While we’re all still clenching our keyblades and waiting on Kingdom Hearts 3 to come through, there are still so many games to catch up with! Since Loot Gaming’s BLADE Crate has a Kingdom Hearts EXCLUSIVE, we thought we’d dip into some trivia! Let’s head to Destiny Island!
1. In Japan, Disney and Square Enix operated out of the same building and a chance moment in an elevator is what got the two of them working together towards conceiving Kingdom Hearts.
2. Sora was not originally meant to be the main character, which was hoped to be Mickey Mouse. However, licensing rights meant that a human protagonist was necessary. If Director Tetsuya Nomura had his way, Donald Duck would’ve been the lead character.
3. Real world weapons weren’t truly encouraged in the adaptations of Kingdom Hearts. When Pirates of the Caribbean’s story comes into play, Japanese versions had a sword that goes through Jack Sparrow, but in other territories, it was removed. Same with a gun further on in the story. While nothing else is changed, if a real weapon, considered dangerous for children, exists — it was removed or edited outside of Japan.
(Square Enix, Disney)
4. Speaking of slight changes to the International ports of Kingdom Hearts 2, at one point Daisy Duck is rather cross with Donald and actually gives him, uh, er, a paddlin’? That got changed for the other countries to just Daisy handing over a firm talking-to. Huh. Well, I’m sure he took that as a warning.
5. Destiny Island is an anagram for It’s Disney Land.
6. Kathryn Beaumont of Alice in Wonderland fame returned to voice Alice again for Kingdom Hearts, what made this even more amazing is that she was in her sixties upon recording her lines!
(Square Enix, Disney)
7. Aeris was renamed Aerith in Kingdom Hearts due to pronunciation in Japan that they ended up sticking with in art books and Japanese promotional materials from Final Fantasy.
8. The darker look of Cloud Strife was thanks to Tetsuya Nomura wanting Vincent Valentine in the game but knew he would be a bit too dark of a character, so he gave Cloud a bit of a brooding and moodier look in order to get at least a wee bit of what he wanted.
9. For quite awhile during the development, they purposely left Sora’s pants and/or shirt off as they wanted to focus on animation of the character and wait to work on fabric movement until the bulk of the work had been completed. So, if you ever meet Kingdom Hearts devs, ask them how they felt about playing a Donald Duck fashioned version of Sora.
(Square Enix, Disney)
10. Sora’s clothing color scheme was meant to be aligned with Mickey Mouse, in order to keep the essence of the famous Mouse without using his exact image. It kept people associating Sora as belonging alongside Goofy and Donald through the game due to their color blocking, which they had hoped for.
