#genuinely had a REALLY good time. and it’s fun to know nomuras other recent works because like.

[planet4546b]

finished ff7 remake. so epic had fun smiled even. my hatred for game remakes vanishes like sun burning off a morning fog and i say Wow so cool :)

[true-intha-blu]

I propose this simple Question

First:  why I ask this. Since the infancy of the KH fandom all the way back from KH1, I noticed this simple trend one that picked up tremulously after kh2. No this has nothing to do with shipping. Also to note; I have genuine curiosity if anyone else notices this and this is from my perspective and experience with dealing with the Kingdom hearts fandom. Others may have very different accounts but others (that I have asked) have indeed noticed this as well in my own view. I am not aiming to stir up hate or discourse. I aim for peaceful fandoms. However, this subject is something I see no one ever addresses and well... maybe breaking a status quo or ‘unspoken rule’. I hope this can be a reasonable discussion where I can learn another perspective or some people may notice it and just go... “Oh yeah. That is a thing.” To which the question at hand. “Why does R*ku always have to be cool?”

(Disclaimer I do not hate this character. This question is not hateful. It is not anti or whatever. I mean exactly what I say. I will not be tagging this in the R*ku tab to prevent any misunderstandings. I ask others do the same. Anyone who reblogs this with hate is in no way associated with me.)

I will state the positive traits about R*ku. He has had the greatest character arc out of all the Kingdom Hearts Characters. A great redemption arc from his lowest to blooming into practically a whole new person in his own struggle against his KH1 self. He’s loyal to his friends. Smart. Gets along with Mickey and Yen Sid. Mellow. Saved Kairi and Sora. Knows what he has done. He’s honest and shares his concerns with others. Since KH2 he has always been trying to help Sora in the best of his ability. In acknowledgment of his misdeeds in CoM and Days is very good and we see a character who has genuinely f’d-up and his trying his best to move past that by helping his friends despite the limited resources offered to him. ^These are very good traits for a character to have. Any character. Besides his one time self in KH1, what else is there to him? What can be addressed as a flaw or criticism of him? (I approach characters as even though a character goes through a development arc, does not mean they are void of flaws. No one works like that. Not characters or actual people.) I say this. I love Sora and Vanitas in the Kingdom Hearts fandom. However, I am not afraid to draw them doing stupid or silly things and point out they have various of unfavorable flaws. Sora is utterly dense and I hate the fact how he was portrayed in DDD but I accept it and I will drag him along pointing out that fact. It is part of his character. He’s a dork (and not always in a good way). He impulsive and is kinda a mess of a human being. He's stubborn in the worse ways and volatile. Vanitas appears to be on the surface a straight up evil villain. As far as the games go, he is just utterly vile in his contempt for the characters and his actions have brought suffering and misery to various of characters. (though there may be other traits that could set for his own arc) (I still love them both) But note how none of these flaws listed above are ‘endearing’ or even remotely positive. They are problems, that hinder the characters and those around them. These are persistent traits even though both Sora and Vanitas have mellowed. Sora far more than Vanitas. I just do not see this done with R*ku. I rarely (they do exist but in comparison to the likes of Sora, Org XIII, even foretellers, or Roxas [who could be compared to be as “badass” as R*ku], its rarely ever there) I don’t see anyone talking about Riku doing dumb stuff. Being silly or being the butt of a joke or just not, not being good. Example of the latter:  When there was talk about Sora cooking in KH3, rarely did I see that, ‘oh, Sora learns how to cook and becomes very good at it’ and most I see ‘R*ku is already a fabulous cook’.... what about Kairi? What about even Lea? Aqua? There is no mention of these other characters being good at cooking. R*ku is usually A.) always the cooler looking one, or must be made to look cooler and B.) always be the better or best at something. I know that is kinda the thing in KH, that R*ku is talented and gifted as a person. As for the coolness factor, Nomura does this as well. Sora gets a keyblade, R*ku gets an edgier cooler keyblade with more details. Riku gets the powers of both light and darkness. R*ku gets the Keyblade Master title. R*ku gets actual growth in his body. He gets the more competent companion (Mickey). I am not saying these things are detractions or upsetting, they are just there and be defacto, cooler than other characters. He becoming edgier and emo was a good play on Normura because back in early 2005′s people thought that was cool and hot. Silver hair is automatically an attractive trait and western audiences love a person with a muscled body like R*ku’s. I don’t blame fans for being appealed to his character. But I suppose I am getting off-topic. Why do fans keep feeling compelled to make R*ku perfect? When people make fanart of him like say a monster form or pirate outfit, they always make it more detailed, edgier or just cooler than anyone else who would be drawn that way. He always looks more impressive than an original canonical design when other characters are drawn or written in ways that are not as impressive or equally the same to a canonical design/form/power. Has the cool wolf animal companion or the cooler weapon, the more detailed designs etc etc Even Axel who is a badass assassin can be silly or dumb-looking. Heck, they even did that in games. They made Axel failed and acknowledge it.  I see Aqua who is awesome in design and badass moments, be criticized for her flaws that persist and others who wish to see her have more moments of weakness even with what we have seen in 0.2 Xion who has had a great arc in Days (Character arcs don’t always have to be a positive development) doesn’t get the coolness factor. Roxas who is probably the second most popular character still is known as a goofy boy who thought he could fight heartless off with a stick. That’s hilarious. The most notable thing about R*ku recently that wasn’t cool or badass or edgy was his infamous “WHAT?” response to Mickey in Kh3. And that was one thing. Only really that. But how Mickey worded it, anyone would have done the same. And I noticed that people use what Mickey said “Aqua is like Sora’ is a way to poke fun at Sora by implying that Aqua is like a dense 15 year old. (Again these are just observations I have made over a decade worth watching the Kh fandom). In talks with other people who are Sora stans or other stans, there is nothing but a lot of talk about R*ku being really good about things. Being superior to Sora, or Kairi, or Aqua and Terra. Over Roxas.  Giving Axel two keyblades is never done, but people have given two to R*ku.  I get it, people who love characters like to do so much with them. I do the same. I just... never seem to regard the characters I love as perfect as others see R*ku. Also... I just don't see anyone criticizing him (I mean criticism in actual acknowledgment of his character and not hating on said character). Or taking about traits or flaws that are not endearing “He cares too much about his friends” is not really that bad of a flaw in consideration. A lot of people would prefer to have that over say... anger issues. What about the fact he falls back into following the orders of others or doesn’t often decide things for himself?...  What about Minor flaws? I just never see them in regards to these characters. Alright, so these are my observations I have made over... 14+ years of watching this fandom. And I want to ask, why do fans see him as such? Besides the only reason being for them is “I like him.” Has it just become such a normal thing to make R*ku better? Is he really that good of a character than he is so universally loved? Or is the backlash of actually criticizing R*ku and seeing that maybe, making him too perfect is... not doing favors for him? An arc is just that, an arc. Doesn’t mean a character is perfect or done with. Doesn’t mean those flaws that persisted in him, are gone.   Make your favorite character silly, or doing something very dumb (that does not even have to do with shipping), or put forth of what you would like to see improve in this character or express more about their flaws and their struggles. I love pointing out the negative traits in all my characters because I like seeing their struggle and how that makes them interact with new nuances in other characters. Maybe it's a running joke that R*ku is ‘Mr Perfect’ in the Kh fandom and I am just not seeing it. But it's daunting and just kinda rubs me the wrong way that all these characters in Kingdom Hearts have so many nuances to them and the one who has the best character arc so far in KH is regarded as... ‘Perfect’ I would like to know your opinion and if anyone else who is not a R*ku stan notice this, or is it just me and my own personal bias? (anything said above is in no way should ever be used to promote hate against R*ku or even bash him. In no way, I want to make others hate R*ku. I do not blame people who love this character to portray him in a superior way over everyone else. My address is that I just see this all the time. And I was wondering... why is it so widespread? Not even Axel who has a great redemption arc gets this.) (also another things is the whole sexgod R*ku that is also about however that may go into shipping and that I will not poke a stick at)

