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[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......

[kupoartist]

I would think that a Kingdom Hearts sequel would be much the same - keep the core characters (Sora, Kairi, Riku, Donald, Goofy and perhaps some of the people who help a fair bit - like Squall) and then fill in around there with unused characters from Disney, FF and possibly even other Squaresoft and Enix titles. For many Japanese people, Dragon Quest is a pretty integeral series... not that anyone in Europe ever got to play it...

[legion]

If any of you saw the "secret trailer" in Kingdom Hearts, it's been pretty obvious there was going to be a sequel. However, it's great news that it will become a series.

It's hard to speculate how the series will play out, but it makes sense to me that the sequel to Kingdom Hearts would continue on where the first left off, with the same characters. After that, maybe it will continue the same "story", just with different characters and NPC's.

Anyway, thanks for posting that. It's pretty tight.

[jmills726]

i cant wait for KH2 to come out. i wonder what cartoon charactors they will have in this one??? it is going to be interesting.

[David]

I think it be great, like having same charaters but having them as adults, young adults or teens. It's just cool, with new Squaresoft games we will have a cool KH game. Like having Sora older and yadie yadda.

[Vic Viper]

Disney Confirms Kingdom Hearts 2 Is In Development

During a press conference held at the Games Convention 2003 in the east German city of Leipzig, Disney consumer product chairman Andy Mooney apparently confirmed that Kingdom Hearts 2 was indeed in development at Square Enix. This would be the first official confirmation following months of relative silence and uncertainty regarding a sequel to the highly popular collaboration between Disney and Square, which has sold more than 3.3 million copies worldwide to date. So far, Square Enix president Youichi Wada, while expressing his intention to turn Kingdom Hearts into a blockbuster series a la Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, had repeatedly mentioned negotiations with Disney were ongoing. Asked about a sequel to his hit title, character designer and director Tetsuya Nomura was even more tight-lipped a few months ago. According to Mooney, the company will officially unveil the title at the upcoming Tokyo Game Show.

A standard development cycle provided, Kingdom Hearts 2 will most likely not be available in Japan before late 2004.

rpgfan