I’m excited for Kingdom Hearts IV. I know someone on social media is gonna look at the headline and try to say that Kotaku hates Kingdom Hearts. No, I love those games, and if you say I don’t, you’re just gonna tell everyone you didn’t actually read the article. But damn, I really don’t care for the photorealistic style Square Enix is going for in the next game in the Disney RPG series, or at least the bits of it we’ve seen so far.
Kingdom Hearts has gotten gradually more photorealistic as the Disney/Final Fantasy crossover saga has gone on. Some of the worlds that Sora, Donald, and Goofy travel to, like the Pirates of the Caribbean and Tron settings, had recreations of live-action characters. Kingdom Hearts IV, meanwhile, has a world called Quadratum, where characters look much more realistic than they ever have. According to director Tetsuya Nomura, this is a deliberate choice meant to reflect how Quadratum is “an underworld, a fictional world that is different from reality” to Sora. In Kingdom Hearts games, Sora and his friends have often been transformed in one way or another to reflect a new setting, appearing as sea creatures in the Little Mermaid world and turning into toys in the Toy Story one. But the further Sora gets from Disney worlds, the more the game’s visual identity has changed.
Quadratum, based on real-world Shibuya, is playing with some metatextual concepts of reality and fiction that we don’t need to untangle here, but visually, it means that characters like Sora and Organization XIII member Luxord don’t really look like themselves anymore. Luxord debuted in Kingdom Hearts II, and even when watching the Kingdom Hearts IV trailer, it took me a hot second to recognize him despite his blonde hair and goatee. It’s kind of wild to compare his appearance in 2006 to the one 20 years later, and while this might serve as a technical showcase for how much “better” video game graphics have gotten, the artistic shift is actually a huge bummer. Donald and Goofy briefly appear in the trailer, but in a nondescript area with nothing but blue flames behind them. The pair is supposed to be looking for Sora after he disappeared at the end of Kingdom Hearts III, so they might not be in Quadratum in this shot, but I’m curious if they, too, will get some photorealistic redesign if they step foot into this place, or if perhaps Square Enix will write the game’s story such that they never actually have to.
The more Kingdom Hearts has leaned into its own original worldbuilding, the less it has felt like a Disney property, and while I am invested in the stories of Sora, Riku, and all the other Kingdom Hearts heroes, I do miss when it had a distinct look. Square Enix has hinted that Sora and friends may look more like themselves if they’re able to leave Quadratum, and if that’s the case, I wish Square Enix would show anything else from the game just to make me feel like I’m looking at Kingdom Hearts instead of Nomura’s latest attempt to make Final Fantasy Versus XIII again.
