Kingdom Hearts 3 director 'reconsidering' simultaneous worldwide releases after leak

Tetsuya Nomura, director of Square Enix's long-running Kingdom Hearts series, has said that he's 'reconsidering' simultaneous worldwide releases for future projects, following the Kingdom Hearts 3 leaks that occurred last year.

Footage of the game's title screen, install screen, and more appeared online in December, after an individual began selling copies of Kingdom Hearts 3 via the Facebook Marketplace. Fan communities immediately placed a lock-down on the illicitly acquired footage, in order to avoid spoilers, and Nomura was prompted to release a statement reassuring players that the "biggest spoilers" weren't currently available in the game.

Now, in an interview with Famitsu (translated by Siliconera), Nomura has shared his feelings on the leak - which, he said, ultimately amounted to four copies of the game from a single source. "The only thing that really disappointed me about everything," he explained, "is that it brought sad thoughts to people who were looking forward to Kingdom Hearts 3."

According to Nomura, the risk of such an incident is higher when simultaneous worldwide releases are involved and, as a result of the Kingdom Hearts 3 leak, he "can't help but reconsider what I'll do for my next games, including simultaneous worldwide releases of physical copies at the very least."

In more positive news, Nomura also offered some advice for those looking to unlock Kingdom Hearts 3's "biggest spoilers", the epilogue and secret movie, after releaese.

The epilogue video will arrive as a download next week, on January 30th, and can only been viewed once players have completed the main game and seen the ending. The secret movie, meanwhile, is scheduled to release on January 31st, and can be unlocked by photographing Mickey-shaped "lucky marks" around the world in-game.

According to Nomura, this time translated by Kotaku from the same Famitsu interview, the number of lucky marks required to view the secret movie depends on the selected difficulty. The harder the difficulty, it seems, the fewer the number of marks required. "For Proud," he explained, "only a few is okay, and even Standard isn't that strict, I think."

Kingdom Hearts 3 comes to Xbox One and PS4 next week, on January 29th, 13 years after the launch of Kingdom Hearts 2. Eurogamer is yet to review the game and we explain why here.