Famed for it's rather complex and confusing story, which spans more than half a dozen different games, Kingdom Hearts is one of those franchises which most likely wouldn't have been given the thumbs up, had it been thought of today. Combining the worlds of Disney and Final Fantasy into an action-orientated role-playing game, it's the sort of game that sounds like a licensing nightmare, especially when even games like Disney Infinity have to keep their worlds separate due to "licensing issues". The third main entry in the series (but actually eighth game in total), Kingdom Hearts III may have been announced back in 2013, but relatively little has been heard about it since - until now, as this year's biennial D23 Expo, a Disney fan festival extravaganza held in the US, has brought with it some interesting news.
Each Kingdom Hearts game sees you and your party travelling into various Disney worlds, where it's up to you to right the wrongs of the various Heartless enemies who've ran riot through everything from Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland, to Tarzan and Mulan, to Pirates of the Caribbean and TRON. Each new game brings with it new worlds, new favourite characters and new enemies - and it looks like the upcoming Kingdom Hearts III will be no exception. Following on from the announcement that Disney's Rapunzel-inspired adventure, Tangled, would be making an appearance in the new game comes the news of another, rather different world - that of Big Hero 6.
Seeing as there's no screens of the Big Hero 6 world yet, here's one of the Tangled land. Look familiar?
Set in the city of San Fransokyo, an imaginary hybrid of San Francisco and Tokyo, Big Hero 6 follows the adventures of a group of brainy scientists-turned-super-heroes as they investigate the death of leading man Hiro's brother, Tadashi. Joining forces with the podgy healthcare robot his brother left behind, Baymax, scaredy-cat man-mountain Wasabi, girly chemistry mastermind Honey Lemon, 'strong female character' GoGo and the superhero-obsessed Fred, it's a tale of a rag tag bunch of normal folks turned superheroes, who have to pool their abilities to solve the mystery of Hiro's brother's demise. The Kingdom Hearts III world of San Fransokyo, however, looks set to pick up where the film left off, with the Big Hero 6 gang having become the city's go-to band of superheroes for when things go bad.
Diagnosis: evil.
In terms of what this means for the game though, details are pretty scant - a piece of artwork shows Kingdom Hearts protagonist, Sora, flying through the skies on the back of Baymax, brandishing his traditional Keyblade weapon at another, dark-coloured, more evil-looking version of Baymax himself, suggesting some kind of involvement with the Heartless enemies. Roy Conli, the producer for Big Hero 6, explained at a recent D23 event that he sees many parallels between the animated film and the overarching (and rather convoluted and confusing) Kingdom Hearts story, saying that "Big Hero 6 is such a special film for me - and we always made sure that each action sequence had a very special meaning. The themes in Kingdom Hearts and Big Hero 6 match very well. For instance there's friendship, really important to both stories, and then of course light over darkness.".
But as awesome as a Big Hero 6 world in Kingdom Hearts III is, what we really wanted to know was a release date for the game - a three-quel which has been rumoured for some ten years now - but there was no such luck. All we know at the moment is that the game is 'now in development' and will hit the Playstation 4 and Xbox One at some point in the relatively near future (we hope!). So - on a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your excitement?
