KINGDOM HEARTS 25th ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

This exhibition marks twenty-five years of the Kingdom Hearts games, a quarter-century the series completes in March 2027. It is held at the Mori Arts Center Gallery, on the fifty-second floor of the Mori Tower at Roppongi Hills in Tokyo, and runs for two months from February.

Kingdom Hearts is a role-playing series made by Square Enix together with Disney. The player is Sora, a boy who carries a weapon called the Keyblade that only certain people can wield. He travels between worlds taken from Disney and Pixar films, and fights a darkness that threatens all of them. Light, darkness and the heart are the ideas the series keeps returning to, and much of the story is held back and let out slowly across the games.

The exhibition covers the whole run, from the first game through Kingdom Hearts II and III to the many spin-offs, and looks ahead to Kingdom Hearts IV, which has been announced but has not yet appeared.

Scenes from the games are built as sets to be photographed in, and replicas of the Keyblade are shown. Alongside them is material from the making of the series and an immersive theatre, a room where the film plays on the walls around the audience. A shop sells things made for the exhibition and sold nowhere else.

There is also a ticket that comes with a set of goods included, made to order in the months before the exhibition opens and not sold separately afterwards, with the goods handed over at the gallery on the day.