Tetsuya Nomura: Kingdom Hearts III may not have dual audio due to disk space constraints

The Weekly Famitsu magazine's latest interview with Tetsuya Nomura signifies that the highly-anticipated Kingdom Hearts III may not have a dual audio option and DLC season pass, while also covering a bit about other Final Fantasy games such as Final Fantasy VII Remake.

After the release date for Kingdom Hearts III had been revealed, Famitsu asked Nomura how far the development has progressed. However, Nomura said that it's rather difficult to give a percentage on the progress. The reason is clarified right below.

There are various reasons but the one with the big influence would be the movie capacity. When you load cutscenes in real time, if it’s in the same scene you could just load a few data. But if you put in an entirely different scene like “meanwhile, at the same time,” you had to load that data from zero which makes the loading time very long.

In order to solve this, we turned some of the cutscenes into movies to reduce the loading time, but if the movies are being kept at high quality, the capacity ends up becoming very big. It’s much more than we have assumed.

The above reason caused the team to run out of disk space, so it would be very difficult for them to implement a Japanese & English dual audio option as they would have to include not only separate voices but also lipsync data. For the same reason, Nomura does not plan to have a Final Mix edition either, whereas the Final Mixes of the first two Kingdom Hearts games were released with English voices and Japanese subtitles.

Instead of a Final Mix edition, Nomura would rather consider providing game updates for KHIII through DLC. Although he couldn't give many details yet, he clarified that they would provide expansions to the gameplay instead of simply selling Keyblades with DLC. Kingdom Hearts III won't have a season pass either as each DLC will be sold separately.

Despite the above plans, Nomura would first prioritize finishing up the main story properly. When Famitsu asked if there are any plans to release a public demo on PlayStation Store or Xbox Live, Nomura replied that they do not have any plans for that since the method of producing a public demo is different than that of demo builds for media previews. However, he believes that there should be a demo build available in Japan at Tokyo Game Show this September.

Famitsu also digressed a bit to ask about other games being worked on by Nomura such as Final Fantasy VII Remake and Dissidia Final Fantasy. The next character to be added in Dissidia has been teased to be a female character from the latter half of numbered FF title who will make her debut in the Dissidia series. Based on the current pace of announcements for the game, Nomura believes that she should be revealed soon.

And when Famitsu asked about the progress on Final Fantasy VII Remake, Nomura had the following to say:

We’re currently measuring the timing to release the next information. We’ve already almost decided the direction before we switched to internal development, and the production is doing well. For the scenario, while we’re leaving intact the atmosphere of that time, we may also delve deeper into characters starting from the Avalanche members. It’s moving even more than I thought, so please rest assured and wait for the next information batch.

While Final Fantasy VII Remake still does not have a release date yet, Kingdom Hearts III is confirmed to be releasing for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on January 25 in Japan and January 29 in the West.