New Nomura Gameinformer interview. Discusses Disney Worlds, Quadratum, and Final Fantasy in KH4.

[mriku90]

Disney is not next. Disney owns the franchise and all the characters. SE just produces the game for them. Disney is always gonna be a part of Kingdom Hearts. The day there's no Disney in KH is the day there's no more KH period.

 

[Theme]

Disney is not next. Disney owns the franchise and all the characters. SE just produces the game for them. Disney is always gonna be a part of Kingdom Hearts. The day there's no Disney in KH is the day there's no more KH period.

That sounds like a really nice sentiment. A nice sentiment indeed. I do hope you're right.

 

[Gandalf-the-Wise]

All this talk about the remakes being included has me dread the world selection for this game. The discussion about only live action and 3d animated films being implemented into KH4, that's both limiting and quite disheartening.

Furthermore, this thread has me coming to terms that most likely I won't get to have some of the worlds I wanted in KH3 & 4 either like returning to the classic 2d animated Agrabah or Atlantica in enhanced unreal engine graphics. Sure as hell at this point something nostalgic like Gargoyles won't ever make it in since they haven't been relevant since the mid to late 90s.

We are most likely getting a handful of the "commercial worlds" that Disney would like to advertise in KH4. Be prepared for Frozen 2 rehash with Sora & company in the background again. Lightyear could be interesting though. Does bring up the question if they would have us return to Toy Story AND have Lightyear in the same game or just one of them. As for other pixar films the only other ones I can think of would be Bugs Life and the Incredibles since they have good options for party members and boss battles.

Moana may have a chance I hope. Same goes for Wreck it Ralph. Princess and the Frog is definitely out at this point, not only being 2d but I think Disney is genuinely ashamed of that movie and wants people to forget it. Encanto and Turning Red both have their fair shots considering their massive popularity nowadays, the closet Disney films have come since the first Frozen. If I had to choose between them, leaning more towards Encanto purely from a visual standpoint.

Now..for the..sighhh..oh dear lord. Sighhhhh. Now for the remakes. If I had to pick my poison, I would choose the Alice in Wonderland remake and Maelficent. Those out of all the remakes in my opinion would provide the most entertainment, especially when Sora has to team up with the alternate reality version of one of his greatest enemies. Please God no live action Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Lion King involved in this.

Well that's my two cents on the subject for the time being. Not at all enthusiastic about this news from the article, but still will try to keep an open mind about it..for now.

 

[Agroogrooiya]

Sad to see that Sora is going to forever be the protagonist of KH. because they say he's SOOO important yet they made him a literal moron in DDD and KH3.

Glad to see reaction commands are coming back, everyone who wants to cope about them is free to but they are part of why KH2 is so damn good, and why Roxas (KH3) is clean as f to play as.

Don't care about the lack of FF or the other KH cast, because they don't matter and literally nobody matters in this stupid story. There is no powerscaling, no real rules, just BELIEVE REALLY HARD and you'll eventually come to the way of light or whatever the f lol. also Sora can get nodiffed multiple times and thoroughly BTFO but next scene he is capable of WIELDING THE X-BLADE, and then NEXT SCENE he doesn't have it for whatever reason and gets snapped out of existence because lol

EDIT: I know Nomura and his team will never read this, but take a look at the KH3 mods. there are mods that specifically make use of L2+R2. why? to give the player even more freedom in combat. KH is a COMBAT GAME, like it or not. nobody plays this shit for the story (it's garbage), nobody plays it to listen to the music when youtube exists, hell they don't even play it for the graphics. they play it for the GAMEPLAY. not for the mini cutscenes in the form of shotlocks, but for the high octane gameplay in reaction commands. even to this DAY, KH2 is still revered as peak KH. and it has the series' worst story.

