This is really fantastic news -- we talked about it briefly on the latest episode of the podcast (#88), but with all their recent announcements (Deus Ex, Star Ocean 5, and Dissidia) and their in-progress games (FFXV, KH3, new Tomb Raider, FFXIV, and so on), they have a lot they can show this year. Committing to their own conference rather than just making appearances at others' and the showfloor tells me they're going to be showcasing a lot at E3.

I still have my doubts as to what capacity KH3 will appear in if it does at all, but this does bode well.

I'm curious to see what direction they'll take with the conference itself. I always enjoy Ubisoft's conference even though I'm not a fan of their games simply because Aisha Tyler is such a charismatic host. Sony's are really fun to watch too, and even Microsoft has stepped their game up recently. But with Square, I have no idea.

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Whats better than a Square Enix E3 conference? How about the same conference on your birthday! I swear if they go and announce a release date/window for KH3 i will consider it the best birthday present ever. I'll even be happy if they show us some footage too

They'll definitely still make some appearances in the Microsoft/Sony conferences. I mean Ubi still do every year whether it's Far Cry or Assassin's Creed, they feature it in those 2 conferences aswell as their own.
Rise of the Tomb Raider will be a huge example to that, as it'll be MS's way of gloating that they have it exclusive for a while (plus it's always been them showing Tomb Raider since the reboot)

As for what they'll show in their own conference...Just Cause 3, Deus Ex and RotTR are the givens. Maybe something on FFXV, and what's to come in the future of FFXIV.

Star Ocean 5 and Dissidia are in the "possible but not as likely to feature this soon" section for me, it'll be great if they're talked about but wouldn't be surprised if they weren't.

As for KH3...they have to give us something, they said at the private KH2.5 events when they showed the early footage that more news would come this year, D23 Japan might aswell not be classed as this year when it's in November so leaving it all the news til then would be silly. So I'd expect something, even if it was "So here's everyone's new outfits for KH3!!". Though they could also say what that smartphone entry is here too.

Welp, looks like I'm not going. Wisconsin and California are a little too far apart and too expensive to fly and/or drive over there. Not gonna get over $1,000 to book a round trip flight for 2 people (me and one of my parents since I'm not 25 and would need them to get a car to rent). Plus the cost of a hotel, food, tickets, and whatever other entertainment would have me in debt for the next 5 years. Not even $9 an hour will take me there before June. :(

E3 tickets are hella expensive and it's tough to get into the conferences. If you wanted to go for the floor show stuff that's cool, but if it was only the SQEX conference you wanted to see in person then there wasn't much hope anyway unfortunately. That said, it's still pretty fun to watch streams of the conferences!

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Nah I've just always wanted to see what it was like in person since streams only show so much. And with the hope of a little Kingdom Hearts 3 news being there, I started looking at pricing just to see how much it would cost. I only made it to the plane tickets and hotel before I said "Nope! That's not gonna happen!" before clicking away.

Please, Square...oh pretty please. Make FFXV and KHIII for PC. You would be a fool not to port FFXV to PC with it's beautiful graphics and it would be hella easy to port KHIII to PC with Unreal Engine 4 at its side. PLEASE OMG.