the thing that kills me about kingdom hearts discourse (which has been flaring up again because of comparisons between ff7 rebirth and kh) is the way people are like "oh the continuity and lore aren't really THAT complicated. all you have to do is play all the games in release order"
and it's like. this isn't necessarily wrong. but also, do people not realize that most other long-running game franchises don't expect this of new players? it's kind of a big ask. like, maybe a series will do a continuous storyline over the course of a few games. maybe a trilogy or something. but when a series gets this long, there are usually efforts to create new jumping on points, and clean breaks where one storyline ends and a new one begins. but kh hasn't really done that. maybe kh4 will be that soft reset, but the fact that they're hyping up the involvement of characters set up in multiple different live service mobile games and all the verum rex stuff doesn't give me much hope
i do think people tend to be too eager to write off anything that can be labeled "kingdom hearts bullshit" in ff, but you have to admit that sentiment doesn't come from nowhere. the excessive continuity stuff gets tiring across all these games. yeah, people can be real dicks about kh, but that doesn't mean i can't roll my eyes when rebirth is like "here's this guy from that mobile ff battle royale game that got canceled after a year" and acts like it's a big dramatic twist and i'm supposed to know who that is. there are better ways than this to handle serialized storytelling across multiple games
i can't wait to be completely lost in KH4 by not having bought re:mind (super hard DLC? no, i don't need that), not playing most of the mobile spin-offs, and never finishing melody of memory
multiple games that are 10s of hours long, across multiple genres and platforms. (prior to the HD collections, you needed a PS2, DS, and PSP at minimum) some of them can now only be officially seen as text crawls + selected cutscenes
