Hearts And Minds

Inside the decade-long development of Kingdom Hearts III – a tale of how collaboration and determination can achieve the impossible.

- Jen Simpkins

Thank Buzz Lightyear that Kingdom Hearts III exists. That’s a bizarre sentence – and as such, entirely appropriate. Square Enix’s long-awaited RPG is a hybrid world in which the impossible is somehow made reality. Keybladewielding hero Sora stands shoulder to shoulder with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and runs through environments plucked from some of the most beloved animated films of all time. It is playable Disney, shot through with anime styling. It is weird. It shouldn’t exist.

Indeed, it’s taken years – more than ten of them – to make it happen. This is the result of a painstaking collaboration between Square Enix and The Walt Disney Company, two sets of very different but equally perfectionist creators. Keeping both sides happy is no easy task: Disney is not exactly famed for its laissez-faire approach to its IP portfolio. Square, meanwhile, is protective of its own carefully constructed worlds, the Kingdom Hearts universe in particular cherished by a legion of fans who connect deeply to its story.

So yes, the collaboration took a while. The endless back-and-forth between artists and their own ideas of what this game should be, an unexpected change of engines early on in development, the sheer size of the team required to make a Kingdom Hearts game more open than any previous series entry – all of this further complicated an already complex project. And then there’s Tetsuya Nomura, a man so committed to his vision of the perfect Disney RPG that unless it’s exactly right, he’d rather it didn’t exist at all.

For the series director, making Kingdom Hearts III without the Toy Story licence was unthinkable. “After we were done with