[nadziejastar]

What’s the relationship with Disney like? Disney’s attitude to games has changed in recent years to become focused on mobile and social games. Have you noticed their attitude change much?

The relationship with Disney has [remained] the same. Actually the contact person at Disney is still the same person from Kingdom Hearts 1, and Disney has given us lots of requests in terms of the Kingdom Hearts franchise and they did mention some smaller titles for other platforms, but our common, most important goal was to [complete] Kingdom Hearts 3. So it’s the same.

Oh, for sure. I get sad when I see Nomura’s old interviews. The above quote is from June 2013. He was so much more upbeat. KH3 actually had a plot back then, too. Sora would look for the ‘Key to Return Hearts’.  

Disney has changed tremendously since 2006. Obviously Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, totally different style of animation. How your relationship with Disney and its properties evolved over the past 10 years or so in the context of Kingdom Hearts? Tetsuya Nomura: I can say that it has actually been increasingly difficult to get approvals from Disney. That's mainly because in the past Kingdom Hearts titles, the creator wasn't around anymore or the team that used to create those titles wasn't there anymore. There was just this one person that we would just have to go to and they would approve it and we'd be fine and good to go. But because we've been featuring recent titles, they still have existing teams for existing creators that are still working in Disney and still working on a certain title. That feedback process just has been a little bit more difficult than before. And each team would have a different set of rules and guidelines and they would say different things, or they would look at different things. It's just been a little different that how it used to be because Kingdom Hearts is a bigger title than it was before. I think that whenever we would bring our previous titles, a lot of people at Disney, and this is my assumption, but I do assume that they probably didn't know what Kingdom Hearts was. They'd go, "What's Kingdom Hearts? I have no idea." But now that it's become a bigger title, a lot more people have been involved in than before. In that sense the relationship with Disney has changed quite a bit. Emotional changes I don't really know if there has been any changes emotionally for me. But at least physically I can say those were the changes that we had with Disney.

