A Keyblade is the key-shaped sword at the heart of Kingdom Hearts: a weapon that chooses its wielder and can lock or unlock anything, including the hidden heart of a world. Heartless are hearts lost to darkness, turned into creatures that hunt for more hearts. Nobodies are what is left behind, a body and soul with no heart, when someone with a strong will loses theirs. Sora is the boy from the Destiny Islands whom the Keyblade chooses, and the series follows him across worlds borrowed mostly from classic animated films, with Donald Duck and Goofy at his side.
The story runs across more than ten games on consoles, handhelds and phones, and they were not released in story order. This explains the terms first, then gives both orders. Every design on the Kingdom Hearts shelf comes from it. Spoilers up to Kingdom Hearts III below.
What a Keyblade is
A Keyblade is a weapon shaped like a giant key. It can open or seal any lock, and that includes the Keyhole of a world, the passage to its heart. In the first Kingdom Hearts, Sora's job in each world is to find and seal that Keyhole so the Heartless cannot reach the world's heart and swallow it.
A Keyblade chooses its wielder, and it can change its mind. In the first game it appears in Sora's hand as his home islands are swallowed by darkness. Later, at Hollow Bastion, it leaves him for his best friend Riku, whose heart seems the stronger, then returns when Sora proves his own. Birth by Sleep, set about ten years earlier, shows that Riku had been given the right to wield one as a child, by a Keyblade wielder named Terra.
Sora's standard Keyblade is the Kingdom Key; keychains attached to the handle change its shape and strength. In the series' ancient history, told in Kingdom Hearts χ, Keyblades were forged in imitation of the χ-blade, the original key to Kingdom Hearts, and a war between their wielders, the Keyblade War, shattered it. Keyblade, a Sora issue, is named for the weapon.
Heartless vs Nobodies
Every person and every world has a heart. When darkness takes a heart, it becomes a Heartless: a creature of darkness with one drive, to take more hearts. The small black Shadows that crawl out of the floor are the most common. There are two kinds. Pureblood Heartless are born of darkness on their own; Emblem Heartless were made artificially through experiments on hearts and carry an emblem on their bodies.
When someone with a strong heart becomes a Heartless, the body and soul left behind can carry on as a Nobody. Most Nobodies are faceless lesser creatures such as Dusks. A strong-willed few keep their human form and their memories, though they say they cannot truly feel. So the difference in one line: the Heartless is the heart, gone dark and hungry; the Nobody is the empty shell, wanting to be whole.
Darkness Falls, a Sora issue, is named for the darkness behind both.
Organization XIII and Roxas
Organization XIII is a group of thirteen human-form Nobodies, led by Xemnas, in black hooded coats. Their plan in Kingdom Hearts II is to have a Keyblade destroy Heartless, which frees the hearts trapped inside, and to collect those hearts into an artificial Kingdom Hearts that will make the members whole again.
That plan needs a Keyblade wielder, and they have one. Late in the first game, at Hollow Bastion, Sora stabs himself with a Keyblade forged from the captured hearts of the Princesses of Heart, to free the heart of his friend Kairi. For a moment he becomes a Heartless, until Kairi brings him back. That moment also makes his Nobody, Roxas, who can wield a Keyblade too. 358/2 Days covers Roxas's year as the Organization's thirteenth member; Kingdom Hearts II opens with him, then he rejoins Sora. Kairi's Nobody, Naminé, is the girl who rewrites Sora's memories in Chain of Memories.
Sora explained
Sora is a boy from the Destiny Islands, where he grows up with Riku and Kairi, a girl who arrived from another world. Kairi is one of the seven Princesses of Heart, whose hearts hold no darkness. When the Heartless swallow the islands, Sora wakes in Traverse Town with the Keyblade and meets Donald and Goofy, sent by their king, Mickey, to find the key.
What defines Sora is connection: his heart links to the people he meets, and the series uses that as both power and plot. After Chain of Memories he sleeps for a year so his memories can be restored, and Kingdom Hearts II picks up when he wakes.
In Kingdom Hearts III, Sora and his allies face Master Xehanort at the Keyblade Graveyard. When Kairi is struck down, Sora uses the power of waking to go after her heart, even though he knows he may not come back. The game ends with Kairi safe and Sora fading away. Heartbound, a Sora issue, is named for the heart that ties him to his friends.
Xehanort and Kingdom Hearts itself
Kingdom Hearts is the heart of all worlds, an aggregate of hearts and the source of light itself. Opening it takes the χ-blade, and that is what the series' main villain, Master Xehanort, is after.
Xehanort is a Keyblade Master who took over the body of a young wielder, Terra, and in it split himself in two. His Heartless calls himself Ansem, a name stolen from his old teacher, Ansem the Wise, and is the villain of the first game. His Nobody is Xemnas, the leader of Organization XIII. In Kingdom Hearts III he gathers thirteen seekers of darkness, vessels that each hold a piece of his heart, to clash with seven guardians of light and forge the χ-blade from the fight. Sora and his friends are those guardians.
Kingdom Hearts order: release and story
Release order, by year of first release: Kingdom Hearts (2002), Chain of Memories (2004), Kingdom Hearts II (2005), coded (2008, remade as Re:coded in 2010), 358/2 Days (2009), Birth by Sleep (2010), Dream Drop Distance (2012), Kingdom Hearts χ (2013), 0.2 A Fragmentary Passage (2017), Kingdom Hearts III (2019), Dark Road (2020) and Melody of Memory (2020).
Story order: Kingdom Hearts χ (the ancient Keyblade War), Dark Road (Xehanort's youth), Birth by Sleep, then Kingdom Hearts; Chain of Memories and 358/2 Days, which overlap; Kingdom Hearts II, Re:coded, Dream Drop Distance; then Kingdom Hearts III, with 0.2 A Fragmentary Passage as its prologue, and Melody of Memory after it.
For a first run, play in release order: each game assumes you know the ones before it.
On the back of a tee
All three Sora issues are on the Kingdom Hearts shelf, drawn from canon reference art. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why it works on the back: Sora is drawn as a silhouette first, the spiked hair, the oversized shoes and a key the length of his arm, so he reads from across a room like a good cover from the far end of a comic shop.
On the shelf
Read next: The Triforce, Majora's Mask and the Zelda timeline explained (another timeline that needs a map) and Kratos from Sparta to Midgard: God of War explained.
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