This bothers me--he really dodged the question. I'd be okay with him saying there needed to be spin-offs to set up the story for Kingdom Hearts III, but when people are vague like this I tend to assume it's for a reason (they're hiding something). Can't imagine what it could be (Square didn't want to end the Xehanort Saga too early, milk what they could out of it?).

Thanks Krowley.

It could be Producer problems as the likely scenario. Disney tends to milk things a lot, after all.

But I think Square might also be guilty of that, considering their current direction for this Lightning saga. And now even FFXV sagas and whatnot could just be jumping the shark.

Hmm, an interesting point that his "game creation philosophy" pinpoints inspiration from films. I feel it could explain some things, especially around the aspect of the presentation of a story. Obviously, Kingdom Hearts does have that movie style within it.

However, I feel the interview was little vague for me as well, so I'll try to take this a little lighter than the others.

It is not the answer we wanted, but I can see it.

There must have been a lot of discussing in KH.. Ps3 was harder to work with , everybody said so at the begining.. than they had to choose between keep it Playstation exclusive or not, the problem with Utada, problems with disney etc.. It is just more simple to make games for handles recycling the OST.

And even though I don't say it was all for nothing, most spin offs could be cut out, or shorttened ... I could live only with BBS (didn't play 3D).

Yeah, Square is having a lot of problems lately....

I could live without Re:Coded, even though it has good gameplay. But BbS, DDD and Days are the important ones in my opinion. COM's events are mostly explained in KHII anyways, And a lot of us aren't even interested in what happened to Jiminy's Journal....

It's good to hear a little more about KH3.
But when you think about it, some of the spin offs could have actually been a numbered Kingdom Hearts title; with a few modifications, of course. Stuff will happen in this game...
I also wonder as to whether we will hear some more soon about what will happen between Sora and Kairi. Nomura did mention that he was going to spend a bit more time building on their relationship in the next numbered title of KH than he did in previous games.

I don't consider CoM, Days, BBS and DDD to be "spin offs" those were all very important to the storyline...

what was the problem with Utada?

Disney allegedly didn't pay her enough and she's also stated its very difficult and tedious to make both a Japanese and English version of a song -- which is why Sanctuary/Passion and Simple and Clean/Hikari have been continually recycled.

I never really saw a point to that... A lot of anime songs don't get dubbed along with the anime, so I really don't think it would make a difference with a game?

I don't know why they force her to do it at all. I actually prefer Passion to Sanctuary, too. But I guess the game would appear a lot less friendly to Western audiences (which, as it is 50% Disney, isn't something they can just ignore as they would with more clearly JRPG titles, like Final Fantasy) if it were still in Japanese. You also have to consider that the games are opening up with these theme songs, so if someone who didn't know much about the series fired up the game and was smacked with a song in Japanese, it could set them off.

Anime is a different animal than video games, imo.

I would trade Days for COM (can't say about DDD, as I never played it). COM was planned since KH I, and has major characters that doesn't appear in other games in there.

Days is a game that if you play before KH 2 takes away the "surprise" flavor of playing KH 2 with Roxas and not Sora, and if you play after KH2 you already know the essential about Roxas so you don't care as much...

The Xion plot was only a overcomplication that they made to try justify the game, not to mention that horrible gameplay.
In the end the "indispensable" spin offs, are the ones that were planned before hand, BBS was planned to be a Playstation game before going to PSP also, could end up being numbered or something like that.