After Versus XIII got cancelled, he became a lot more negative in his interviews. This is from June 2018. Five years later. Around the same time as Versus XIII, BBSV2 got cancelled. And also his relationship with Disney changed. So in a way, even KH3 was kinda taken from him, like Versus XIII was. Nomura was trying to dodge the subject of his emotional changes toward the KH series, but there obviously were some.

You've grown up as a person and as a designer alongside the players and it's been so long since the last Kingdom Hearts was released. How has your perspective on making the game changed over time? Do you still have that passion for it? Or is it just like you feel more of a responsibility to people to make it and end it?

I'm getting older now, so my body really can't take all that difficulty anymore. When I was younger I was definitely more aggressive and I was the one pulling everyone forward, but now there's a lot more energetic staff around me who are more aggressive, so I feel like I'm more like a sage now. Like I'm in the sidelines just telling people what to do. The Kingdom Hearts series has become a huge title nowadays and back then it was more like I was making it secretively in the corner, but now that a lot more people are involved I do feel that it's not my title anymore, it's everyone's title. And just talking about all this … It actually kind of makes me really sad.

This is another interview from June 2018. He said that with all the people involved, KH3 wasn’t really his title anymore and it made him really sad. At this year’s E3, Kitase said that the FF7 Remake was the first game in a long time that Nomura has been really heavily involved with. So, it sounds like Nomura wasn’t as heavily involved with KH3 as he was with past KH games.

Kingdom Hearts means a lot of things to a lot of people. For some, it represents their childhood or it's a story about friendship. What does Kingdom Hearts mean for you?

It's probably the title that represents who I am. When I was a starting as a developer, like I wasn't an industry veteran yet, when I was creating Final Fantasy titles with Mr. Sakaguchi, the father of Final Fantasy, and at that time, he said that Final Fantasy is a game that has everything in it. I don't think that there are that many people left in Square Enix that have actually worked with him on Final Fantasy. Of course, Final Fantasy is still continuing on--they still are committing to push out titles. But when I started creating Kingdom Hearts, that was when I kind of had this time away from Final Fantasy. And of course, I am working on a Final Fantasy title right now, but it was at a time when I was not working on a Final Fantasy title, and I really wanted to realize what Sakaguchi-san said about Final Fantasy, that it is a game that incorporates everything, to Kingdom Hearts. So I brought that idea to Kingdom Hearts. Currently looking at the newer Final Fantasy titles, to be honest, I don't think it really incorporates that idea of having everything. So I think that Kingdom Hearts, to me, is a game that has everything in it.

Nomura actually said that Versus XIII was more of his preference than KH. He enjoyed working on it because it was a break from the super happy, always positive KH universe. 

Nomura: "Kingdom Hearts is not too realistic, but I do want my players to grasp a sense of reality from it as well. For example, I'm sure you had friends when you were young, a good group of friends, but as you grow older things change and it doesn't always stay the same." 

And I think that’s why Lea is (was?) my favorite KH character. Versus XIII was a “fantasy based on reality”. I got the sense that Nomura used Lea/Axel to inject a lot of himself and his preference for realism into KH, since he was so different from other KH characters. He was an adult with a dark backstory. He and his best friend were human lab rats. His best friend later became a sociopath and is possessed. But he longs for the times when they were innocent and happy. Axel was very complicated. I DID get that sense of realism Nomura wanted to convey in his character. That’s why I loved him so much. There was such genuineness in his dialogue.

But I think what Nomura was doing with him and Saïx was so subtle it went over most people’s heads and they couldn’t appreciate it. It sucks because the subtlety made it even better. He basically lived inside the world of his memories. But he hid all of that from everyone (even the player) by smiling. Because he knew happy-go-lucky kids like Roxas and Xion wouldn’t be able to understand him. He was the most realistic and human character for me. He had a dark backstory, but he was still charming, intelligent, and funny. He had many layers. It was devastating to see him get dumbed-down and turned into a caricature of himself in KH3. Flat comic relief whose dark backstory was totally stripped from him. Just like that...poof. Gone. Now it’s all about Retcon X.

October 2014

“If I had to pick, I am a person more on the dark side like Xehanort and co., I harness the burning anger in my heart into what I create,” “Kingdom Hearts 3 current development explodes very much in this sense.”

