At D23 Expo 2015, the Disney Interactive team promised news on both Kingdom Hearts and Disney Infinity, but fans didn’t know that meant at the same time.
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Similar to the lightsaber “ultimate unlock” toy in Disney Infinity 1.0, the third version of the game will have a special weapon: the Keyblade from Kingdom Hearts.
“It’s our one more thing – we’re doing integration of Kingdom Hearts into Disney Infinity,” John Vignocchi, VP of Production for the game told ComicBook before the presentation. They invited Square-Enix’s Hashimoto-san onto the stage to share the reveal.
In addition to the Keyblade, and perhaps a sign of things to come, Disney Interactive gave out special costume change discs for their new Mickey character figure, which transform him into King Mickey from Kingdom Hearts, complete with custom animations and, when paired with the Keyblade unlock, looks like he’s straight out of that game.
“We made these only for the D23 Expo crowd. We will never make these costume change discs again. All the animations are from the game, it is so cool,” Vignocchi said.
Kingdom Hearts is one of the most requested properties for Disney Infinity, and they wanted to deliver, and planned out for quite awhile.
“Everyone keeps asking me about Kingdom Hearts. I’ve been alluding to a passion project that I’ve been working on for some time, and that’s what this is. We have had this planned out for about 8 months, with a lot of back and forth with our partners at Square-Enix,” Vignocchi said, meaning they’ve been planning this for about 6 months prior to really getting questions about the products having a merger of sorts. “A lot of people are confused about who exactly owns Kingdom Hearts, but it’s Disney – it’s developed in partnership with Square-Enix.”
When he approached those developers, he made sure to make this content that was “respectful to the brand.” The hope? Well, of course it’s to do more with the two. “Hopefully this leads to us doing more. We’ve had a lot of fun doing it, and I love Kingdom Hearts, so that’s the goal.”
