Here's Why Final Fantasy Characters Were Absent in Kingdom Hearts 3

Kingdom Hearts Co-Director Tai Yasue has explained why Kingdom Hearts 3 incarnations of Final Fantasy characters were absent from the story.

[PiNkFaIrYbOi]

I blame Disney.

[Omnislashver36]

Isn't it obvious? Disney had more oversight over KH3 and FF is too hardcore for Disney.

[cogniveritas]

Not obvious, and hardly an excuse. Disney owns a lot of IPs. For all we know, they could have put the Avengers in KH3 since they own Marvel too.

[PhoenixUp]

Disney has no control over how Square Enix handles their own properties in this series

[Omnislashver36]

Disney could just pull the rights to all the worlds. Nomura said himself it was much more difficult for him to get the rights to newer properties.

[PhoenixUp]

What does that have to do with Disney controlling how Square Enix content is handled within the series?

[Omnislashver36]

Disney would just not make KH3 possible. Simple as that. If they pull the worlds then all you have is World of FF, not Kingdom Hearts.

[PhoenixUp]

What kind of hypothetical situation is that? Disney immediately asked for Square Enix to make KH3 in the first place as soon as KH2 released. Nomura himself stated that he wouldn’t even make KH3 if he didn’t get access to Pixar properties.

Disney has no reason to pull the worlds so idk why you keep bringing that up. Disney wants this franchise to continue just as much as Square Enix does since it’s beneficial to both of them.

Besides that, Disney has no say in how Final Fantasy content is handled in this series. All you’ve ever responded to is how Disney content itself is handled in the franchise, which is entirely different from what I’ve been saying the entire time.

[Omnislashver36]

It's not hypothetical. Nomura has already said Disney had more oversight in KH3 and it was harder to get newer properties into the mix. Older ones were easy to get however Pixar actually had to look into KH1/KH2 to even figure out what the game was about and Nomura said himself that the worlds took way longer to acquire. He brought this up when people asked if this would affect the story and he claimed he already had the story set, he would just add the worlds as they came.

[PhoenixUp]

Omg you’re still not getting it 😑

All you’ve said over and over again is how Disney wanted their own Disney properties handled.

None of that has anything to do with how Square Enix properties in the series is handled, something that Disney has no control over.

[TheGamez100]

Actually I think it was mostly nomuras decision. He even said awhile back that he wouldnt even make kh3 a possibility if toy story didnt make it to the game. This indicates that he seems mostly a fan of disney than even final fantasy. He also said the he wants kingdom hearts to be more of its own thing by not adding final fantasy characters....despite 3 having been very disney...smh...
How in the world did they think making the game 90% disney, not having more original worlds/levels, no sephiroth battle, no final fantasy characters, make the gameplay lose its touch, etc etc etc, was a fantastic idea??? This is just like vsXii all over again.
Tbh im losing faith in him and especially square all together. Square has been making mostly mediocre console games and putting more of their focus onto mobile. Kh3 lost so many of its core values that I considered very important for any mainline kh game. Having taking years upon years to work on ff vsxiii was misstep # 1, making kh3 a horrible game compared to 1&2 is misstep #2....and my final hope is the ff7remake, if he screws that up....then that is strike 3 for me. I think im done being a huge fan of kingdom hearts, no way can that bitter taste in my mouth will ever disappear.
I want to complain more about the problems kh3 had but that'd take me hours and a massive amount of text lol.

[BABI-PANGPANG]

I feel ya.

[MoshA]

I blame Disney for letting Nomura defile the franchise with his insultingly bad story telling.

[-Foxtrot]

Original characters?

We didn't get into these games because of original characters, we got into it because it was a massive mash up. Sora and co were just a way story wise to link everyone together

If you guys didn't convoluted the entire story and kept it simple then you would have had time to do that but if you look at the story and the worlds in the past two main games you can see Kingdom Hearts III is lacking so much

Personally I would have sacraficed the newer worlds like Frozen or Big Hero Six for Radiant Garden and some older classic Disney worlds. I found it funny they let Pirates of the Caribbean come back but not Halloween Town and brought Olympus but no Tournament

[Nitrowolf2]

The story got to big for them, they should have just kept it simple and clean (¬‿¬)

It’s an odd decision for them not to have the collesuem back for the final episode in this chapter. They could have easily squeezed in the ff characters there for the fan service

I don’t know maybe I’ll rethink it next time when they start the new chapters and try and keep it down to a trilogy

[amazinglover]

Every world in this game was small, boring and uninspired. Yeah there was a lot of them but you spend 2-3 hours in each then you have no reason to ever go back there. I would have preferred less but better fleshed out worlds that gave me a reason to care about being there and to have reasons to come back.

[rainslacker]

At least the FF characters were actually doing something to try and curtail the opening of Kingdom Hearts, or doing something to directly help their worlds. The disney worlds were just being affected by it, and it was Sora who came in to help them, and fix their heartless problems, which they remained clueless on. The FF characters were aware of what was going on. KH often made it a point to say how they couldn't let those in the Disney world know about other worlds.

They didn't need to have a FF world....although that would have been cool...but some characters could have easily been worked in. But there was almost no story in Traverse Town, which is where we usually saw them outside the coliseum.

[PhoenixUp]

The Final Fantasy characters were as pivotal to the main story as most of the Disney characters aside from those associated with Mickey Mouse. It’s very jarring to just shoo them aside like they had no further purpose to fulfill.

