As I write this, Disney’s fan event D23 is taking place and fans of Disney and Square Enix’s role-playing game Kingdom Hearts are riding a particularly big high right now as it has just been revealed for the first time, along with a brand new trailer, that the fourth mainline game in the series Kingdom Hearts IV will be released in 2027. Kingdom Hearts creator and director Tetsuya Nomura has confirmed that they are locked in on this date and it will not be pushed. Not to mention the exciting news that Kingdom Hearts is finally going to be getting an anime adaptation that is “coming soon” to both Disney Channel and Disney+.

I’ve been waiting a long time for the release date of KH4 to be revealed, not just because I can’t wait to experience the game, but because I can finally do something that I have been planning to do for years now. It’s the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done with this blog and I’m not even entirely sure how smoothly I’ll be able to pull it off, but in anticipation and in celebration of the upcoming release of Kingdom Hearts IV, I’m going to do a massive favor to my readers who have never played a Kingdom Hearts game, don’t know anything about the series and perhaps have played the game but still don’t understand it completely or need a refresher.

I’m going to explain the plot of Kingdom Hearts.

Not right now! And not in a single blog! That would be impossible! This undertaking is going to require multiple blog entries over the course of several months, each with detailed explanations of the lore, the characters, the worlds, and how everything that takes place before KH4 leads to KH4, as chronicled in the first three Kingdom Hearts games and their various spin-offs, which Tetsuya Nomura has collectively labeled the Dark Seeker Saga. The release of Kingdom Hearts IV in 2027 will kick off the Lost Master Arc, which is the second phase of the series, so I will basically be spending months setting up the Lost Master Arc by explaining the Dark Seeker Saga.

Just to be clear, this is not going to be a multi-part series of blogs that explain each plot for each video game one by one like I’ve been doing with the Legend of Zelda series. Nor am I going to explain the entire plot of the series chronologically from start to finish. You would think that would be the most simple option, but that feels like the wrong way to go, because this game’s lore is so deep, sprawling and twisty that getting through the plot that way would be kind of like slowly reading a giant Bible to you, and that’s not a very good way to keep people engaged or interested in this game’s story. My plan is to focus each blog on a single character, event or thing from these games, and once you learn about one thing, I can move on and teach you about another thing in the next blog. So the blogs are kind of going to be like puzzle pieces that connect to each other (in true Kingdom Hearts fashion) that paint the full picture of the Dark Seeker Saga when you read them together. But I promise I will try to explain everything about this convoluted series as clearly as possible (wish me luck when I get to the explanation for how time travel works). Believe me, I’m not Tetsuya Nomura. I don’t get any sick kind of amusement from confusing the hell out of people. Plus I’m a huge fan of these games and I already know a lot of the lore by heart so y’all can trust me because I am kind of the perfect person for this job. And I will make it even easier for people by separating each of these blogs into a brand new category on this website’s main menu called “Before KH4.” That way you can read every article in my Before KH4 series together.

As I get through these blogs, I will be making very few references to the gameplay or discussing which particular games these plot points originate from. This whole endeavor is mainly for the purposes of plot explanation and providing narrative context. The entire reason why I’m doing this is to make sure people understand the Dark Seeker Saga before they dive into the Lost Master Arc. I obviously don’t know a lot about the story of Kingdom Hearts IV yet so I don’t know if every single thing that happens in the Dark Seeker Saga will be relevant to the Lost Master Arc, but this series often makes callbacks and connections to past events from previous games so I can’t be too careful, and I already know for a fact that it will do that again to some extent.

If I thought that all you had to do to understand these games was play them yourself or watch someone else play them on YouTube, I wouldn’t be doing this. Believe me when I say that even when you pay close attention to these games, they feature some of the most convoluted, needlessly complex and deliberately cryptic storytelling on the planet and even as someone who played through many of these games more than once, it took me a while to even comprehend the plot. So if you are someone who is already a Kingdom Hearts fan and you are already well-versed in all the lore, most of you probably don’t need to read anything I say about it. But if you are someone who likes these games but you don’t have the time nor the patience to untangle this plot yourself, I volunteer my knowledge to you. As for everyone who doesn’t care about Kingdom Hearts, I probably lost you a long time ago, but on the off chance you’re still reading this, maybe you will get some enjoyment out of learning what Kingdom Hearts is. By the time you’re finished reading my blogs, maybe you will finally be able to understand what the Kingdom Hearts fan in your life is talking about when you hear them say things like “the Keyblade War” and “the Master of Masters” and the “Black Box.”

Of course if convoluted storylines don’t scare you and you would rather embrace the story of these games firsthand, a new compilation game called Kingdom Hearts Collection [I~III] is about to be released in October 2026 for Windows, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2 for just under $75. In the meantime, I’ll be in my Gummi Ship guiding readers through the wayward world of Kingdom Hearts.