Kingdom Hearts III, Final Fantasy VII Remake still a while off
Neither game is close to being finished, says director of both titles Tetsuya Nomura.
Millions of gamers have waited for over a decade for a remake of Final Fantasy VII and a true sequel to Kingdom Hearts II. Well, gamers, your wait will not abate any time soon.
Tetsuya Nomura, the director of both Final Fantasy VII Remake and Kingdom Hearts III, said both games are still a while away from hitting store shelves.
"I apologize that the wait will be a bit longer for Kingdom Hearts III and Final Fantasy VII Remake," Nomura told Japanese magazine Famitsu, according to Gematsu.
"We're steadily progressing on production," Nomura said of the Final Fantasy remake, while noting Kingdom Hearts III still has "some way to go."
This is bad news for those who are eagerly awaiting the titles, as Square Enix typically takes a while to make games even at the best of times. Hopefully it won't be another fiasco like Final Fantasy Versus XII -- a game that was announced in 2006 for PS3, changed to Final Fantasy XV in 2013 and finally released in 2016.
After years of spinoff and bridging titles, Kingdom Hearts III was announced at E3 2013. The last Kingdom Hearts game designed from the ground up for a console was Kingdom Hearts II, which was released all the way back in 2006.
Meanwhile, Square Enix first teased a remake to Final Fantasy VII, one of the most popular role-playing games ever, at E3 2005. It showed a "tech demo" of what the game's opening sequence would look like on the then-upcoming PlayStation 3. The remake was made official 10 years later at E3 2015.
Kingdom Hearts fans will at least be able to whet their appetite for Kingdom Hearts III (again) with Kingdom Hearts 2.8, a collection of games coming to the PS4 this month. It includes Birth by Sleep -- A Fragmentary Passage, a short game built on the same engine as Kingdom Hearts III.