The Dark Road to Kingdom Hearts IV | PostMesmeric

Kingdom Hearts has come a long way over its 20+ years of activity, and with KH4 still shrouded in mystery, it seems like a great time to ponder what we might see in this exciting new installment, along with what this new game could mean for the series' future. Kingdom Hearts IV has walked a dark road thus far, but maybe we can shed a little light on it.

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00:00 Disclaimer
00:11 What's Next for Kingdom Hearts?
01:45 The Long Wait
06:25 Saying Hello, Saying Goodbye
13:10 Changing the Game
18:00 The Turning Point
21:43 Credits

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Background music:

Additional Music by Yoko Shimomura and OC Remix

#KingdomHearts4 #KingdomHeartsIV #KingdomHearts

[JFairy]

This franchise unapologetically wears its heart on its sleeve. The sincerity is hard to hate despite all the shortcomings. I'm all in for Nomura's revenge. Let's go.

[AwwRatz]

I'm both excited and cautiously optimistic about KH4 and the direction the series will take and, based on interviews with Nomura, I have a feeling it will be a much more personal project just due to him already talking about his thoughts on retirement and the end of the series. Good video overall! <3

[barsabe]

i always thought of kh as a manga series in the form of games. feelings aside, the way it changed and expanded over time is just too similar

[xyzetc]

Kingdom hearts iv should be inside the computer of radiant garden, computerized shibuya, or the shibuya world is inside the black box as a trap to keep sora there until the lost masters fully recovered to face him in the end fights like the data fight with the organization xiii

[purpleirken]

Kingdom Hearts is a special series to me, because it is so unlike any other game I've seen. It's pure, sad, dark, edgy, and everything in between. You can never know what to expect and I love reading into the littlest details Nomura can throw at us, it just shows how hard he's been working on it. And there is nothing quite like it <3

[JordanWilliams_Link]

Clear it does share the same anticipation as 2 and 3 and 4 has reached the heights of excitement of its predecessors

[Turnipa]

Havent played kh3 but watched walkthrough. It seemed to fully implode having to tie all the lose ends that were already convoluted. But whats more upsetting is the disney : final fantasy ratio. Barely any final fantasy in the mix. Etc so kh4 doing a hard reset is a good thing . Hopefully the execution hits the mark. It seems it will have more final fantasy over disney rep because of the new direction . We could possibly travel to ff worlds .

[Hugsloth]

11:40 I think the important distinction is that the series has had Xehanort infused into its lore retroactively. Kingdom Hearts 1 was definitely not intended to be the gateway into a decade-spanning story centered around this old bald guy. Ansem was almost certainly written to be a singular villain of that game, not half of a guy who was possessed by another guy and got amnesia. They can write a story without Xehanort, easily. All they have to do is stop writing their lore backwards from the end to the beginning.

Nomura has said in the past that the hardest part of Kingdom Hearts is creating new surprises in every story. New ways to reveal unknown plot points. But he does this by working backwards from the present time.

Nowhere is this clearer than the final scene of 0.2, where so much retroactive canon is added happening just offscreen of the original game's ending. Seeing Aqua sprint towards an indifferent KH1 Riku who somehow fails to notice her presence, it doesn't feel like a cool secret we've been let in on, it feels like a lame attempt to chain the prequels to the present canon. Even going so far as to have Mickey's shirt just dissolve from an enemy attack to explain the tiny window of KH1's ending where we see Mickey without a shirt. Something which definitely was only there originally to have 'classic Mickey' onscreen, but now must have some 'lore' reason. Again, writing backwards.

I really hope that KH4 represents Nomura writing forward from now on, with an actual plan that will connect plot points of the 'new saga' together in a less slapdash afterthought kind of way, for the sake of shallow 'surprise'.

