A Kingdom of Transmedia

Warning:  Yes, this is another blog post about Kingdom Hearts.

People that know me closely know about my massive affection towards the Kingdom Hearts franchise. I has everything I like in one video game  Disney, Final Fantasy, RPG, action, decent storyline, great graphics, amazing game-play  great soundtrack and more. I thought it could be great to talk about the transmedia journey so far, but I'm not talking about the adaptations of the same story line to a manga (comic) way or the countless products of merchandise or even the cross-platform remakes of some it's entries. What I want to talk about is the transmedia done along the story itself. 

I feel like I can't go around naming characters as potentially someone reading this might not follow just by what I'm saying. If anything, I found this "simplified" version of the story so far. (In case anyone is interested). 

The interesting part in this case is the arrange in which stories/entries have come out and how they are intertwine between each other. This table below shows when the games came out and for which platform they did:

While KH and KHII are considered the main storyline as they're made for consoles, all the other entries that have been made for portable devices have been used as a link. The story has a lot of characters, most of them are linked to each other in complicated ways, and this is where they used game entries to explain reasons how the character got there in the first place and why it behaves the way he/she does. 

On the time line below you can have an idea of how stories are used as links and some even happen at the same time as others. 

This certainly doesn't affect the main storyline; if anything I find it fascinating how they manage to fill those story gaps and even if Square Enix is doing it just for the sake of feeding the fandom or because the story was originally intended to expand this much I just can't help to want to play them all and know everything about it. 

I have to admit that I bought my PS2 quite late, but only for the reason of playing this game. After this I became quite affective to Sony's consoles, and I felt again by buying a 3DS to play KH3D; all I'm trying to say is that even when transmedia it's not intended to capture all the market possible in a greedy way, I have to admit I've been a victim of this commercial strategy. (and I love it!...please give me more)