LogFAQs > #978778128

Yeah, KH gets pretty convoluted, you're not gonna get a short summary that also covers everything you need to know. That said, I'll try my best! Some of this will definitely be basic stuff you don't need a reminder on, but it's good to have a foundation~

KH1: Sora and his friends Riku and Kairi get sucked into some wacky nonsense when monsters called heartless take over and destroy their home. With the power of a special weapon called a keyblade, as well as the companionship of Donald Duck and Goofy, Sora travels around various worlds based on Disney movies to fight heartless and search for his friends. At the end, he fights Ansem, a, let's say "darkness enthusiast" possessing Riku's body. He manages to win, save the universe, and send Kairi home, but he has to continue his journey to bring back Riku too.

Chain of Memories: Sora's journey takes him to a place called Castle Oblivion where memories are super important. While he explores the castle, his own memories start to get weird, and he starts to think his closest friend is a girl called Namine. Turns out, it's all part of a plot by Organization XIII, a group of beings called nobodies who are basically reverse heartless. After cleaning out the Organization folks in the castle, Sora chooses to go into a deep sleep while Namine restores his memories. Meanwhile, Riku is also in Castle Oblivion, with his story focusing on his struggle to overcome Ansem inside him. He eventually succeeds and teams up with Mickey frickin' Mouse.

KH2: The story opens on some kid named Roxas as his ordinary life starts to get upended. Turns out, he's Sora's nobody, and he needs to rejoin with Sora so Sora can fight Organization XIII. Once he's whole again, Sora goes on another universal journey. Along the way, he learns that the Ansem he knows of is actually using someone else's name, and his real name is Xehanort. Eventually, Sora ends up at the nobody home world, where he and his friends defeat the rest of Organization XIII, including Xemnas, the nobody of Xehanort. After it's over, they all return home in what should be a picture perfect happy ending.

Birth By Sleep: Years before KH1, a group of friends named Terra, Aqua, and Ventus are all training to be keyblade wielders. Some stuff goes down and they end up going on separate journeys around the Disneyverse. Meanwhile, an aged keyblade master named Xehanort is manipulating them for his own ends. He wants to corrupt Terra with darkness in order to steal his younger, stronger body, and he wants to make Ventus fight some emo guy named Vanitas in order to forge the X-Blade. His ultimate goal is to summon Kingdom Hearts and take over the world or some such. Ultimately, he partially succeeds, taking over Terra's body to create the Xehanort from KH2, but losing his memories along the way due to Terra's resistance. Meanwhile, Ven goes into a super-coma and Aqua locks him up in Castle Oblivion in a secret room for his protection. Then, Aqua herself falls into the realm of darkness, where the heartless originate from.

Dream Drop Distance: ...some of which is conveyed to Sora and friends through a letter. Sora and Riku agree to take on a test called the Mark of Mastery in order to earn the title of keyblade master so they can help. To do this, they enter a series of dream worlds and try to resolve issues there. But Xehanort also has his fingers in this pie, having summoned his younger self from the past to interfere. It's revealed that Xehanort is trying to establish a new Organization XIII by using various bodies as vessels for his own mind. He's thwarted in his plot here, but it's clear he's not done yet.

...which leads us into KH3. Phew, there, the heavily abridged summary of the main plot of Kingdom Hearts prior to KH3! Oh, there's also 358/2 Days and Coded, but they more inform some of the other stuff going on. Days delves into Roxas' time prior to his role in KH2, as well as his friendship with another couple of Organization members. Coded more or less just explains how Mickey learns some of the stuff that gets revealed to Sora and friends prior to 3D.

Of course, like I said, this is the heavily abridged version. I've left out a lot of details that shouldn't be necessary to understand the main plot, but are still pretty important for some of the side plots going on. To be frank, Kingdom Hearts is a mess, and no, those spin-offs are not optional to making sense of it all. It's more accurate to think of them as additional entries in the series that just aren't numbered. The only ones you could skip are Coded and maybe Days, and I wouldn't recommend skipping the latter. The good news is, as I recall, KH3 comes with summaries of all the other entries built in, so if you don't mind reading for a bit before you start, you should get a better understanding of what's going on than what I put here~