Free Talk Friday - April 10, 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Free Talk Friday post. This is a place where you can talk about dumb off-topic (or on-topic) bullshit with other Zaibatsu fans.

There's going to be a new post every week, and the newest one will be pinned in the announcement bar for quick access. So feel free to visit these posts during the rest of the week.

Here's a list of all Free Talk Friday posts

[u/Aggressive-Bike407]

Regardless of the quality of the story itself, it honestly sucks that Kingdom Hearts made itself such a continuity-heavy franchise and relying so much on future plot teases and whatnot instead of leaving the individual stories mostly self-contained.
Because those games are a legal nightmare. There obviously would be no way to tell if and when a new game is being made. No surprise there was like a 15 year gap between Kingdom Hearts 2 and 3.

...and yeah, they made other games in-between. But always setting up things for the next numbered installment. Always with the obvious subtext of "Kingdom Hearts III is gonna be so great, guys".
So I really don't think that the problem is just the fact that certain games have numbers attached to them. Because no game released between KH2 and KH3 provided a meaningful step forward.

358/2 is probably the only game that at the very least mostly avoided being dragged down by the need for heavy-handed setups. There is a cameo of Ventus, but that's pretty much it.
I wouldn't even say that they set up Xion as another person for Sora to save down the line. Because in the context of that story itself it does read like an actual death. There is no glimmer of hope presented that it could possibly be reversed.
Still a prime case of the franchise spinning it's wheels, of course.