Kingdom Hearts 3 Leak May Mean an End for Square Enix’s Worldwide Retail Releases

Kingdom Hearts series director, Tetsuya Nomura, says that he is “reconsidering” simultaneous worldwide releases for his games.

Last month, four copies of Kingdom Hearts 3 were sold ahead of the game’s release, and despite the damage control and efforts from the community to shut down any leaks before they became widespread, the experience has given Tetsuya Nomura second thoughts about how to handle the launch of his games going forward.

“Because of what happened, the risks for a simultaneous worldwide release are high, for any games that I work on henceforth, currently I cannot help but reconsider a simultaneous worldwide release for at the very least the retail package version,” he said in an interview with Famitsu, via Kotaku.

Fans’ responses to this prospect haven’t been overly positive, but one thing the leaks haven’t managed to spoil is the title’s epilogue and secret movie, which weren’t included in the copy that was leaked. Both pieces of content will be post-launch downloads.

The epilogue will unlock on January 30, and the secret movie will be available on January 31.

To view the epilogue, players will need to have completed the game and seen the ending.

The process to watch the secret movie is a bit more involved. According to Nomura, players need to snap photos of “lucky marks” shaped like the iconic Mickey Mouse logo, that are peppered throughout the game with Sora’s selfie device.

Nomura explained that the number of lucky marks players need to take photos of varies depending on the difficulty level they’re playing the game on.

The easier modes require more than the harder difficulties, with Beginner requiring pictures of all of them.

“For Proud, only a few [lucky marks] is okay, and even Standard isn’t that strict, I think,” he said, although he didn’t divulge the exact numbers.

Kingdom Hearts 3 launches Tuesday, January 29, on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Be sure to check out our review, and don’t forget to catch up on the series’ story so far to prep for release.

Shabana is a freelance writer who enjoys JRPGs, wine, and not finishing games. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.