Kingdom Hearts III’s Epilogue and Secret Movie Will Be Added January 30 and 31

I’ve pretty much stopped checking Kingdom Hearts III news to avoid spoilers, but this is the kind of news I still want to know ahead of time: when the epilogue and secret movie will be available.

Now, some people are making a big deal out of this announcement, but they actually revealed they were going to do this quite a while ago.

Nomura mentioned the idea at least as far back as September, during the Stage Show at TGS.

When asked if Kingdom Hearts III would have a secret movie, Nomura said yes, but that he was trying to think of a way to release it so that spoilers wouldn’t appear online.

After the full game was leaked in December, Nomura released a message that repeated this point:

The game’s epilogue and secret movie, which are the biggest spoilers in this game, are planned to be released at a later date just in case, so they will not be shown before the game’s release.”

So this shouldn’t be a huge shock… but since lots of people are only learning about the news now, it’s important to repeat that the full game and its ending are available on the disk. These are an epilogue and a secret movie held back so they wouldn’t be spoiled.

(Based on the epilogues and secret endings in previous Kingdom Hearts games, it will probably tease the next saga in some way.)

Anyway, the schedule has been revealed:

• January 29 – Data fixes and the Memory Archive (story recap videos)
• January 30 – Epilogue
• January 31 – Secret Movie

The epilogue can be viewed after you finish the game and see its ending. The secret movie can be viewed after you finish the game and see the ending while meeting certain criteria, which will be different depending on the difficulty level you played on.

Note the fact that you have to see the ending to watch the epilogue. That must mean they consider the epilogue separate from the actual ending of Kingdom Hearts III.

Anyway, unlike the Spyro situation, this doesn’t bother me too much. I appreciate their reasons for doing it, the full game is completely playable without the download, and finding a video online is much easier than finding a way to download a game (in the case of people with no/slow Internet).

I’m excited for Kingdom Hearts III, and I’ll be looking forward to the epilogue and secret movie once I finish. How do you feel about the latest news?