#since its a way more modern take for the kh fandom to frown on anyone who hasnt played the entire series

[wildfyrevalkyrie]

i came into the fandom post-kh3

then ig lemme give you some perspective from someone who grew up with the series.

so base kh2 was my first kh game. im not sure how, since im pretty sure my family owned kh1 first, but it was. as a kid coming into this with absolutely zero context from the prior games, kh2 was not only understandable, but became one of my favorite games. the flashes of memory recapping the plot in the prologue was enough information for me to get the gist of what had happened before, and kh2 is written in such a way that it can both stand on its own and serve as a satisfying finale to the kh1-com-kh2 trilogy. this game set a standard for kh numbered titles.

the next game i played was base kh1. i couldnt beat kh1. i tried multiple times over the years, but each time i would get stuck at the lion head fight in agrabah. i still respected kh1’s story, even if i didnt get to see hollow bastion until i finally played the hd remake following kh3s release.

com was a title i was aware of. my family owned the walkthrough book for it but not the game itself. all i knew about it was that it was for gameboy, it features card games as the gameplay system, and that sora ends up in a bubble flower because of namine. as a kid, it was pretty obvious that handheld + vastly different gameplay system = spinoff, and that wasn’t a negative but a statement of fact. (honestly, i find it weirder that you associate “spinoff” as being equivalent to “bad”.) as such, while i was curious about com, i didnt feel like my experience in 2 was affected enough by this knowledge gap to go out of my way to play it.

i literally did not know about days. maybe it was cuz i didnt have a ds.

i was aware that bbs existed. i couldnt play it tho cuz i didnt have a psp. i think i was aware that it was a prequel series, maybe that it was connected to the keyblade graveyard seen in 2’s ending (remember i owned base kh2, so lingering william didnt exist), and i definitely had the misconception that took place back in the Ancient Times™️ when keyblades were common. (unironically, finding out years later that it was set only 10yrs in the past was very disappointing) so ancient history + following a completely new cast + handheld = spinoff, a really cool sounding spinoff that i wouldve probably played had i owned a psp, but nothing close to a console seller in my child eyes.

ddd i was not only aware of relatively close to release, but i had a 3ds and was hyped to play a sora-focused spinoff… and then i got pinpoint spoiled that its about sora and riku taking their mark of mastery exam and riku passes while sora fails. i decided in that moment that that was all i needed to know and wrote the game off. literally never found out about the dream eaters or any of the time travel nonsense, hell i still didnt know old man xehenort even existed. it just made so little sense to play a game that ends with the protagonist failing, and even less that sora would fail a keyblade mastery test while riku passed, so i skipped it.

i had a friend that played the mobile game back when it was a web browser game. she tried to get me to play it, but i think i was either still mourning the death of pixie hollow/toon town or was busy with other stuff.

re: coded im p sure i got as a christmas gift in like 2014? it was definitely after the web browser game came out, because i remember checking out the character editor thing included and thinking it was neat that you could make a web browser character. it was straight-up not fun to play, and the story wasn’t compelling enough to make me finish it.

0.2 i knew for being a tech demo and having a silly-long name. i didnt play it cuz i wasnt interested in paying full game price for a tech demo.

by the time of kh3, i knew a lot of the general story beats for the games i had missed (still not the time travel plot—apparently i had intense blinders on for ddd lmao), and i was so hype for a new mainline title. i didnt bother with playing any of the titles i had missed, because i didnt own them, because why would i do homework for a video game, and because kh2 had taught me that the numbered titles can more or less stand on their own.

kh3 doesnt stand on its own.

im sure thats obvious to you, having come into the series post-kh3, and likely already cognizant that all of kh was connected and going to culminate in 3, but that wasn’t obvious living through the releases, especially for someone who was a more casual fan.

so in response to your question of “why do kh fans ignore games they find irrelevant to the plot”, historically its got a lot to do with the accessibility of these titles and little to do with the “plot relevance”. now that things like the all in one package exist, making the entire series experienceable on one platform (plus or minus two ds games), people ignoring the titles between 2 and 3 is way less common. but back in the day, the general consensus was that most of these games were generally worth it if you owned the system it was on, but weren’t console-sellers. and that’s reflected in my own experience. i played (or wouldve played, rip days/ddd) all the games the were on systems i owned that i was aware of.

Y'know now that I think about it, the kh fandom seems to have a huge problem with ignoring or disliking games they find "irrelevant" to the plot. I came into the fandom post-kh3 so I can't say I know how the fandom's changed over time but.. it's kinda ridiculous to me tbh. Because from what I read it sounds like most people hated/ignored BBS and 358/2 days because they were "spin-offs." (Which is dumb anyway, like, even if hypothetically KH3 didn't exist and they were just spin-off characters- Why is that a bad thing? Why should you treat them like they don't matter? Why do some people think the characters from those games don't matter because they only care about the fate of the Destiny Trio?) And even still people consider Chain of Memories irrelevant because "Oh Sora forgets everything anyway, all you need to know is that." And then they consider Coded/Re:Coded irrelevant because "It's all data anyway." And THEN they consider DDD irrelevant because "All you need to know is the Xehanort time travel stuff in the finale." It's so weird to me how some people can claim to be invested in these games yet only care about the numbered titles. It can't be because they care about Destiny Trio that much if they consider titles including them to still be irrelevant.. So what is it then?? Is the concept of a spin-off inherently bad to these people? Like, sure, if you're thinking of the BARE MINIMUM KNOWLEDGE then yes I would agree you don't need to know much about those games beyond what I listed.. HOWEVER, that does not mean it's good to only go into the games with that knowledge. If you truly care about this series and its characters, you would value the ways those games expand on their characters. And even if you don't.. If you're only going into these games with the idea of "vaguely understanding the plot" but the plot alone. Not the characters. If all you care about is "How did Xehanort revive other versions of himself?" And not the buildup for the characters and how these arcs affect them, y'know, as characters..

I just don't understand how you can go into these games like that and still have fun with it. Like sure if I'm into a series where I appreciate the worldbuilding but there isn't much to the characters I can get behind that. (And I mean that in the sense of games with blank-slate protagonists, not to say the characters don't matter to me, but that the characters don't have much personality to get attatched to.) But in a story like Kingdom Hearts where it is about the characters, and the story is just how the characters choices affect each other- I dunno man. I'm not sure of the right words to explain what I'm trying to say but it just feels so dull and boring to only care about that in a series, and especially a series like this. I could go on and on about the ways those games affect the characters and the story more than those little one-sentence quotes.. And sure, maybe I will in addition to this, but that's not the point I'm trying to make here. Even if they didn't affect the story, even if they were solely character-building, or even if they barely served a purpose at all beyond a couple of scenes.. It shouldn't devalue the entire experience as irrelevant. (Chain of Memories I kinda get disliking due to the combat LMAO but aside from that + some people do like the combat-) The games are more than story alone. They're more than gameplay alone. And they're more than characters alone. All aspects of the game come together to create an experience, and if you want to devalue the entire experience as a bad game, because you find it irrelevant due to it not fulfilling your specific preferences of what you want out of these games- Then I have a hard time believing you appreciated this series at all to begin with. Also a hard time believing you have good media literacy or even care about having any but hey that's a topic for another day am i right