Kingdom Hearts III has been in the works for over a decade, and this year, players truly felt that the game would finally come to them, and to make it all better, it would arrive on both PS4 and Xbox One (and hopefully Switch in the future but that’s another topic). However, just before E3 2018 began, Square Enix dropped a new trailer for the game and revealed that the title wouldn’t arrive until January 29th, 2019. This new crushed many players.
So, naturally, the questions became…why? Why was it delayed to 2019 when all reports and accounts from the team said it would be in 2018? Well, Kingdom Hearts III director Tetsuya Nomura sat down with IGN at E3 and stated:
“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 went on:
“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.'”
So basically, this was both a business and game development decision, and you can hardly blame the team or Square Enix for wanting to take the time to make sure that the game was as perfect as it can be given all the time and hype buildup for it. And to be fair, it’s only a month into 2019 at present, so it’s not too long of a wait after 2018.
Not to mention that during E3 there were multiple trailers shown for the game. Including new worlds revealed in the forms of Frozen and Pirates of the Caribbean World’s End, and shots of returning characters like Aqua.
When the game eventually releases, it’ll likely be worth it.
