IMO, a big reason why the story is so confusing now is all the retconning. There was retconning in the past, sure. But starting with KH2FM, Nomura seemed to have a set story he was building up to. BBS, Days, Coded, 0.2, even KHX and Back Cover, all seemed to be building up to KH3. Then…the story changed on a whim, previous plot lines being built up were discarded. Let’s use an example.
KHX started off as browser game, a prequel about the Keyblade War. It was a self-contained story with a defined ending. Your player avatar dies and goes to the Final World where they are living in a dream created by Chirithy. But, since the game was quite profitable after being ported to mobile, Square wanted to continue the story and they had to retcon everything. Union X even seemed to retroactively uncanonize the secret ending from KHX, and it was never even given an official localization. Turns out Player didn’t go to the Final World, they just uh, went to the datascape. And the Chririthy Sora met isn’t your Chirithy, it’s uh, VEN’S Chirithy (which will only be resolved in KH4 now!!).
Then Square planned for Dark Road to be the new mobile cash cow and they wanted to create a connection between those two games. So your player then dies AGAIN and they are…reincarnated into Xehanort? Uh, okay. But Dark Road flops and Missing Link is now the cash cow mobile successor to UX that Square is banking on. Now we learn that Player didn’t reincarnate into Xehanort. No, no. They actually reincarnated into the ML Avatar. Xehanort just uh…absorbed their memories by being in their proximity.
It’s very hard to follow a series when it feels like the writer doesn’t firmly know where the story is going and is just making things up as he goes and constantly changing his mind on certain details.