For some, the Kingdom Hearts franchise has some of the best games of all time. For others, they’re an incomprehensible mess of subtitles, timelines, and multiple people having the same name. In reality, both are true, but the latter can be easily solved by simply playing through the games in the proper order.
Of course, Square Enix hasn’t made that easy, with a naming convention that defies all logic and games that jump between almost every platform. Thankfully, the games have since been consolidated into a bundle on consoles and Steam to at least put them all in one package to get players ready for when Kingdom Hearts 4 eventually comes out. If you have that game on your most-anticipated upcoming games list, or simply have always wanted to dive in but don’t know where to start, let us be your guiding key.
All Kingdom Hearts games in release order
The Kingdom Hearts franchise has been going strong since 2002 with some of the best PlayStation 2 games and shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. Thanks to all the subtitles and rereleases with changed names, it might look like there are a lot more games than there really are. To make things simple, we will only list the first version of a game released and note when there was an updated version later.
- Kingdom Hearts/Kingdom Hearts Final Mix — 2002
- Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories/Re: Chain of Memories — 2004
- Kingdom Hearts 2/Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix — 2005
- Kingdom Hearts Coded/Kingdom Hearts Re: Coded — 2008
- Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days — 2009
- Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep/Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep Final Mix — 2010
- Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance — 2012
- Kingdom Hearts X/Unchained X/Union X Dark Road — 2013
- Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth By Sleep -A fragmentary passage- — 2017
- Kingdom Hearts 3 — 2019
- Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory — 2020
All Kingdom Hearts games in chronological order
This is where we all need to pay close attention. While not every game in the series came out in chronological order, playing them in that way might end up making the story more digestible. Either way, there’s no game here that doesn’t have an impact on the story, so there’s nothing you can safely skip. For games like 358/2 Days, Re: Coded, and Kingdom Hearts X, which are either not available at all or very hard to access, any of the compilations include all the necessary story elements from them as little videos you can watch that will catch you up.
That all said, here’s the official Kingdom Hearts timeline:
- Kingdom Hearts X/Union X
- Kingdom Hearts Dark Road
- Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep
- Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth By Sleep -A fragmentary passage-
- Kingdom Hearts/Final Mix
- Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories/Re: Chain of Memories
- Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days
- Kingdom Hearts 2/Final Mix
- Kingdom Hearts Coded/Re: Coded
- Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance
- Kingdom Hearts 3
- Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory