutes and should have the new one in 4-6 weeks.
Pro tip: Ask for the passport book with more pages so you don't get stuck with a "Commemorate" one with Trump's ugly mug in it for the next decade.
The champs have arrived! The @Canes Championship exhibit is now on display at the Hockey Hall of Fame. 🏆
The Hurricanes were straight up “AURA FARMING” in the Stanley cup final 😭😭✌️
It’s been about a month since we got back home, and I’ve finally finished putting all our photos and videos from the trip into one big video.
It was pretty hard to capture everything we experienced just through tweets, so I think this video is a much better way to show everything that went on.
It has everything in it, our phone call with the ISS, all the adventures we had with locals, and all the other crazy stuff that happened along the way. About 99% of the footage in this video is something we haven’t posted before.
Unfortunately, I can’t upload it directly to Twitter because it’s filled with copyrighted music. We obviously can’t monetize it on YouTube either because of that, but if you could leave a like and subscribe, that would really help us out.
For our next trip this fall, we’re planning to make YT videos on the exciting days, especially things like college gamedays, so it’s definitely worth subscribing:)
Here’s the video:
https://t.co/LFeppkeLmv
I’ve never seen anything more accurate in my life
9 DAYS 🐺🔥
Oct. 23, 2004. The ONLY time College GameDay has ever come to Raleigh for football.
Corso put on the Mr. Wuf head! 😤
We lost 45-31.
Do not care.
Still one of the best mornings in the history of this program! 🔴⚪️
OK FINE, HERE IS A VERY DETALIED, ALL GAMES YOU CAN PLAY BEFORE KINGDOMHEARTS 4, this is good for people who are new to the series:
Kingdom Hearts Final Mix:
This is the foundation of everything. The original game introduces the core philosophy of the series. Hearts, connections, the power of friendship, the existence of other worlds, and the constant pull between light and darkness. It establishes the main trio and the fundamental rules of how this universe operates. Without it, every later game feels like it's referencing a language you never learned. Skipping this is like trying to understand a cathedral by only looking at the roof.
The Final Mix version isn't optional and here's why. The original 2002 release ends with a secret movie. Final Mix swaps it for a longer, weirder cut full of imagery that wouldn't pay off for eight more years. Eight years. People theorized about that video on forums for most of a decade. Final Mix also adds a hidden boss in Hollow Bastion who will make absolutely no sense to you, which is correct and intended, plus rebalanced difficulty and a bunch of extra content.
Now the important part. The Ansem Reports. There are thirteen of them, they're collectible text documents rather than cutscenes, and they contain a genuinely huge chunk of the game's real worldbuilding. The nature of the Heartless, what happened under Hollow Bastion, the question about identity that the entire second game is built on. Cutscene compilations on YouTube do not include them. Read them.
I'm going to keep bringing this up, because "Kingdom Hearts has an incoherent story" and "I watched the cutscene movies and skipped all the text documents" turn out to be the same sentence.
Play on Proud Mode always. Just because that's where the combat stops being a mash button simulator and starts making sense.
Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories
This is where the series starts showing you that memory itself is a battlefield. The card based combat forces you to think differently, but the real importance is how it expands the idea that identity and recollection are fragile. New players underestimate this one constantly because of the gameplay shift. Narratively it is load bearing.
Some background that makes it land better. The original Chain of Memories was a Game Boy Advance game from 2004, done in sprites, with a deck building system that is honestly way smarter than it had any right to be. You build a deck, you chain three cards together into special attacks called sleights, and enemies can break your card by playing a higher number. There's a card that breaks literally anything and is itself broken by literally anything. This is a real strategy game hiding inside a Disney licensed handheld title and people still don't take it seriously.
Re:Chain of Memories is the PS2 remake, originally released in Japan bundled with Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix Plus in 2007 and not localized until a standalone US release the following year. Full 3D, voice acting, card system mostly intact, which is a small miracle.
Do not skip Reverse Rebirth, the second campaign that unlocks after the main story. Different protagonist, completely different deck philosophy, no customization, and character material that Kingdom Hearts II opens by assuming you already have. If you've ever seen someone say "wait why is he like that at the start of KH2," you've met someone who skipped Reverse Rebirth.
Also the journal entries. More text. Still important. Read them.
Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix
This is widely considered the peak of the series for pure gameplay and spectacle, but its real value is how it deepens the themes of identity and belonging, and what happens when people are connected in ways they don't fully understand. It expands the cast massively and starts weaving a much bigger web of relationships and organizations. This is where the series stops being "Sora's adventure" and becomes a full ensemble story.
The Final Mix content is genuinely mandatory rather than just nice to have.
The Cavern of Remembrance is an entire post game area added in Final Mix, full of platforming, gauntlets, and a set of data battles that are basically the thesis statement of KH2's combat system. Every hard boss in every later Kingdom Hearts descends from these fights.