 

[2 quid is good]

I know Nomura and his team will never read this, but take a look at the KH3 mods. there are mods that specifically make use of L2+R2. why? to give the player even more freedom in combat. KH is a COMBAT GAME, like it or not. nobody plays this shit for the story (it's garbage), nobody plays it to listen to the music when youtube exists, hell they don't even play it for the graphics. they play it for the GAMEPLAY. not for the mini cutscenes in the form of shotlocks, but for the high octane gameplay in reaction commands. even to this DAY, KH2 is still revered as peak KH. and it has the series' worst story.

 

[NoWay]

I actually love the mess of the story that is KH AND hearing the soundtrack in game hits WAY different than listening it on YT
I mean, the Scala ad Caelum would never hit that hard if you didn’t experience the emptiness of the world in ReMind while searching lonely for Kairi’s heart. The atmosphere is so depressing.

But yeah, I also think we need L2 and R2 during combat so that we can enjoy the adaptive triggers from the DualSense controller

 

[Elysium]

Oh, for sure, there will always be Disney-owned products in KH, but whether legitimate Disney content remains is another story. I feel like actual Disney content (WDAS) is certainly on track to be sidelined further and further and further.

 

[the red monster]

people really don't remember 80% of KH3 was disney worlds?
disney will always be AT LEAST 50% of a KH game, and super likely even more.
not that i'm a fan of it, i enjoy the OC content way more. but it is a disney franchise so yeah..

 

[SuperNova]

Nomura can confirm that Disney is here to stay as often as he likes, there will always be players who think that Disney is becoming less and less important because of the OC content. It's been like this since before KH2 came out and all the way up to KH3's Disney Power Hour before the OC content was shoved into the last 4-5 hours of game.

Disney isn't going anywhere.

 

[MATGSY]

EDIT: I know Nomura and his team will never read this, but take a look at the KH3 mods. there are mods that specifically make use of L2+R2. why? to give the player even more freedom in combat. KH is a COMBAT GAME, like it or not. nobody plays this shit for the story (it's garbage), nobody plays it to listen to the music when youtube exists, hell they don't even play it for the graphics. they play it for the GAMEPLAY. not for the mini cutscenes in the form of shotlocks, but for the high octane gameplay in reaction commands. even to this DAY, KH2 is still revered as peak KH. and it has the series' worst story.

That Days is more popular than RE:Coded proves that ain't true.

 

[kirabook]

You guys do realize as it stands, Disney's next, right? The series was never meant to be a marriage of FF with Disney, or even just Disney. Those two elements were nothing more than stepping stones for Nomura to tell his own convoluted ass story, with the aim to ditch them when the time is right. He failed as a mangaka, so he went into games instead.

Look no further than TWEWY and Verum Rex as proof. When TWEWY, at best, only found success as a cult title, he shoehorned the characters into Kingdom Hearts. And when he failed to get Versus XIII off the ground, he crowbarred all of its ideas, once again, into Kingdom Hearts. It's a cut and dry pattern with him, and frankly, it's just about killed my interest in the series.

As deeply entrenched as I am in the modding community, the truth is, KHIV will likely be the final game I'll give a damn about. IF the series can even hold my interest before it's out...

We don't need to go as far as to slander him or criticize him for projects that never really took off. All successful people have had a few flops in their life and Square is not exactly known for treating their projects and lead developers with care.

There's a 0% chance Disney is going anywhere.

 

[HakaishinChampa]

Disney will always be in the series, we keep having this conversation and even if there was a game where no Disney worlds appear - Donald, Goofy & Mickey would show up at least.

KH3 was successful and with all the references of KH in recent Disney media....Disney will want to advertise their properties in future releases.

Even if some people don't like Disney, with KH4 possibly having Star Wars - basically being Nomura's FF vs 13 - and maybe even having Marvel. It'll bring lots of people to this next title

 

[Elysium]

That's what I mean, personally, not sure what the first person who said Disney was next might've meant: Star Wars, PIXAR, and Marvel are owned by Disney, but they aren't WDAS or live-action Disney-made content. I'm sure the series will always have Disney IPs like the former, but the latter that composed the series up until III will dwindle in much the same way the FF content has disappeared entirely. And there will be excuses made (by Nomura, by the fanbase) for that happening, too.

