Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts III, Square Enix, tetsuya nomura

Is Tetsuya Nomura Going To Be The New Hideo Kojima?

Published Mon, 17 Jul 2017 21:45:25 -0500

Game director and Square Enix legend, Tetsuya Nomura had a pretty exciting weekend at D23 where he spoke with several members of the games press. This latest bit of scrounged interview comes to you through GameSpot, but I'm not just here to give you news you've already seen.

Talking about the delay in the release of Kingdom Hearts III, Nomura was quick to deny allegations that the delay in the game's release is on him.

"A lot of people have been mentioning and making it sound like 'Oh, Nomura's taking too much time,' and it hurts," Nomura said, through a translator.

"There was a decision made to change to an external [engine]…Unreal Engine 4," he said. "So we switched over to that. Unfortunately there was a bit of time that needed to be rewinded and started over. So there was a bit of a setback there, but it was a decision that the company had to make, so it was inevitable."

He went on to say, "I wanted to emphasize that it wasn't a problem on our development teams," he said. "It just happened that way, and there were some decisions that the company had to make, and it just didn't work out for certain timings that we were hoping to hit."

"It's kind of out of my hands," he added. "I mean, yes, time has passed. But it's out of my hands."

Which, okay,is not as bad as Kojima's infamous split with Konami, but it does represent a growing trend in games of a disconnect between the top executives and the game designers themselves. Perhaps because they're using an outdated model of production, perhaps because of labor costs to have larger development teams.

And it is worth noting that Kingdom Hearts III is not the only Square Enix project with Nomura's name attached. It is the project thats taken the longest, however, and has been in development hell for about a decade or more, at this point.

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