Let’s take the Final Fantasy characters out, shall we?
Again, it’s not that we don’t love them, but their inclusion has to have a delaying impact on the cost, negotiations and profit sharing of the Kingdom Hearts series. It wouldn’t surprise us if Square had been including Cloud and Co for a song in 2002, but that was before they started spinning them off like crazy.
Above: Perhaps it was Kingdom Hearts that proved FF characters were worth far more than a single title
Disney and Square may have just renewed their business relationship on the publishing end, but once you factor in the announcement-to-release window of a modern Square-Enix game... Final Fantasy XIII was announced in 2006, and the soonest America will ever see it is 2010. Additionally, development of FFXIII and its numerous spinoffs should keep KH overseer, Tetsuya Nomura, plenty busy in the meantime.
Above: Wonder why the second highest grossing film of 1988 was never revisited?
Hell, Disney wanted to produce a sequel to another one of its epic ensemble crossovers, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but guess what? Rights expire, and the project became exponentially more infeasible as the years wore on until it died completely. We apologize for being so Doom and Gloom, but even if they announced Kingdom Heart III tomorrow, we probably wouldn’t see it until the PlayStation 4 and that makes GamesRadar a sad website…
Kingdom Hearts is pretty much the reason this week’s all about Disney at GR (And a little ODST too). It embodies everything that makes the Disney Universe special, well worth preserving for the better part of a century. And it’s been so long since we played a principal effort in the main series, we thought everyone could use a little reminder:
Above: SQUISNEY FOREVER!
Sep 21, 2009
Kingdom Hearts 2 streamer spends 2 hours grinding a 9999-hit combo, gets enough cash for 1.2 healing potions: "This is possibly the most stressful thing I've ever done"
Kingdom Hearts forced Naughty Dog to go "oh sh*t" while making Jak 2, because Square Enix's character models were so much more detailed that the platformer devs had to change course