The Lingering Will is a Final Mix superboss and I'm not going to tell you a single thing about it. If you play KH2FM before Birth by Sleep, this fight is a screaming question mark. That's the intended experience and it rules.
The extended cutscenes throughout, including extra material in the Twilight Town prologue, which is substantially better than the original version.
The secret ending, unlocked by clearing the game and hitting the journal requirements. This one set up the next five years of the franchise.
Play on Critical Mode, which Final Mix introduced. Less HP and MP, but you start with bonus abilities and damage modifiers. It isn't a masochism setting, it's the difficulty the combat was actually tuned around, and it turns Reaction Commands and Drive Forms from spectacle buttons into an actual system you have to respect.
Final Mix also added the Zero EXP ability, which exists so people can do Level 1 Critical runs. You do not have to do this. But you should know it exists, because it's the closest thing this series has to a competitive scene and those runs are incredible to watch.
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days
Even if you only experience it as the HD cutscene movie, this is one of the best character studies in the entire franchise. It's about daily life, routine, friendship, and the quiet moments between the big events. It teaches you that the series cares just as much about the people living inside the conflict as it does about the conflict. A lot of later emotional beats only hit as hard as they do because this game spent time making you care.
The original is a Nintendo DS game from 2009 and it's a genuinely strange thing. The whole structure is a mission calendar. You get handed a day, a job, and a checklist, and the repetition is the entire point. The game is about routine. The HD version in Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 ReMIX turns it into a three hour cutscene film, which keeps every story beat and completely wrecks the thesis. This is the most argued about adaptation decision in the series and you should absolutely have an opinion about it by the end.
What the movie loses, in case you can get the DS version running.
Mission Mode, with playable versions of all fourteen Organization members, each with their own weapon and moveset. It's the only place several of them are ever playable and it's fantastic.
The panel system, where your equipment, abilities, magic, and even your character level all live on one shared grid. Absolutely bizarre, weirdly great.
The secret reports, written from a perspective the cutscenes leave out, which supply motive and interiority the film version only implies. Yes. More text documents. This series really wants you to read.
Whatever you do, don't skip the entry. Watch the film and grab the reports separately if you have to.
Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep Final Mix:
The first major prequel and absolutely essential. New trio, new perspective, and stories that turn out to be tangled up with the main timeline in ways you won't see coming. The three route structure makes you live through the same events from different angles, which is a core Kingdom Hearts storytelling move you'll see again and again.
Play in Terra, then Ventus, then Aqua order. This is not fan preference, it's the intended reading order. The routes are written so each one gives you more information than the last, which means the dramatic irony compounds as you go. Playing Aqua first defuses the entire structure. Please don't.
This is a PSP game from 2010 and it's where the Command Deck comes from. No traditional MP bar, just a set of action slots on cooldown. Command Melding lets you fuse two commands plus a crystal into something new with abilities attached, and it has a real optimization ceiling. This system directly shapes Dream Drop Distance, Re:coded, and arguably KH3.
Final Mix specifics you can't skip.
The Secret Episode, unlocked after the Final Episode once you've collected all the reports. Short, and a direct bridge into a later entry.
The Xehanort Reports, thirteen of them, and the most important text collection in the series after the Ansem Reports. They lay out how the whole plan actually functions. I'll say this as plainly as I can. Almost every person I've ever seen call this plot incoherent has not read these.
The Mirage Arena, expanded in Final Mix, and the secret ending, which sets up the next game and recontextualizes something you already watched.
One nerd detail worth having. The χ blade shows up here, and that's the Greek letter chi, not the letter X. How you pronounce it eventually stops being a fandom argument and becomes an actual plot point, which is very funny and very on brand.
Kingdom Hearts Re:coded
Constantly dismissed as filler, and it's really not. This is where the series works out how it feels about data, digital worlds, and whether a reconstructed experience can carry real emotional truth. It connects earlier events to later ones in quiet ways and reinforces the idea that no story is ever really finished.
Fun historical footnote. The original coded was an episodic Japanese mobile phone game released between 2008 and 2010. On flip phones. In a delivery format that no longer exists in any playable form anywhere. Re:coded is the DS remake and it's the only version anyone outside Japan has ever legitimately played. The original is basically lost media.
Honest take, and your friends will respect you more for making it. Most of Re:coded's plot critical content is concentrated in the last stretch and the secret ending. The rest is a genuinely inventive gameplay experiment, with a stat grid, a bug block system, and worlds that change genre on you, wrapped around a story that's retreading familiar ground.
But the "data can hold real weight" idea isn't filler at all in hindsight. It's the philosophical groundwork for a much later arc. Re:coded is the series quietly setting its terms years in advance, and that's the kind of thing that makes people fall in love with this franchise.
Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance
This is the game that formally kicks off the final stretch of the original arc while also planting seeds for everything after. It deepens the relationship between the main characters, expands the dream mythology, and introduces ideas later titles keep coming back to. This is where the scope starts feeling genuinely enormous.
3DS, 2012, and mechanically the most maximalist entry in the series. Flowmotion lets you grind rails and kick off walls and generally trivialize level geometry, and it was so much fun that later games quietly nerfed it out of existence. The Drop gauge is a timer that forcibly swaps you between the two protagonists mid dungeon, which is either brilliant thematic design or the most annoying system ever shipped, and you will have to pick a side. And the Dream Eater system replaces party members with craftable, raisable creature companions on an ability grid.
The ending sequence has the densest lore dump in the franchise up to that point. It also lays out a set of rules that are much stricter and more consistent than people give them credit for. Understanding those rules is genuinely the difference between "this is nonsense" and "oh, this is actually airtight." I will not be elaborating.
You'll play the HD version inside Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue. Read the secret reports. I keep saying it. I will keep saying it.
Kingdom Hearts χ [chi]
The furthest back in the timeline and foundational for the whole new arc that Kingdom Hearts IV is entering. It introduces the ancient history of the Keyblade, the Foretellers, and the original conflict that still echoes into the present day. Without it, a big chunk of the mythology the series has been slowly revealing feels like it came out of nowhere.
Here's where the preservation situation gets grim. Kingdom Hearts χ was a Japan only Flash browser game launched in 2013, and the service was shut down in 2016. It's unplayable. You can't buy it. It exists now only as cutscene compilations put together by fans, and honestly the fan preservation community is the only reason this material is accessible at all. Genuinely, thank you to those people.
What you want out of it is the Age of Fairy Tales, the Book of Prophecies, the Master of Masters, and the five Foretellers, each with an animal masked Keyblade and each leading a Union. If you retain nothing else, retain those names and the fact that there's a black box nobody will tell you anything about. That box has been a running fandom obsession for over a decade.
Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover
A short companion piece to χ focused on a specific group and their roles in the ancient conflict. Short, dense, and one of those small but load bearing things later games assume you already understand.
About an hour, fully animated in the KH3 engine, included in HD 2.8. It retells the events of χ from a different set of eyes, and it might be the single best directed piece of storytelling in the entire franchise. Which is a slightly funny thing to say about a bonus movie, but here we are.
Watch it after χ, not before. The perspective shift only works if you've got the ground level version first.
Kingdom Hearts Union χ [Cross]
The continuation and expansion of the χ storyline, and right now one of the most important things you can experience before Kingdom Hearts IV. It develops the ancient era further, deals with the fallout of the original conflict, and follows characters whose influence reaches all the way into the modern day. A lot of the threads the series is pulling on now start here.
The naming history is a disaster and you deserve to know it. This launched internationally in 2016 as Kingdom Hearts Unchained χ, a mobile remake and continuation of the dead browser game, then got rebranded to Union χ [Cross] in 2017 when the Union Cross multiplayer mode arrived. Same product, one continuous storyline, three names.
I'm going to break from the "everything is required" position for exactly one paragraph. This is sixty plus hours of cutscenes wrapped around a gacha, and a well edited summary is a completely legitimate way to consume it. A newcomer who watches ninety focused minutes is better prepared than one who bounces off the full archive at hour eleven. Nobody is grading you.
One thing you have to plan around. Union χ's live service has ended, and its ending was never part of the live game at all. It got delivered through a separate offline app alongside the finale of the next entry. Which brings me to the ordering fix.
Kingdom Hearts Dark Road
The last major piece of the ancient era puzzle. It follows the early life of a character whose importance becomes very clear very fast, and it fills in a lot of history about the Keyblade wielders and the world they lived in. It ties the distant past to the present in ways that matter directly for the new arc.
Move this up in your order. A lot of lists stick Dark Road at the very end, after Melody of Memory, and that's a release date artifact rather than a story order one. Dark Road's conclusion and Union χ's conclusion came out together and function as one sequence. Splitting them across a rhythm game in the middle is the one real ordering mistake I see people make. Watch or play Dark Road immediately after Union χ and it lands so much better.
Kingdom Hearts Missing Link ..... the game shaped hole
You can't play this one, and you should know why.
Missing Link was announced at the 20th Anniversary event in April 2022. GPS based mobile action RPG, Unreal Engine 5, gorgeous. Its story sat between Union χ and Dark Road, and it was explicitly meant to be connective tissue between Kingdom Hearts III and Kingdom Hearts IV. It went through multiple closed betas, got delayed in November 2024, and in May 2025 Square Enix cancelled it outright, saying they didn't think they could sustain a live service that would satisfy players long term.
So there's a gap in the chain that no amount of playing can fill. All that survives is beta footage, the official teasers, and a leaked opening cinematic. Whether that story content gets folded into KH4 or somewhere else hasn't been announced.
