Kingdom Hearts 4 is an opportunity to win back lapsed fans

Kingdom Hearts 4 needs to be reset.

There was a time when I would have been overjoyed by the news of a new Kingdom Hearts entry. I've been a faithful fan of the Church of the Keyblade since the moment I heard about Kingdom Hearts 4. The spinoffs began to fragment across consoles I didn't own, and the story became a quagmire of characters and plot points. The franchise that was formative to my youth had become utterly unrecognizable to me after I dropped Kingdom Hearts 3 mid-game.

It is a chance for me and my beloved franchise to reconcile. The game needs a clean slate, and Kingdom Hearts 4 could be the jumping-on point I and other lapsed keyblade wielders need. The story is completely inscrutable. Even the most concise write-ups and video essays are aware that the story is weird and convoluted.

Kingdom Hearts 4 is the 16th game in the franchise. That fact is fine. It happens all the time. Every single game in the series is necessary to understand what's going on and that's what the series loses me and others. Imagine if you had to play the first 14 Final Fantasy games. Why would anyone bother? When it released a collection of Kingdom Hearts games, Square Enix seemed to understand that things have gotten out of hand.

The lack of coherence in the games is the result of all this twisty-turny, timey-wimey storytelling. Kingdom Hearts 3 wasn't great. The game's overwrought story was one of the factors that contributed to its poor reception. Despite being almost universally reviled by the fans, we are still dealing with the Gummi Ship.

It doesn't have to be that way. There are a lot of books in the Kingdom Hearts franchise. The library became so intimidating that it became a source of shame, as spinoffs accrued like compounding late fees to the point that they got so intimidating. The only thing that has to be done is grant lore amnesty, releasing fans from the burden of trying to understand what happened before. People will come back in droves just like libraries have late-fee forgiveness programs.

There is very little in the trailer that leads me to believe that the giant reset button will be pushed. If Square Enix can get rid of Sora's giant clown shoes, it means that they are willing to let it go.