Kingdom Hearts III Makes an Unreal Change

While it's been all quiet on the Eastern front with Kingdom Hearts III lately, a Famitsu interview with series creator Tetsuya Nomura has turned up an interesting piece of information.

Nomura says that, for "various reasons," development of Kingdom Hearts III has switched to Epic's Unreal Engine 4. As VG24/7 points out, this is an odd turn of events considering how well Square Enix's in-house Luminous Engine has looked in tech demos. Could this be an indication on how the in-house engine is shaping up? While we didn't know for sure that KH3 was using the Luminous engine, what other engine could it have been using?

Most importantly, Nomura says that despite some rendering issues that Epic Games is helping to smooth out, the development schedule for the long-awaited Kingdom Hearts III is still on schedule and that things are moving well. That's nice to hear, but Kingdom Hearts fans have been waiting too long for this game as it is (hence their reactions at the reveal), so telling them "everything's still cool" without an indication as to when the wait may finally end doesn't help them.

Hopefully 2015 will be the year of Kingdom Hearts III, but we probably won't know for sure until E3.