This isn't your fault and there's nothing to do about it. It's also, given the title, the funniest thing that has ever happened to this franchise.
Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep, A Fragmentary Passage
Short but dense, and it sits right between the old saga and the new one. It follows one character through one very specific place, and it leans hard into isolation, determination, and the long term consequences of things that happened much earlier. It's placed exactly where it needs to be so that certain beats in Kingdom Hearts III land properly.
Two to three hours, part of HD 2.8, and functionally a tech demo for the KH3 engine. This is the first Kingdom Hearts content built in Unreal and you can feel every one of the eight years between it and the PSP original. It looks incredible.
It's also a genuinely useful mechanical warmup, since it's your first time with the KH3 command menu, Shotlocks, and situation commands. And yes, it has a secret ending, and yes, it matters.
Kingdom Hearts III plus Re Mind
The conclusion of the original long running story arc. Playing the base game is mandatory, and Re Mind is every bit as important. It expands the ending, adds significant new sequences, and introduces elements that set up the next era directly. Big payoff for everything before it, and the starting point for everything after.
What in Re Mind is genuinely not optional.
The Re Mind episode itself, which replays part of the endgame from a different angle with new scenes filling in gaps the base game very deliberately left open.
The Limit Cut episode, thirteen data fights, and much more importantly the cutscenes wrapped around them. There's more forward facing plot in those bookends than in the whole base game ending.
The Secret Episode, which is the most direct setup for Kingdom Hearts IV that currently exists. That's all I'm saying about it.
The base game's secret ending, which has its own unlock requirements involving photo missions and difficulty, so check them before you start rather than after.
One more thing to keep an eye on. There's a fake video game inside the Toy Box world. It plays like a Nomura self parody gag. It is not a gag. Pay attention to it and then come talk to me afterward, because watching people realize what that is in real time is one of my favorite things about this fandom.
And read the secret reports. Thirteen of them. Last time I'm saying it, I promise.
Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory
This rhythm game is sneakily important. The gameplay is completely different, but the story sequences push the narrative past Kingdom Hearts III and set the emotional and thematic state of the cast heading into the new saga. It also works as a retrospective that helps everything you've played click into place.
Being straight with you, the story content is short. A framing narrative plus a substantial post credits sequence. That sequence is required. It's also about forty minutes of the runtime.
The other ninety five percent is a rhythm game with a setlist of well over a hundred and forty tracks pulled from Yoko Shimomura's entire body of work for the series. If you've just spent two hundred hours on everything above, playing the soundtrack in chronological order is one of the most quietly devastating retrospectives any franchise has ever built. Shimomura is one of the best composers this medium has, full stop, and Dearly Beloved gets rearranged for every entry in a way that tracks the emotional register of each game. Notice that while you play. It's the whole series in one melody.
Deep Cuts For Absolute Lunatics
Totally optional. You'll understand Kingdom Hearts IV without these. You will not be complete without them.
Kingdom Hearts V CAST from 2006, a Verizon exclusive mobile phone game released only in North America, retelling the first game in 2D with original world content. Delisted, never rereleased, effectively lost media, with fragments recovered by preservation people. Knowing this exists is a real flex in the right room.
Kingdom Hearts Mobile from 2008, Japan only, an avatar and social service with minigames. Not a story game. Listed purely because completeness demands it.
The Shiro Amano manga, covering the first game, Chain of Memories, KH2, 358/2 Days and more. Not canon, occasionally clarifying, frequently funnier than the games.
The Tomoco Kanemaki novels, light novel adaptations with interior monologue the games leave out. The 358/2 Days ones in particular contain characterization fans still quote.
The Ultimania guides, Japanese strategy guide and artbook hybrids stuffed with Nomura interviews that the fandom treats as basically canon because they keep answering things the games leave dangling. A surprising amount of well known Kingdom Hearts lore comes from an interview and has literally never been stated in a game.
The secret movies as their own thing. At some point, watch every secret ending in release order back to back as a standalone exercise. Twenty plus years of this series telegraphing itself. The through line is genuinely startling.
Actually Getting Your Hands On All This????
Kingdom Hearts Collection [I-III] comes out soon on October 8, 2026 on Switch 2, PS5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC. It bundles HD 1.5 plus 2.5 ReMIX, HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, and KH3 with Re Mind, all running natively on current hardware. That one purchase covers twelve of the fourteen playable entries above, which is a genuinely great deal for a newcomer.
What it doesn't cover. Melody of Memory is a separate purchase. And the whole χ, Union χ, Dark Road line is dead mobile and browser stuff, so fan cutscene compilations are your only route.
You've got well over a year. Kingdom Hearts IV was confirmed at D23 in August 2026 for late 2027 all platforms basically
Budget somewhere around 150 to 200 hours for the playable material at a normal pace, plus another 20 to 40 for the χ side of things depending on how completionist you get. Start now. Start with Final Mix. Play on Proud.
