Game director Tetsuya Nomura has provided some more intel about the relationship between Square Enix and Disney’s relationship when it comes to the licensing and making of Kingdom Hearts III.
Game director Tetsuya Nomura has provided some more intel about the relationship between Square Enix and Disney’s relationship when it comes to the licensing and making of Kingdom Hearts III.
Interestingly, during an interview with USGamer.net at E3 2018, Nomura discussed the nature of the conversation with Disney and said that now it’s getting more difficult to have green lights on each world because the developer is doing worlds from more recent movies and properties.
In the past, many creators were gone or were not in Disney anymore, so Square Enix only had to offer a good creative vision to the business department and see whether they thought it was a good idea to return to a certain property. That’s apparently not the case anymore for many things.
“I can say that it has actually been increasingly difficult to get approvals from Disney. That’s mainly because in the past Kingdom Hearts titles, the creator wasn’t around anymore or the team that used to create those titles wasn’t there anymore. There was just this one person that we would just have to go to and they would approve it and we’d be fine and good to go. But because we’ve been featuring recent titles, they still have existing teams for existing creators that are still working in Disney and still working on a certain title,” Nomura says.
“That feedback process just has been a little bit more difficult than before. And each team would have a different set of rules and guidelines and they would say different things, or they would look at different things. It’s just been a little different than how it used to be because Kingdom Hearts is a bigger title than it was before. I think that whenever we would bring our previous titles, a lot of people at Disney, and this is my assumption, but I do assume that they probably didn’t know what Kingdom Hearts was. They’d go, “What’s Kingdom Hearts? I have no idea.”
But now that it’s become a bigger title, a lot more people have been involved in than before. In that sense, the relationship with Disney has changed quite a bit. Emotional changes I don’t really know if there have been any changes emotionally for me. But at least physically I can say those were the changes that we had with Disney.”
Kingdom Hearts III is releasing on January 29, 2019, for PS4 and Xbox One.
Source: USGamer
