corfidbizna

Man, I was just at Disneyland Anaheim in November and I could only find the Black Coat Mickey ∏_∏

No Re:coded! ∏_∏ My vote's for III for sure, but… folks, pretty soon Kingdom Hearts III will have existed for a year! And Valve is making a new Half Life game! What is the world coming to?

Sshhhhh… (As a fan project I've been working on recreating Re:coded in Unreal Engine 4, focusing on the System Sector segments and the stat matrix, etc. and featuring a semi-original scenario. Despite that I find Re:coded to me by favorite as well, I've honestly never interfaced with the avatar system since I have no friends ∏_∏ but that's interesting that you bring it up. I'll have to look in to that.)

Hm… I wonder if they'll do all chapters one at a time or if Chapter 0 is special?

Y'all can read it in English now in KH13's manga gallery~

In addition, the Master of Masters shares Noctis' voice actor in both English and Japanese. If true, it's an additional example of a Final Fantasy character having a Kingdom Hearts-ish instance (Reno / Axel). If Noctis is a more polished version of the Final Fantasy XIII-Versus protagonist, then Yozora is something similar. Plus, there's that interview from 2013 where Nomura said the following: "Do you know the name Sora mean the “sky”, in japanese and Noctis, his family name is Caelum which mean sky as well so basically, Noctis mean “night sky”, so they are kind of complete opposites to each other. There is a reason why I named these characters as opposites." Plus, there's that KH easter egg in FFXV where Prompto mentions a video game featuring magical key that can unlock any door. And in the Toy Story world, Sora (or rather Yozora) is from a video game. Basically, too many coincidences for me. But mostly its the voice actor thing.

This means that Lea and Riku are the only two [good guys] who have seen both Ventus and Roxas. Sora doesn't know what Ven looks like after all….

Elfdemon_'s statement is accurate in terms of why it happened, but if you're also curious of how: There are three components to a person: heart, mind / will, and body. You need any two to exist, since the two would be able to kinda compensate for the third. When Xehanort split Ventus into Ventus & Vanitas, Ven kept the body and the light half of the heart, and Vanitas kept the will and the dark half of the heart. Since 1.5 < 2, neither of them were able to adequately hold on to existence and were fading away. Enter Sora, who connected his heart to Ven's and consequently Vanitas' also. Ventus, who was missing a 'will,' got a template for a will from Sora, which is why he acts like Sora. If you consider Ven a four-year-old in a teenager's body (since that's effectively what he is), some of his behavior makes more sense. Vanitas, who was missing a 'body' (according to the novel he looked like a Neoshadow with red eyes until this point), got a template for a body from Sora, which is why he looks like Sora. However, his body is still made of Darkness like how a Heartless' is. An implication of this is that Vanitas' personality is likely closer to the original Ventus' than the current Ven (albeit perhaps a little more darkness-centric).

When I first saw these screenshots I was expecting them to be fake, but the more I nitpicked the more evidence I found to lend to them being real. The first thing I'd like to mention is that I use Unreal Engine 4 as part of my profession / schooling on a regular basis, and I can say especially after these new screenshots that if someone faked this they put it a lot of effort and really, *really* did their homework. Firstly, the HUD: UE4's idea of source control is a bit old-fashioned in that it can't have two people working on the same asset without getting really confused since UE4 uses binary assets instead of something like XML. What you tend to do instead is have a work-in-progress version of an asset that has all the functionality you need that the developers interact with while the people / person in charge of the asset in question works on the actual version. This would explain the old-style HUD and in particular the "temporary" kanji next to Donald and Goofy's icons. Secondly, Mike and Sully: The most recent Monsters, Inc. game I could find assets for online do in fact contain 3D assets for Mike and Sully that could be traced or adapted to UE4. However, the models I found contain inaccuracies relative to the movie that the models featured in these screenshots do not contain those inaccuracies. Thirdly, the particle effects: KHIII's particles have a fairly distinct look to them, and while one could theoretically recreate them by guessing and checking, the Fire particle system has both near-identical if not actually identical post-processing effects, particle distribution, and correct interactions with the floor. Fourthly, Sora and co.'s animations: There are various tools one can use to extract previous Kingdom Hearts game's animation. While none of the leaked Monsters, Inc. world contains actual footage, it's difficult to tell for sure. However, these animations would likely not work if put directly in UE4 and would have to either be nearly completely re-worked, retargeted to a new rig, or rotoscoped—all three methods are time-consuming and annoying. Plus, in the screenshot with Mike and Sully staring at Sora in a dim-lit room (that has 45 fps for some reason) Sora is in the middle of the animation where he is dismissing his Keyblade, going from combat stance to normal standing. This particular behavior has only been seen in KH2.8 by Aqua, whose combat and idle stances are different and don't have this frame in the middle, meaning Aqua's animation set hasn't been copy-pasted here. This frame showing up in a screenshot is not the kind of thing you'd do on purpose, it's the kind of thing that would happen incidentally. Fifthly (I've never had to count this high in this system, is this right?), the newly leaked environments: Sure, the lobby itself is fairly simple and could be recreated with relative ease. However, it is eerily accurate, and the surplus of new environments from the more recent leak mean the amount of effort a faker or group of fakers would have had to go through to make that many environments look that good while matching KHIII's art style AND being accurate to Monsters, Inc. (where applicable) would be enormous. Sixthly, Sora and co.'s clothing: People have recently started to gain access to KH2.8's models and have consequently been able to have access to UE4 KH models. However, last I checked, Sora, Donald, and Goofy had not been found and if they had they would not include Sora's KHIII jacket / gloves as seen in these screenshots. Either these were painstakingly recreated down to the normal map or they're legit. Lastly, the developer notations on the screenshots: Likely what these screenshots are is one or more developers showing others different aspects of the levels, environment, shaders, sections where frame rate drops, triangle count issues, use of the command line to gather data, etc., hence the notations. I've put my copy of UE4 into Japanese localization temporarily to look up some of these stats to make sure they appear the same as in these screenshots and the ones I could recreate do in fact use that wording. Right down to the "lighting needs to be rebuilt" message being in English for some reason. Furthermore, the triangle count, shader complexity viewer, texture cache size, memory usage, etc. are all within reasonable bounds for a AAA game. While this doesn't necessarily lend to legitimacy, this does lend to the annotations and on-screen stats themselves are likely not faked. …Long story short, if these screenshots are indeed fake, whoever made them is skilled enough to have been working on KHIII for over three years.

/\ This is indeed the case. Another interesting thing to note in the related discrepancy in the English-Japanese dialogue in that once Ganon is defeated, Zelda says that "Ganon is gone for now" but the same line in Japanese is a more vague "the threat of Ganon has passed." The confusion in these lines could just be a case of human error in translation, but another commonly interpreted implication is that Ganon's insistence to self-revive created Dark Beast Ganon and that defeating him in that form will put and end to him since he went all-out.

No Keyblade change, Donald & Goofy whenever possible, no summons, and no accessories are my normal runs… ¬_¬

If Hiro's power is that three-axis rotational-head 3D printer he's got, then I'm down for that.

Since it will be revealed in the long-awaited Kingdom Hearts III, I bet it's going to be Half-Life 3.