Everything on this list matters because Kingdom Hearts isn't a series of isolated stories. It's one continuous, self referential, multi decade narrative that treats every character, every world, every theme, and every mechanical idea as part of one living organism. It constantly rewards people who paid attention to the small details, the quiet character moments, the ancient history, and the questions it's been asking since 2002.
I'm done bruh 💀
![mrpyo1's tweet photo. OK FINE, HERE IS A VERY DETALIED, ALL GAMES YOU CAN PLAY BEFORE KINGDOMHEARTS 4, this is good for people who are new to the series:
Kingdom Hearts Final Mix:
This is the foundation of everything. The original game introduces the core philosophy of the series. Hearts, connections, the power of friendship, the existence of other worlds, and the constant pull between light and darkness. It establishes the main trio and the fundamental rules of how this universe operates. Without it, every later game feels like it's referencing a language you never learned. Skipping this is like trying to understand a cathedral by only looking at the roof.
The Final Mix version isn't optional and here's why. The original 2002 release ends with a secret movie. Final Mix swaps it for a longer, weirder cut full of imagery that wouldn't pay off for eight more years. Eight years. People theorized about that video on forums for most of a decade. Final Mix also adds a hidden boss in Hollow Bastion who will make absolutely no sense to you, which is correct and intended, plus rebalanced difficulty and a bunch of extra content.
Now the important part. The Ansem Reports. There are thirteen of them, they're collectible text documents rather than cutscenes, and they contain a genuinely huge chunk of the game's real worldbuilding. The nature of the Heartless, what happened under Hollow Bastion, the question about identity that the entire second game is built on. Cutscene compilations on YouTube do not include them. Read them.
I'm going to keep bringing this up, because "Kingdom Hearts has an incoherent story" and "I watched the cutscene movies and skipped all the text documents" turn out to be the same sentence.
Play on Proud Mode always. Just because that's where the combat stops being a mash button simulator and starts making sense.
Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories
This is where the series starts showing you that memory itself is a battlefield. The card based combat forces you to think differently, but the real importance is how it expands the idea that identity and recollection are fragile. New players underestimate this one constantly because of the gameplay shift. Narratively it is load bearing.
Some background that makes it land better. The original Chain of Memories was a Game Boy Advance game from 2004, done in sprites, with a deck building system that is honestly way smarter than it had any right to be. You build a deck, you chain three cards together into special attacks called sleights, and enemies can break your card by playing a higher number. There's a card that breaks literally anything and is itself broken by literally anything. This is a real strategy game hiding inside a Disney licensed handheld title and people still don't take it seriously.
Re:Chain of Memories is the PS2 remake, originally released in Japan bundled with Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix Plus in 2007 and not localized until a standalone US release the following year. Full 3D, voice acting, card system mostly intact, which is a small miracle.
Do not skip Reverse Rebirth, the second campaign that unlocks after the main story. Different protagonist, completely different deck philosophy, no customization, and character material that Kingdom Hearts II opens by assuming you already have. If you've ever seen someone say "wait why is he like that at the start of KH2," you've met someone who skipped Reverse Rebirth.
Also the journal entries. More text. Still important. Read them.
Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix
This is widely considered the peak of the series for pure gameplay and spectacle, but its real value is how it deepens the themes of identity and belonging, and what happens when people are connected in ways they don't fully understand. It expands the cast massively and starts weaving a much bigger web of relationships and organizations. This is where the series stops being "Sora's adventure" and becomes a full ensemble story.
The Final Mix content is genuinely mandatory rather than just nice to have.
The Cavern of Remembrance is an entire post game area added in Final Mix, full of platforming, gauntlets, and a set of data battles that are basically the thesis statement of KH2's combat system. Every hard boss in every later Kingdom Hearts descends from these fights.
The Lingering Will is a Final Mix superboss and I'm not going to tell you a single thing about it. If you play KH2FM before Birth by Sleep, this fight is a screaming question mark. That's the intended experience and it rules.
The extended cutscenes throughout, including extra material in the Twilight Town prologue, which is substantially better than the original version.
The secret ending, unlocked by clearing the game and hitting the journal requirements. This one set up the next five years of the franchise.
Play on Critical Mode, which Final Mix introduced. Less HP and MP, but you start with bonus abilities and damage modifiers. It isn't a masochism setting, it's the difficulty the combat was actually tuned around, and it turns Reaction Commands and Drive Forms from spectacle buttons into an actual system you have to respect.
Final Mix also added the Zero EXP ability, which exists so people can do Level 1 Critical runs. You do not have to do this. But you should know it exists, because it's the closest thing this series has to a competitive scene and those runs are incredible to watch.
