Kingdom Hearts Producer Says Native Version For Switch Is Currently “Undecided”

Earlier this month, Square Enix and Nintendo announced that the Kingdom Hearts Trilogy would be making its way to the Switch, albeit as cloud versions.

Although this announcement was generally well received, many fans were disappointed that the games would be cloud versions as opposed to native ports. In a recent interview with NintendoLife, Kingdom Hearts series producer series producer Ichiro Hazama shared some of the reasons behind the decision, citing difficulties with storage capacity among others.

Nintendo Life: From an outsider looking in, we’ve seen other high-quality ports of classic Square Enix games like Final Fantasy X | X-2 run natively on Switch. So what was the reason to release the Kingdom Hearts series on Switch as Cloud Versions, instead of optimising them to run natively on Switch hardware?

Ichiro Hazama: “For some time, our director Tetsuya Nomura had expressed his desire to deliver the Kingdom Hearts series to Nintendo Switch players, him having seen and heard the demand, and so a great deal of consideration went into this internally. Bringing these titles to Nintendo Switch proved to be quite difficult for various reasons, including the storage capacity of the hardware, but we’re excited that we were able to make it happen for the first time ever by utilizing the Cloud service.”

When pressed further about the possibility of at least getting the first two games running natively on the platform, Hazama replied that the production of a native version was still “undecided”. With any luck, this could mean Square Enix has not entirely ruled out the possibility, and we could see a native release for at least Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 Remix for Switch in the future.

NL: We understand it would have been near impossible to get the entire series running smoothly on Switch, but is it possible that Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 Remix could ever be reworked to run natively on Switch later down the road? Is this just sort of a stop gap?

Hazama: “At this moment in time, the production of a native version is undecided. We believe that the Cloud version is currently the best way to deliver the Kingdom Hearts series to Nintendo Switch players, but we are always excited to hear to feedback from our fans and want to thank them for all their support.”

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.