TGS 2007: Three New Kingdom Hearts in Development

...And they're all for portables. Which is and isn't a surprise for various reasons. Let's look into what exactly the deal is here.

Square Enix is, by now, well known for its attachment to "polymorphic content", which they believe makes their games more accessible (even though games from polymorphic franchises are not necessarily multiplatform). What the company did with Final Fantasy VII is indicative of what they have in mind for the future of Kingdom Hearts.

Not surprising then, that two of the new Kingdom Hearts games are on DS and PSP, and the third is for mobile phones. Sound crazy? You bet. But hey, development times are lower, cheaper and raise (more) funds for Square to invest in the development of their bigger titles for home systems, one of which will undoubtedly be a new Kingdom Hearts game.

More surprising than the fact that all three new games are portable is the fact that Birth by Sleep, the teaser trailer for which is extremely popular among Square fans, is not the next major iteration of the franchise on PS3, but instead, a PSP game. Say the lads from IGN:

On display were trailers for Kingdom Hearts Coded for mobile, Kingdom Hearts 358 / 2 Days for DS, and Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep for PSP. No specific release dates were given for any of the titles, save for a "work in progress" text flashed at the end of each trailer.

Story details were sketchy, but it appears Birth by Sleep will be set in "the distant past," according to text in the trailer. 358 / 2 (called 358 over two), whose title, said Square, will apparently make sense once you play the game, will take place somewhere around the events of Kingdom Hearts 2. Coded appears to be set somewhere during the course of the first KH and its sequel, indicated in the trailer with a line of text reading "time has gone by." The overall timeline is a bit muddled, though, something a Square representative admitted to while we were asking for further explanation.

Coded's gameplay had Sora running around various dungeons filled with floating red and black blocks. During battle it's possible to engage a "debugging" mode to clear away the blocks, but their exact nature and implications with regard to gameplay were not clear. 358 / 2 had a darker thematic element than KH games of the past, with all the characters, including Mickey, draped in flowing black robes. It appeared to support some kind of four player mode, though it just may have been one human player with three AI companions. Birth by Sleep featured an unidentifiable playable character during the gameplay portions of the trailer.

A dark DS game? Interesting. And goddamn it, does this mean I'm going to have to buy a PSP? Because I'm one of the many who watched the Birth by Sleep teaser on loop for hours when it was first released. As usual, don't care about the mobile title. But the DS and PSP ones ... definitely something to keep an eye out for.