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days
Even if you only experience it as the HD cutscene movie, this is one of the best character studies in the entire franchise. It's about daily life, routine, friendship, and the quiet moments between the big events. It teaches you that the series cares just as much about the people living inside the conflict as it does about the conflict. A lot of later emotional beats only hit as hard as they do because this game spent time making you care.
The original is a Nintendo DS game from 2009 and it's a genuinely strange thing. The whole structure is a mission calendar. You get handed a day, a job, and a checklist, and the repetition is the entire point. The game is about routine. The HD version in Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 ReMIX turns it into a three hour cutscene film, which keeps every story beat and completely wrecks the thesis. This is the most argued about adaptation decision in the series and you should absolutely have an opinion about it by the end.
What the movie loses, in case you can get the DS version running.
Mission Mode, with playable versions of all fourteen Organization members, each with their own weapon and moveset. It's the only place several of them are ever playable and it's fantastic.
The panel system, where your equipment, abilities, magic, and even your character level all live on one shared grid. Absolutely bizarre, weirdly great.
The secret reports, written from a perspective the cutscenes leave out, which supply motive and interiority the film version only implies. Yes. More text documents. This series really wants you to read.
Whatever you do, don't skip the entry. Watch the film and grab the reports separately if you have to.
Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep Final Mix:
The first major prequel and absolutely essential. New trio, new perspective, and stories that turn out to be tangled up with the main timeline in ways you won't see coming. The three route structure makes you live through the same events from different angles, which is a core Kingdom Hearts storytelling move you'll see again and again.
Play in Terra, then Ventus, then Aqua order. This is not fan preference, it's the intended reading order. The routes are written so each one gives you more information than the last, which means the dramatic irony compounds as you go. Playing Aqua first defuses the entire structure. Please don't.
This is a PSP game from 2010 and it's where the Command Deck comes from. No traditional MP bar, just a set of action slots on cooldown. Command Melding lets you fuse two commands plus a crystal into something new with abilities attached, and it has a real optimization ceiling. This system directly shapes Dream Drop Distance, Re:coded, and arguably KH3.
Final Mix specifics you can't skip.
The Secret Episode, unlocked after the Final Episode once you've collected all the reports. Short, and a direct bridge into a later entry.
The Xehanort Reports, thirteen of them, and the most important text collection in the series after the Ansem Reports. They lay out how the whole plan actually functions. I'll say this as plainly as I can. Almost every person I've ever seen call this plot incoherent has not read these.
The Mirage Arena, expanded in Final Mix, and the secret ending, which sets up the next game and recontextualizes something you already watched.
One nerd detail worth having. The χ blade shows up here, and that's the Greek letter chi, not the letter X. How you pronounce it eventually stops being a fandom argument and becomes an actual plot point, which is very funny and very on brand.
Kingdom Hearts Re:coded
Constantly dismissed as filler, and it's really not. This is where the series works out how it feels about data, digital worlds, and whether a reconstructed experience can carry real emotional truth. It connects earlier events to later ones in quiet ways and reinforces the idea that no story is ever really finished.
Fun historical footnote. The original coded was an episodic Japanese mobile phone game released between 2008 and 2010. On flip phones. In a delivery format that no longer exists in any playable form anywhere. Re:coded is the DS remake and it's the only version anyone outside Japan has ever legitimately played. The original is basically lost media.
Honest take, and your friends will respect you more for making it. Most of Re:coded's plot critical content is concentrated in the last stretch and the secret ending. The rest is a genuinely inventive gameplay experiment, with a stat grid, a bug block system, and worlds that change genre on you, wrapped around a story that's retreading familiar ground.
But the "data can hold real weight" idea isn't filler at all in hindsight. It's the philosophical groundwork for a much later arc. Re:coded is the series quietly setting its terms years in advance, and that's the kind of thing that makes people fall in love with this franchise.
Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance
This is the game that formally kicks off the final stretch of the original arc while also planting seeds for everything after. It deepens the relationship between the main characters, expands the dream mythology, and introduces ideas later titles keep coming back to. This is where the scope starts feeling genuinely enormous.
3DS, 2012, and mechanically the most maximalist entry in the series. Flowmotion lets you grind rails and kick off walls and generally trivialize level geometry, and it was so much fun that later games quietly nerfed it out of existence. The Drop gauge is a timer that forcibly swaps you between the two protagonists mid dungeon, which is either brilliant thematic design or the most annoying system ever shipped, and you will have to pick a side. And the Dream Eater system replaces party members with craftable, raisable creature companions on an ability grid.
The ending sequence has the densest lore dump in the franchise up to that point. It also lays out a set of rules that are much stricter and more consistent than people give them credit for. Understanding those rules is genuinely the difference between "this is nonsense" and "oh, this is actually airtight." I will not be elaborating.
You'll play the HD version inside Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue. Read the secret reports. I keep saying it. I will keep saying it.
