If you boot it up they give you the order to play it in. There is only 1 problem and it's at the beginning. They tell you to watch 358/2 before playing 2 DO NOT DO THAT IT SPOILS A MAJOR PLOT IN PART 2
Not only are the numbers weird, the games within the series (more than just the main 3) came out as exclusives to a wide variety of platforms. KH has such a bizarre history.
1.5 kind of makes sense. It holds Kingdom Hearts 1 and a remake of the GBA game that comes before Kingdom Hearts 2 (also comes with a the cutscenes of another game between 1 and 2). I guess they wanted to keep the naming similar because 2.5 comes with Kingdom Hearts 2 and...a prequel to every game... and a cutscene collection of some weird side game about an AI. They then released a bundle of both of these on PS4 which they named 1.5+2.5. 2.8 they were really scrambling. Because they wanted to release the rest of the games in some way before Kingdom Hearts 3 so that holds a sequel to Kingdom Hearts 2, A standalone demo for 3 and...a movie from the earliest part of the series that actually is a giant pit of questions with no answers which may or may not have been answered by the gacha. No idea.
To learn Kingdom Hearts lore going in blind you'd need an autistic kid who's hyper-fixated on it, a couple cases of monster energy, and a weeks worth of LSD micro doses.
That should get you up to speed on about 50% of it.
As a huge fan of these games... absolutely. I keep coming back because I love the characters so much and the story arcs within each game can be fairly satisfying, but the overarching plot is a complete mess.
I know it's not the same, but it gives off similar energy as Sony RE releasing all the previous Spider-Man movies to theaters because Madame Web flopped so hard.
I agree full price is steep, but to be fair 1.5/2.5 is like 4 or 5 different games (plus a few cinematic movies for lore from the obscure handheld games) in one and the remasters are actually really well done and add a bunch of content. I don't know how they perform on PC though since it's a Square port.
The stories already fucky enough as it is in Kingdom Hearts, without doing a FF7 remake to it and releasing each game in chunks for a total cost of 200+ bucks for each game.
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