Sagacyte's BG corner

Gosh!

Yesterday Kingdom Hearts fans were all riled up after finding that Bill Farmer, who is the voice actor for Goofy in both Kingdom Hearts and everything Goofy, stated on Twitter that the next installment in the saga - Kingdom Hearts "I broke E" 3 - was coming this year. The news quickly spread and people captured screenshots of the tweet. It didn't take long for the corporate overlords at Disney to recognize the goof (ha!) and Bill was quickly changing his tune to a more industry-conformant "The release date for Kingdom Hearts Three has not been announced yet!" No surprise there. Voice recording may be done, but there's still a lot to do.

So, for today's topic, let's have a main dish of "who in their right mind would think KH3 could possibly release this year?" served with a side dish of "this is SquareEnix we're talking about!".

KH3 was announced to the world during Sony's conference in E3 2013. Glorious moment. Since then there have been a couple of japan-side events where small glimpses at proto footage are shown but not much else. Much more recently (October 2014) it was announced that the game was switching development to Unreal Engine 4. And finally, during KH2.5HD's launch in Japan there was another small glimpse of footage that hasn't been made publicly available. Long story short: we have seen less about KH3 than we have about Final Fantasy XV. Even that urban myth of a game suddenly popped back into existence during 2013 and after another period of silence has since showed a bit more skin via live letters with the dev team (a very good habit that I'm pretty sure they copied from FFXIV's dev team). Alas, there's much to be done in that game and despite nearing a 10 year dev cycle, I can't see it releasing this year. Kingdom Hearts would seem to be much - MUCH - earlier in development than the-game-formerly-known-as-versus-XIII.

Unless SE has devoted a full team to work on KH3 24/7 in the most absolute of silences and NDA wallpapers under the watchful eye of a SeeD strike team with kill on sight orders to keep it all a secret and plans to surprise the world by coming out saying "Both XV and KH3 are releasing this holiday season because we love you and we know what you want!".

[Insert pause and foley disc with several audience laugh tracks, like those in popular sitcoms, or just me watching Mike & Molly].

I know this is gonna sound cruel, but guys: this is SquareEnix. The company that has made a habit of mixing "Final Fantasy" and "mobile" way more than it should be allowed by our ant overlords. The company that made it cool to release mobile games for more than $5. The company that has some sort of selective hearing issue. The company that nested up there in its corporate wonderland somehow thought it would be the coolest thing ever to troll the entire planet (and nearby alien races that know how to emulate consoles) announcing a port of a game people were expecting a remake of. The company that knowing that KH fans wanted the 3rd entry in the saga instead took the time (and money) to develop a lot of secondary games (though the excellent Birth By Sleep was born of this milking phase) - I'm actually surprised there hasn't been a Kingdom Hearts mobile game for this long. What's that? Chi? OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

In the end, the chances of KH3 (and XV) releasing this year are next to my chances of seeing a Bravely Default port on Vita. I'd LOVE to be wrong, at least for XV, but if that one releases this year it'll probably be for Japan... and that's a stretch. I guess we'll just have to wait a little longer... it's not like we haven't already waited ages for these games, right?

I won't get my hopes up. I won't get my hopes up. I won't get my hopes up. I won't... *checks Twitter*... fuck.

Game on.

- Sagacyte

This post originally appeared on my blog.