Square Enix Tells You Their Recommended Kingdom Hearts Play Order; It’s Unironically Straightforward

Square Enix has recently updated their blog with a post discussing the best ways to play through the Kingdom Hearts games. The series has practically always had a rather negative reputation for various reasons, mostly unjustified, and the play order has been one of them. While the franchise used to release its new entries on different platforms, the collections are available on all consoles and PC now, so there’s no way to bash on approachability anymore.

Square states that anyone’s first title should be whichever interests them the most to avoid gatekeeping. However, they also provide their own suggested play order that essentially comprises the order of the games throughout the collections. While this order is easy to follow, one specific point I disagree with is experiencing Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days before Kingdom Hearts II, since the former thrives on its players already knowing about Roxas and Organization. They have integral roles in Kingdom Hearts II.

You can view the full Square Enix blog post discussing the Kingdom Hearts series’ play order via their official website.

• For those unconvinced, the Kingdom Hearts timeline is unironically simplistic, which we wrote about previously.
• If you would like a digestible perspective on playing the Kingdom Hearts games in their release order, I wrote a piece last year detailing that viewpoint when the games were making their way to PC.