SHINJUKU, Japan — SquareEnix has released an exclusive sneak peek at the pre-announcement concept artwork and gameplay for the highly anticipated fourth entry in the action RPG Kingdom Hearts franchise made in partnership with media giant Disney.
Along with the reveal, Director Tetsuya Nomura shared his thoughts and insights on the direction this new game will take.
“Recently Disney films have adopted a more realistic visual style,” Nomura said “and we really want to capture that aesthetic. It’s very important to us that our Final Fantasy and original characters look like they are a part of the Disney worlds they travel to in the game. So we’ve removed any semblance of interesting design and just made them photorealistic lifeless creatures.”
The conceptual artwork for the redesigns of Sora, Donald and Goofy were shown featuring a combination of photographs of real-life actors and animals, meticulously recreated in breathtaking accuracy in 3D.
“As you may know, using real actors as models for our games is not new. In Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core, we introduced a new character named Genesis who was based on the real life J-Pop singer Gackt. The only difference this time is that all of our characters will have to be made in a similar way. We ran into some real problems with the anthropomorphic characters like Donald and Goofy, but ultimately we chose to match Disney’s approach and adapt them to be talking animals with empty expressions like in The Lion King remake.”
When asked about which movies and worlds Kingdom Hearts 4 would be taking players to, and how revisiting them would affect the story, Nomura was a bit tight-lipped.
“I can’t spoil too much, but I have been given permission to reveal that we will indeed be returning to at least three worlds we have visited previously, this time in their Disney remake forms. As to the implications of that, and the how and why of these massive changes to the worlds well … you’ll just have to wait until obscure spin-offs explain everything!”
At press time, SquareEnix could not give a solid release date for the game but Nomura confirmed that he intends to get at least 6 years deep and spend a minimum of $200 million before the project is ultimately reassigned to Naoki Yoshida.
