Tetsuya Nomura explains the world of Kingdom Hearts IV - and addresses realistic Sora

It's been a busy week for Kingdom Hearts fans - and now it's capped off with a new interview with series boss Tetsuya Nomura, where the franchise's creative lead explains some things about the newly-announced Kingdom Hearts IV. 

Much as with comments made to fans during a fan Q&A event at the KH anniversary event in Tokyo, Nomura used the interview to clear up some fan questions about the elements of KH4 shown in the game's first trailer - plus tease all-new pieces of information. 

Probably the most interesting new piece of the interview are some comments made by Nomura about Quadratum, the world we see Sora in during the KH4 trailer - a realistic land that largely resembles our own world, and comes with a 'realistic' design of KH protagonist Sora that's more in line with the look of recent Final Fantasy games than the more cartoony KH style.

"From Sora's point of view, Quadratum is a world on the other side of his own world and reality: a fictional world," Nomura told Famitsu, in comments translated by the team over at KHInsider. "However, from the point of view of the inhabitants of Quadratum, their world is the real one, and the place Sora and his friends hail from is the other side, the fictional world."

In relation to this, Nomura suggests that the game's theme will be directly related to this - "something akin to the 'contrast between people from different positions'."

One topic of fan discussion - and concern - was the new-look Sora, who had a more realistic look and even ditched those signature oversized feet for totally normal looking sneakers. While many also expected this was simply due to KH's art style switches from world to world, some were worried this was Sora's default look for KH4. Nomura also spoke on this, confirming that this look is simply due to the nature of Quadratum, linking the revelation to teaser footage of Donald and Goofy searching for Sora in another world, the trailer's stinger.

"Donald and Goofy are looking for clues to Sora in the original world," Nomura explains. "Everything you saw in the trailer before the title appeared is from Quadratum, and Sora will look realistic there, but if he returns to the original world, then the shaders will make him look like Donald and Goofy."

So there you have it - big shoes confirmed, at least when Sora returns to his original world.

Nomura confirmed some other small pieces of information in the interview, some of which overlap with things revealed in the fan Q&A:

• The trailer's battle command menu features a new command, 'Build'. This is part of a new piece of the battle system based around the concept of Destruction & Reconstruction, and more information on this will be revealed later.
• The big drill-style move seen in the trailer is a Reaction Command, aka a QTE. These were in KH2 but ditched for KH3 - but they're back for the 4th game. 
• The area we saw in KH3 content that looks like Shibuya is within Quadratum, but this Shibuya is unrelated to the Shibuya of The World Ends With You; they're different worlds.