Kingdom Hearts χ [chi]
The furthest back in the timeline and foundational for the whole new arc that Kingdom Hearts IV is entering. It introduces the ancient history of the Keyblade, the Foretellers, and the original conflict that still echoes into the present day. Without it, a big chunk of the mythology the series has been slowly revealing feels like it came out of nowhere.
Here's where the preservation situation gets grim. Kingdom Hearts χ was a Japan only Flash browser game launched in 2013, and the service was shut down in 2016. It's unplayable. You can't buy it. It exists now only as cutscene compilations put together by fans, and honestly the fan preservation community is the only reason this material is accessible at all. Genuinely, thank you to those people.
What you want out of it is the Age of Fairy Tales, the Book of Prophecies, the Master of Masters, and the five Foretellers, each with an animal masked Keyblade and each leading a Union. If you retain nothing else, retain those names and the fact that there's a black box nobody will tell you anything about. That box has been a running fandom obsession for over a decade.
Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover
A short companion piece to χ focused on a specific group and their roles in the ancient conflict. Short, dense, and one of those small but load bearing things later games assume you already understand.
About an hour, fully animated in the KH3 engine, included in HD 2.8. It retells the events of χ from a different set of eyes, and it might be the single best directed piece of storytelling in the entire franchise. Which is a slightly funny thing to say about a bonus movie, but here we are.
Watch it after χ, not before. The perspective shift only works if you've got the ground level version first.
Kingdom Hearts Union χ [Cross]
The continuation and expansion of the χ storyline, and right now one of the most important things you can experience before Kingdom Hearts IV. It develops the ancient era further, deals with the fallout of the original conflict, and follows characters whose influence reaches all the way into the modern day. A lot of the threads the series is pulling on now start here.
The naming history is a disaster and you deserve to know it. This launched internationally in 2016 as Kingdom Hearts Unchained χ, a mobile remake and continuation of the dead browser game, then got rebranded to Union χ [Cross] in 2017 when the Union Cross multiplayer mode arrived. Same product, one continuous storyline, three names.
I'm going to break from the "everything is required" position for exactly one paragraph. This is sixty plus hours of cutscenes wrapped around a gacha, and a well edited summary is a completely legitimate way to consume it. A newcomer who watches ninety focused minutes is better prepared than one who bounces off the full archive at hour eleven. Nobody is grading you.
One thing you have to plan around. Union χ's live service has ended, and its ending was never part of the live game at all. It got delivered through a separate offline app alongside the finale of the next entry. Which brings me to the ordering fix.
Kingdom Hearts Dark Road
The last major piece of the ancient era puzzle. It follows the early life of a character whose importance becomes very clear very fast, and it fills in a lot of history about the Keyblade wielders and the world they lived in. It ties the distant past to the present in ways that matter directly for the new arc.
Move this up in your order. A lot of lists stick Dark Road at the very end, after Melody of Memory, and that's a release date artifact rather than a story order one. Dark Road's conclusion and Union χ's conclusion came out together and function as one sequence. Splitting them across a rhythm game in the middle is the one real ordering mistake I see people make. Watch or play Dark Road immediately after Union χ and it lands so much better.
Kingdom Hearts Missing Link ..... the game shaped hole
You can't play this one, and you should know why.
Missing Link was announced at the 20th Anniversary event in April 2022. GPS based mobile action RPG, Unreal Engine 5, gorgeous. Its story sat between Union χ and Dark Road, and it was explicitly meant to be connective tissue between Kingdom Hearts III and Kingdom Hearts IV. It went through multiple closed betas, got delayed in November 2024, and in May 2025 Square Enix cancelled it outright, saying they didn't think they could sustain a live service that would satisfy players long term.
So there's a gap in the chain that no amount of playing can fill. All that survives is beta footage, the official teasers, and a leaked opening cinematic. Whether that story content gets folded into KH4 or somewhere else hasn't been announced.
This isn't your fault and there's nothing to do about it. It's also, given the title, the funniest thing that has ever happened to this franchise.
Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep, A Fragmentary Passage
Short but dense, and it sits right between the old saga and the new one. It follows one character through one very specific place, and it leans hard into isolation, determination, and the long term consequences of things that happened much earlier. It's placed exactly where it needs to be so that certain beats in Kingdom Hearts III land properly.
Two to three hours, part of HD 2.8, and functionally a tech demo for the KH3 engine. This is the first Kingdom Hearts content built in Unreal and you can feel every one of the eight years between it and the PSP original. It looks incredible.
It's also a genuinely useful mechanical warmup, since it's your first time with the KH3 command menu, Shotlocks, and situation commands. And yes, it has a secret ending, and yes, it matters.