 

[Chie]

There is no powerscaling, no real rules, just BELIEVE REALLY HARD

I love the idea that what makes the story meaningless and irrelevant to this person is that the characters don't have "power levels". It's a story, not a D&D sourcebook. Cry about it.

 

[celebi]

I’m here for some slice of life content

Amen to that!

 

[Launchpad]

Interesting stuff. Not to be snarky or anything but it is a bit odd to me that the main site updates us on TWEWY but not this article. Any reason for that?

 

[Soldier]

While I'm personally doubtful about Yozora due to Nomura's statements in the last Famitsu interview I agree with the rest here.
It seems that Nomura is fully immersed in the whole X-era cast right now and intends not only to use already introduced characters from these entries but also to introduce even more new ones.

The fact that Nomura keeps hyping Yozora up scares me, it really does. Personally I kind of already hate him and I, like everyone else barely know anything about him.

Nomura stated he felt Radiant Garden already "too crowded" in BBS and replaced the FF cameos with the original beings of Organisation members (Even, Dilan, Aeleus, Lea and Isa) because they are/were more important to the overall story and Ventus meeting them instead of the FF cameos would have "a bigger impact" whatever that meant, lol.

And yet here we are several years later from BBS, and Dilan hasn't spoken a single word since the fight on Beast's Castle. Real big impact right there ladies and gentlemen. Let's not forget that we couldn't get Laguna Loire to act as the mirage arena's master because he had to appear in Dissidia 012, which is something I still don't understand. What? his agent only wanted him to participate in Final Fantasy events only? was KH a bad thing to put on his resume?

If I recall correctly the appearance of the FF cameos in Re:MInd of KH III was done by Nomura only because of both backlash from fans and other members of the KH development team concerning them.
If Nomura could have had his way completely the FF cameos would most likely have been dropped from the series for good with KH III.

A part of me has the suspicion that this was his plan all along, and like @Underwater Cop says, Disney will get the axe next. Honestly the genius of KH is something that's unrivaled at this point and it's sad that half of the unique dynamic had to be thrown away for the sake of characters like Axel and freaking Yozora. I wouldn't lose a wink of sleep if Yozora is killed in KH 4 in the middle of the game, that's how little I care about him.

Either around when DDD was made or at the latest when the whole X[chi]-stuff with the original japan-only browser game started there definitely was a shift in Nomura's general approach as well as the up to then hinted at story concepts.

I long for the days when KH V-Cast was the only mobile game that existed and Nomura cared less about implementing it into the already convoluted story and just focused on the side games that already were focused on the main story. Did we really NEED to play through the keyblade war and revisit Agrabah again?

 

[Dandelion]

Some of you were right on the money.

English articles that are highly accessible (and that's what this was to be clear -- you all found it, made a topic about it, and I'm sure you've watched a shitty youtuber who twisted the interview for clickbait by now, after all) don't get articles anymore. The site was asked to stop. Smaller sites have probably never had this problem.

Some of you seem pretty miserable. A change in franchises after IV sounds like a good idea.

 

[Oracle Spockanort]

I don’t want a GI lawyer on me ty

 

[Launchpad]

Some of you were right on the money.

English articles that are highly accessible (and that's what this was to be clear -- you all found it, made a topic about it, and I'm sure you've watched a shitty youtuber who twisted the interview for clickbait by now, after all) don't get articles anymore. The site was asked to stop. Smaller sites have probably never had this problem.

Some of you seem pretty miserable. A change in franchises after IV sounds like a good idea.

I mean I've been using esteemed Youtubers to factcheck KHi's work for years. It's not that you guys aren't trustworthy, it's just that I need the insight of a true gamer's joint to verify that site staff didn't slip up.