Thirteen years after the release of Kingdom Hearts II, the series will finally reach its conclusion when the long, long-awaited Kingdom Hearts III releases sometime next year. With the moment many have waited the majority of their lives for finally on the horizon, it’s no surprise that content would be found and leaked by hungry fans desperate for new info. Last week a host of screenshots made the rounds on the internet from an alleged developer build, revealing a world based on Monsters, Inc. and the presence of the “Unversed” enemies, which would have major story implications if true. Many have argued for the validity of this content, and yesterday, the leaks kept on coming.
Reddit user /u/Rum3637 claims that, in the course of researching the leaked screenshots, they “ran across the files that were supposedly leaked”—the rumored “2 TB’s of data in a FTP server” that has sourced these rumors—and found a list of names corresponding to certain worlds and areas players will visit in the game. While Rum3637 was apparently unable to download the files for proof, the specificity of their claims and similarities in their data to that of other Kingdom Hearts titles go a long way toward giving the post validity.
According to the report, the files contained abbreviations for the world titles and the names and assets of the included areas. Mentioned by Rum3637 are TS (Toy Story), RA (“Rapunzel,” or Tangled), FZ02 (Frozen), RG (Radiant Garden), DP (Land of Departure), HE (Hercules), PO (Winnie the Pooh), and DC (Disney Castle). The area names and assets are used to justify many of these assumptions—for example, HE features an asset named “Hercules doll,” PO has “honeypot” and “rabbithouse,” and FZ02 has a bevy of “Icicle” files. Additionally, “DP” was supposedly used in the internal files of Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep to denote the Land of Departure (per /u/ultimaspark), possibly validating the claim.
While an unsourced leak should always be taken with a heavy grain of salt, the amount of content described by Rum3637 and the way in which it matches up with information already known about Kingdom Hearts III gives these claims some weight. This isn’t a full world list—we already know that the Big Hero 6 world is included—but if these leaks are true, fans have a lot to be excited for.