Kingdom Hearts III plus Re Mind
The conclusion of the original long running story arc. Playing the base game is mandatory, and Re Mind is every bit as important. It expands the ending, adds significant new sequences, and introduces elements that set up the next era directly. Big payoff for everything before it, and the starting point for everything after.
What in Re Mind is genuinely not optional.
The Re Mind episode itself, which replays part of the endgame from a different angle with new scenes filling in gaps the base game very deliberately left open.
The Limit Cut episode, thirteen data fights, and much more importantly the cutscenes wrapped around them. There's more forward facing plot in those bookends than in the whole base game ending.
The Secret Episode, which is the most direct setup for Kingdom Hearts IV that currently exists. That's all I'm saying about it.
The base game's secret ending, which has its own unlock requirements involving photo missions and difficulty, so check them before you start rather than after.
One more thing to keep an eye on. There's a fake video game inside the Toy Box world. It plays like a Nomura self parody gag. It is not a gag. Pay attention to it and then come talk to me afterward, because watching people realize what that is in real time is one of my favorite things about this fandom.
And read the secret reports. Thirteen of them. Last time I'm saying it, I promise.
Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory
This rhythm game is sneakily important. The gameplay is completely different, but the story sequences push the narrative past Kingdom Hearts III and set the emotional and thematic state of the cast heading into the new saga. It also works as a retrospective that helps everything you've played click into place.
Being straight with you, the story content is short. A framing narrative plus a substantial post credits sequence. That sequence is required. It's also about forty minutes of the runtime.
The other ninety five percent is a rhythm game with a setlist of well over a hundred and forty tracks pulled from Yoko Shimomura's entire body of work for the series. If you've just spent two hundred hours on everything above, playing the soundtrack in chronological order is one of the most quietly devastating retrospectives any franchise has ever built. Shimomura is one of the best composers this medium has, full stop, and Dearly Beloved gets rearranged for every entry in a way that tracks the emotional register of each game. Notice that while you play. It's the whole series in one melody.
Deep Cuts For Absolute Lunatics
Totally optional. You'll understand Kingdom Hearts IV without these. You will not be complete without them.
Kingdom Hearts V CAST from 2006, a Verizon exclusive mobile phone game released only in North America, retelling the first game in 2D with original world content. Delisted, never rereleased, effectively lost media, with fragments recovered by preservation people. Knowing this exists is a real flex in the right room.
Kingdom Hearts Mobile from 2008, Japan only, an avatar and social service with minigames. Not a story game. Listed purely because completeness demands it.
The Shiro Amano manga, covering the first game, Chain of Memories, KH2, 358/2 Days and more. Not canon, occasionally clarifying, frequently funnier than the games.
The Tomoco Kanemaki novels, light novel adaptations with interior monologue the games leave out. The 358/2 Days ones in particular contain characterization fans still quote.
The Ultimania guides, Japanese strategy guide and artbook hybrids stuffed with Nomura interviews that the fandom treats as basically canon because they keep answering things the games leave dangling. A surprising amount of well known Kingdom Hearts lore comes from an interview and has literally never been stated in a game.
The secret movies as their own thing. At some point, watch every secret ending in release order back to back as a standalone exercise. Twenty plus years of this series telegraphing itself. The through line is genuinely startling.
Actually Getting Your Hands On All This????
Kingdom Hearts Collection [I-III] comes out soon on October 8, 2026 on Switch 2, PS5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC. It bundles HD 1.5 plus 2.5 ReMIX, HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, and KH3 with Re Mind, all running natively on current hardware. That one purchase covers twelve of the fourteen playable entries above, which is a genuinely great deal for a newcomer.
What it doesn't cover. Melody of Memory is a separate purchase. And the whole χ, Union χ, Dark Road line is dead mobile and browser stuff, so fan cutscene compilations are your only route.
You've got well over a year. Kingdom Hearts IV was confirmed at D23 in August 2026 for late 2027 all platforms basically
Budget somewhere around 150 to 200 hours for the playable material at a normal pace, plus another 20 to 40 for the χ side of things depending on how completionist you get. Start now. Start with Final Mix. Play on Proud.
Everything on this list matters because Kingdom Hearts isn't a series of isolated stories. It's one continuous, self referential, multi decade narrative that treats every character, every world, every theme, and every mechanical idea as part of one living organism. It constantly rewards people who paid attention to the small details, the quiet character moments, the ancient history, and the questions it's been asking since 2002.
I'm done bruh 💀](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HP3gKmlW8AAJaTc.jpg)
Dude got called out on social media for riding a bike without a helmet. Realizing yeah, good call, starts wearing one and then a few days later he's promoting free helmets for the public. How can anyone hate on this guy?
Florida Basketball
No Dribble Tag
Cool concept
BACK TO BACK BOZO
I feel for the new players who believe they only have to play a trilogy of Kingdom Hearts games to get the full experience.
In reality, you’ll be following this path. Trust the process!
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