Here’s the deal: in December 2018, more than a month before the official launch, copies of Kingdom Hearts III started being sold early in a retail stock leak. With the game in the hands of a few lucky people, the risk was clear: spoilers for the series’ most anticipated story spreading across the internet.
The director himself, Tetsuya Nomura, stepped in. Through the official Kingdom Hearts Twitter account, he posted a message asking fans not to share spoilers. Check it out:
And there was an ace up his sleeve: the epilogue and the secret ending, which Nomura called “the biggest spoilers” of the game, were not on the leaked copies. They would only be released by update, close to launch. For fans of the saga who were avoiding spoilers, it was quite a relief.
Around the same time, Square Enix also released a new short video of the game:
What came next
Kingdom Hearts III arrived on January 25, 2019 in Japan and on January 29 in the rest of the world, for PS4 and Xbox One. The epilogue and the secret ending were released by patch between January 26 and 31, as promised. And sales were huge: on February 4, Square Enix announced more than 5 million copies shipped in two weeks, the franchise’s fastest launch. Critics gave it 83 on PS4 and 80 on Xbox One on Metacritic, with praise for the gameplay and visuals and mixed opinions about the story, which closes the Xehanort saga but not the series.
Then came the Re Mind expansion, on January 23, 2020 on PS4 and February 25 on Xbox One, the PC version on the Epic Games Store on March 30, 2021, the cloud version for Nintendo Switch on February 10, 2022 and the Steam launch on June 13, 2024. And the list of platforms keeps growing: Square Enix scheduled native versions for Switch 2, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S for October 8, 2026.
Source: Eurogamer.
Max Xavier
Moleque do Fliperama
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