I’m not only disappointed with their absence but also by how many of the original characters didn’t even get to have as many interactions as you’d expect because how much of the major plot is backended rather than things occurring at a gradual pace throughout the story

[terrorofdeath]

So all the FF Characters in Radiant Garden/Hollow Bastion just vanished into thin air? Man, that sucked. Square Enix doesn't realise just how cool it was seeing all these FF Characters we grew up playing with in a modern game, and took that away from us.

[Xaevi]

The conclusion of Cloud vs Sephiroth maybe never actually be concluded. And Zack's introduction in BBS will be for nothing it seems

[TheProfessional]

The story in KH3 was convoluted trash with way too many random, forgettable anime characters with stupid names. Everytime you beat a level there were poorly written cutscenes featuring these randoms with pink hair and their scenes barely connected to anything going on with Sora. I skipped every cutscene with those characters and missed NOTHING.

[Xaevi]

They aren't random though, and I think that's part of the problem. All those anime characters were all in previous games and had plenty of screen time for character development. They were just under used and their importance was down played

[rainslacker]

They weren't random characters. They were former members of Organization XIII, or their replicas mostly. Understanding their motives and reasons for being there is where the convolution comes in. If you hadn't skipped the cutscenes, they often went into back story detail....which I found made them boring, because they spent too much time on explaining what was happened before, instead of concluding the story with stuff actually going on. Then they just crammed every meaningful story point into the last couple worlds. Some of the significance of the big reveal would easily be lost if you missed one of the games...not that it was really that interesting, and was kind of anti-climatic.

And that's kind of the problem with KH in general. The main story from KH1->2 had so much side story which was only sometimes important to the Xehanort connection. The only one that really mattered overall was the one that introduced Roxas, and Namine, and they were disgracefully underused, or completely absent.

[Snookies12]

Saying you skipped scenes and missed nothing in the same sentence is really funny. Because you did miss things, a lot of things apparently. I wonder why you think the story is so 'convoluted'? Maybe because you didn't actually pay attention to it. There's a lot going on, but it's not really that hard to actually follow.

[TeamIcoFan]

Cha Ching!
That's why.

[AK91]

I kinda want the FF and Disney characters to be the only characters in the new Saga, the original KH characters got real annoying after the first entry.

[rainslacker]

I didn't mind most of them. But, I have no idea why the voice actor changed Sora's voice after the first one. His original English voice was OK. The one after the first were terrible. Same actor, but you'd never know it.

That, and Donalds voice in KH3 were terrible. Donald I was forced to turn on the subtitles to understand. Didn't care for Xehanort's new voice, but that was kind of unavoidable given the circumstances, just wish they picked a better one.

[AK91]

Regarding Sora's voice actor its called puberty lol, he grew up and his voice got deeper but yeah kinda wished they got a younger sounding VA it's odd to hear Sora have the voice of a 30 year old man.

[FallenAngel1984]

You really asking why Haley Joel Osment couldn’t keep the same voice he had when he was 12 years old later on in his life?

[rainslacker]

It wasn't 12 years between the 1st and 2nd game. He changed the voice between the first and second...which were released 4 years apart. While I might expect some change in voice, he actually sounded older and more mature in the first game. His voice only got worse with KH3. I could understand if the voice wasn't so different in KH2, but that's what I was talking about. Even hitting puberty doesn't change someone's voice to sound that much different when they're still in the early stages of puberty.

I have nothing against the actor himself, he generally does a good job in many parts. He just either had terrible direction in KH3, because it wasn't just his voice that I had a problem with in KH3, but the way he did it, or he really wasn't trying at all.

[FallenAngel1984]

I didn’t say 12 years had passed between KH1 & KH2’s release, I said that Haley Joel Osment himself was 12 years old when he started recording for Sora. Miyu Irino voiced Sora at the same age as well.

It really shouldn’t have to be explained why Sora’s voice got deeper in both the Japanese & English dubs. It’s basic human physiology.

Sora’s higher pitched voice in the first game did not make him sound older and more mature, quite the opposite.

Haley’s & Irino’s performances in KH3 were one of their best in the series. It was especially far superior than their DDD performance which sounded off because they tried to sound younger than they actually was which didn’t sound right compared to their natural vocal evolution in KH3.

[lucian229]

Not as if those "unique" characters had any importance. They were just taken from previous game to just be there. The story was trash. If they didn't save the bulk of the story for the last chapter and actually did it how BBS did then we'd have answers.

No instead the Disney worlds felt like (were) filler as sora watched snippets of the movie play then commented on it. Such poo

[Question_Mark]

He was surprised that the lack of FF characters was disappointing to fans, but at least he’s aware of it.

[r3f1cul]

ive only played the mainline installments aka 1 & 2 and it made me sad when they sad that because the sephiroth battles were always cool as hell :/ i dont remember crap about the story over a decade later from either of those games but i remember the fights with him so yea ...

[Uglyday]

I thought kids liked dinosaurs?

[Positivelypositive]

Because of all the games between 2 and 3. There was so many loose ends they wanted to clear up that there was no room for them. Which is a bad excuse. They should have taken out the frozen world and the pirates worlds and replaced them with final fantasy worlds. Like FF7 or FFX.

[kayoss]

I think its a good thing that they left out the FF characters from the game. I felt that the FF characters were taking the attention away from the characters from this game.

[LuzCB1987]

I don't think they should mix.

[Lexreborn2]

Seriously though, not having FF characters is why I chose not to buy the game.

[Flewid638]

A game just full of Disney characters is exactly why I passed on it.