Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue review: As messy as its title

Enlarge / Dream Drop Distance is nothing if not colorful.

Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue is a package as hard to parse as its name. The collection serves up three new-ish chapters in the Kingdom Hearts series: an HD remaster of the 3DS exclusive Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance; a two-hour followup to the PSP’s Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep; and an extended cutscene based on the browser and mobile game prequel Kingdom Hearts χ.

Before booting up 2.8, I did my best to brush up on the 15-or-so years of series lore to get a grasp on where these episodes fit in Kingdom Hearts’ timeline. What I found was a swirling mess of proper nouns and unpronounceable names. It seems since the first Kingdom Hearts (the last one I finished) things have gotten complicated. Or more complicated than a world where Disney and Final Fantasy characters hang out on a regular basis, anyway.

If you’re hoping 2.8 will at least make sense as a self-contained collection, forget it. No single part of the trio seems directly connected to any other part. Dream Drop Distance is set at the extreme end of the Kingdom Hearts timeline (ostensibly leading up to the still mythical Kingdom Hearts 3), A Fragmentary Passage (the two-hour Birth by Sleep followup) runs concurrent with, but disconnected from, the original Kingdom Hearts; and Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover (the “extended cutscene”) is set eons before either of the other two.

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