[Star-egqt]

I love kingdom hearts been a fan of the manga since I was 14

[Star-egqt]

Really want to read the light novels at least the ones that follow the minor stories

[Star-egqt]

Really hoping they’ll bring union x characters into the fold

[treymykel]

No y'all not understanding why young You can't use Marvel and Star wars Star wars and Marvel is on multiverse's or is a big universe these Disney properties and final fantasies you can kind of keep them because they're all self-contained things You can't bring Marvel or Star wars into is a big property franchise I really wish y'all stop trying to bring in two franchises that aren't even by Disney they were brought by Disney The reason why the Disney work is because this is all Disney's property that they created on their own and even if they use fairy tales but they created their own self-contained universes Marvel is a multiverse there are so many different versions of the universes you want to use You know what I'm saying and then they're going to be people with like why use MCU why you didn't use the comic book one or why you didn't use earth mighty as heroes You know what I'm saying the same thing with Star wars which version of Star wars are we going to do are we going to Disney version of it or we going to do the prequel or are we going to do the regular original trilogy so no you just can't absolutely not Kingdom hearts need to avoid anything Marvel and Star wars related It just doesn't work. What I would want them to do is focus a little bit more on bringing the final fantasy characters into the series you know or maybe some of their worlds you know that would be nice

[Etrodecim]

The only issue I find with this video is your claim that the anticipation for Kingdom Hearts IV pales in comparison to Kingdom Hearts II. That’s simply not true. Yes, KHII was highly anticipated— I lived through it. Even IGN had to publicly announce that they didn’t know when the title would be released, and fans kept clamoring for it after the 2003 teaser. Right now, the same thing is happening with KHIV. It's constantly being talked about and requested to the point where Geoff Keighley of Summer Game Fest even mentioned how he doesn’t know why people expect it to appear at his show, and he poked fun at its absence from the latest State of Play.

The Kingdom Hearts franchise, along with its lore and social media presence, has grown far larger than it was in 2005. There are far more people eagerly awaiting KHIV than there were for KHII. KHIII was actually the most anticipated KH game to date, selling far more copies than any other game in the series. It even brought in new fans who hadn’t previously been into Kingdom Hearts, and many outsiders jumped on the bandwagon. KHII didn’t even sell half as many copies as KHIII.

If you're talking about anticipation purely in terms of "where is the story going?", that's also untrue. KHIV introduces entirely new concepts to the series and incorporates elements from Nomura’s Final Fantasy Versus XIII and the Fabula Nova Crystallis mythos, pushing us into truly unknown territory. Back in the early 2000s, we had KH: Chain of Memories to show us the direction the series was headed and who we would be facing in future plots. In contrast, KH: Melody of Memory told us virtually nothing about the future, serving mostly to explain how Riku ended up in Quadratum for the upcoming arc.

[barsabe]

did you...slow down the ost at the end? it was kinda clipping

[JordanWilliams_Link]

More realistic worlds with adult themes are better

[dochedgehog]

Nah.

Your excitement for the future ignores the present we got.

We waited nearly 13 years, to watch frozen and tangled re created in pre rendered CGI. All the Disney worlds had no real impact. This video is a lie.

Play an early kingdom hearts games, KH3 evolved backwards in terms of story and Disney worlds.

It looked good. The gameplay was neat.

The original KH characters got shafted. The FF characters forgot.

The remind DLC literally just re did the ending based of what fans said should have happened. None of these are good things.

We waited 13 years for the director (I’m done giving his name praise he doesn’t deserve anymore) to just mishandle everything and try to set up something else.

I replayed it recently and I still haven’t changed this view. KH fans are gonna suffocate this franchise if they don’t criticise the direction properly.

It’s crazy how 13 years of side games and mainline entries led to what amounted to a couple hours of actual KH plot and very very watered down Disney plots.

KH3 has its merits. But it’s about time yall were truthful. And maybe stopped praised the game director. His obsession with FFVersus 13 isn’t cute.

It’s ruined any hype for KH4 from me. I’m not here to play the lost story of FF15 or what HE WANTED to do with those characters. I was here for the KH crew he barely did justice in the end

[TheRetroPerspective]

Damn, these are some fanboy tier takes.