Quote Originally Posted by Tavrobel View Post
The first game states that Heartless didn't exist until Ansem's (both the real and the fake) experiments.
I was under the impression that shadow heartless existed before the experiments and that all the other "variations" of heartless are merely the result of the experiments conducted in Hollow Bastion. I thought they'd always been around, but in numbers too few to pose a threat, and they'd merely been mass manufactured during the experiments.