Square Enix treated fans to plenty of new looks at Kingdom Hearts III at E3 2018, and director Tetsuya Nomura shared some insight on its delay to 2019 and why we haven’t seen the Big Hero 6 world in an interview with IGN.
On the delay from the originally intended 2018 window to January 2019:
“The timing of release that we were actually looking at, we were told by many people, including hardware manufacturers, marketing teams, sales teams that it just wasn’t a good timing in the year.”
He also explained that the differences in holiday lengths and store behavior in different regions were also of concern.
“…For Kingdom Hearts III, the [Square Enix] western offices had requested to release the game as simultaneously as much as possible between Japan and America, so we were no longer able to just think about Japanese issues and retail situations,”
That said, Square Enix decided on January 2019, but there were other considerations:
“We of course considered maybe speeding up development to release earlier than when we were told wasn’t good, but the development team said that ‘No, we just couldn’t do that. We could delay it, but we couldn’t make it any sooner.'”
Now that the release date has been set, Nomura explained that the team has extra time to continue working on polishing the game before its release.
Lastly, Nomura shared a bit on Big Hero 6‘s world:
“…We pretty much have finished creating all the gameplay within that world, but we’re just not finished with the cutscenes yet.”
Kingdom Hearts III releases in Japan and Asia on January 25, 2019 and in North America and Europe in January 29, 2019 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. You can check out its latest trailers from E3 2018 here and here, info on its Deluxe and Bring Arts editions here, and its limited edition PS4 Pro here.
