[Darkness 4 Hire]

To mark the merger of Square and Enix into a single super-entity, Reuters has posted an interview with the new company's president, Youchi Wada. Within it, he discusses such topics as the continued use of subcontractors to the old companies under their new umbrella, Square-Enix's preferences towards genres, and the coming financial plans of the fledgling company. More importantly, however, he also commented quite clearly on Square-Enix's plans for the Kingdom Hearts series, as well as others. Specifically, he said, "Although there are still some remaining negotiations with Disney on the matter, we will release a sequel to Kingdom Hearts and make it, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest into three pillars of the company." Considering that the first Kingdom Hearts sold roughly 3,150,000 copies worldwide, it had been suspected for some time that a sequel was on the horizon, just never confirmed.

In addition to talk of the pillar franchises of the company, Wada also went on to lay out the production plans of Square-Enix for the coming years. Within 2003, Wada stated that Square-Enix will try to produce roughly 20 titles for market and a similar number in the coming years. This would be comparable to the total number of games produced by the companies while independent, which came to a grand total of nineteen games for the 2002 fiscal year. Also, among these games, they are hoping to have at least one "mega-hit" per year which may be alluding to the release cycle for their three pillar franchises.

Source: RPGamer.com

What i get from this is that, square enix is going to use Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest its 3 main series. What make me wonder on how they will do that with KH, because from what i heard KH2 is going to be an direct sequel to KH! Which means the same characters and what not. And using the same characters in a series would become very boring. So i'm quite intrested in the way square enix will handle this.

Please share your thoughts......