When I first saw this quote, I had no idea what Nomura meant by channeling his anger into KH3. After playing KH3, I finally understood. That’s why there was so much breaking the fourth wall. Axel was Nomura’s mouthpiece. He was basically acknowledging that the story was crap, like during the scene where he reunited with Ventus and was commenting about how stupid the whole situation was. That B.S. ending? The result of Nomura’s depression. Things aren’t the same anymore. They’ve changed. The whole game just felt like it was phoned in. Nobody who actually cared about the story would do what they did with Kairi and also Lea and Isa’s backstory. KH3 was just so depressing for me because of that. Reading Nomura’s interviews just made it sadder.

2018 Famitsu interview

Tetsuya Nomura's cats were included. He speaks of how his cats cheered him up when he was depressed and how they inspire his work on Kingdom Hearts 3. -The reason he got these cats: Our family really loved cats and dogs, so we always had them in the house. For this reason, when I got a little depressed I was recommended to get cats.

I was really looking forward to Versus XIII when it was announced. Everything about it just sounded so cool. The story was supposed to be the saddest FF, but it would still have fun and humor in it. It was going to be like a road-trip. Noctis’s family was involved in organized crime, like the Yakuza. I still remember the tagline that was a quote from Hamlet. “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Nomura said Noctis wasn’t going to be super serious like Squall. He was shy and awkward. Somnus is still an awesome song. The Noctis in the above picture just felt totally different from the Noctis in FFXV. They give off a completely different vibe. 

After I beat KH3, I was so disappointed with it, I started looking for a bunch of info on Versus XIII, since that game’s cancellation obviously influenced KH3 so much. I have seen a lot of stuff from people who claim to have leaked info about Versus XIII. I find this particular leak to be credible since the person correctly leaked the plot of FFXV six months in advance:

The game centered about death, ghosts and hallucination/dreams. Noctis killed the female protagonist before the game started but he didn't remember. Ardyn was Noctis ancestor and he was responsible of the crystals disappearing over time (the only one left was Lucis crystal). Regis died in front of Noctis because his bodyguards betrayed him. The protagonists had to leave the capital because their nation lost the war.

The game didn't focus on summons that much (they still existed) and instead there were actual gods which didn't appear physically. One of the gods was the main antagonist of the first FF game. Each nation was inspired by a different capital of the world. The empire was using ghosts as weapons. Ravus wanted to kill Noctis for having killed her sister. The game ended in another dimension which was supposed to be their version of the after-life.

This sounds a lot like what Nomura would do with a story, and is consistent with the info and trailers about Versus. I think I remember one where people were being turned into ghosts/monsters. The goddess Etro was supposed to be worshiped in Lucis. And I remember one of the things that interested me most about Versus XIII was that Noctis was able to see some light in the sky that others couldn’t, and it was due to having had a near-death experience as a child. That sounded SO cool.

I can believe the whole Stella being a ghost thing, because Tabata said they had to create Luna because Stella just wouldn’t make sense in the new story. The dreams/hallucinations part sounds cool to me, but is probably thought of as being “too weird” for a mainstream game. Also, the fact that the game ended in the after-life stood out for me. KH3 already had something similar with the Realm of Sleep. But they tried to connect it more with the after-life, even though Nomura previously said there was “no concept of death” in KH. This made me think he was still hung up on Versus while making The Final World. 

I definitely think that the original Versus XIII would have been a much more interesting game, since Nomura was SO passionate about it. The script was finished, too. It was jsut scrapped. The voice actor of Noctis, Suzuki Tatsuhisa, mentioned during the release date live stream that he still has the Versus scripts at home that he reads on his days off. And he said he couldn’t figure out how to move from the Versus Noctis to XV Noctis and struggled to find middle ground. 

He said he had a hard time getting into the character towards the end of the game, so he had to re-do his lines from the middle of the story again a few times to get it right. The fact that he still reads the Versus scripts tells me that he was really disappointed when Versus became XV. It sounds like he enjoyed what Nomura/Nojima wrote a LOT more and had a hard time masking his displeasure.

I stand behind what Sakaguchi said about big budget games development: it’s not worth it anymore. But they are also very disorganized. The staff -200 souls- had to work when the story still wasn’t completely defined. In fact, this story kept changing every 3 months and the definitive delivery date for the game was for the end of 2014. ---Roberto Ferrari

Sadly, the big budget style of production seems to be at the root of why Square Enix’s console games have been so soulless. KH is not for everybody, but it was a series that was made with passion. I actually enjoyed the handheld KH games more than KH3 because they felt like Nomura was able to do what he wanted creatively, instead of feeling like it was made to appease a focus group. I would give up the super fancy graphics in a heartbeat to get KH0.5 and the original vision Nomura had for KH3.