In an interview with VentureBeat, Kingdom Hearts series director Tetsuya Nomura elaborated on the reasons behind the choice to include The Caribbean into Kingdom Hearts III, answering several concerns about its status as a returning world.
The desire to include realistic characters based on live-action properties was a significant motivator for the development team, especially since these characters can be faithfully recreated within Unreal Engine 4, in far greater detail than ever before. Furthermore, the world design of The Caribbean lends itself well to interesting and varied gameplay. Nomura also explained why Kingdom Hearts III would be focusing on the plot elements of the third Pirates of the Caribbean film, At World’s End, rather than directly continuing the story with Dead Man’s Chest.
You can read Nomura’s comments from the interview below.
Q: So why go back to Pirates? Specifically, why the third installment in what is now a series of five films?
Nomura: It’s not that we’ve been avoiding the reappearance of worlds from our previous titles. They are reappearing as necessary. But for Kingdom Hearts III, one of our ideas or concepts was to try to have as many new worlds as possible. At the same time, I’ve always wanted to have at least one live-action world in Kingdom Hearts III. When we were looking at all these different live action titles, Pirates of Caribbean was one of the most interesting worlds, one that we thought we could create interesting gameplay around. There’s the underwater action and the ships. You can even be airborne. It covers land, sea, and air. I thought that would be a great opportunity, to use the Pirates of the Caribbean world.
Nomura: Another reason was, because we wanted to have more realistic characters in the live action worlds — even more realistic than before — we thought that the Pirates of the Caribbean characters were unique enough in their details that we’d be able to re-create it as closely as possible with computer graphics.
Q: OK, but why At World’s End?
Nomura: When you look at Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End, one is the setup for the other,” Nomura continued. “If we went with the second movie, then the story kind of ends in the middle. It doesn’t really make sense for us, because we’d have to end it in the middle as well. With At World’s End, I felt like there’s more dynamic action to it. Just looking at it from that perspective, it’s a better fit. I also wanted to show the battle with Davy Jones and make it as dynamic as possible, and to do that it had to be the third movie. It was just an easier fit overall.
Do you agree with Nomura's reasons for including The Caribbean in Kingdom Hearts III? What part of this interview is most interesting to you? Let us know in the comments below!
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