Sora in Smash Bros
Category:
Gaming

Like a Kid Asking a Parent to Take Them to McDonalds, Nintendo Asks, “You Got Donald and Goofy Money?”

That Mickey Mouse emblem on the keyblade is all the Disney you get in Smash.
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Briana Lawrence
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Published: Oct 6, 2021 09:31 am

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Yesterday, Mario embraced the dying embers of the Smash Bros. flame to toss a keyblade into the darkness, the blade powering up to open a keyhole and reveal the final fighter to join the 80+ character roster. With the instrumental version of Utada Hikaru’s “Simple and Clean” playing in the background, Sora (and his sunshine optimism) literally flew onto the scene as the fighters came back to life.

Mario and Sora shook hands like gentlemen, sealing the deal between Smash Bros. and Kingdom Hearts, a union that fans have been begging for with every other character announcement that’s happened in Smash.

Even if fans have been wanting to see Sora for years, the consensus seemed to be that it would never happen. That’s not because Sora was an odd pick or anything like that, after all, there are several other game franchises in Smash – including Final Fantasy, which involves Square Enix, the company behind Kingdom Hearts.

Still, there’s another part to Kingdom Hearts, a more… mousey element that had fans convinced that Sora would never get an invite.

But he did.

And it didn’t take long for fans to notice the lack of Disney in this Kingdom Hearts collaboration with Smash Bros.

And, honestly? A lot of fans aren’t surprised.

Like.

At all.

Sure, you’ll come across the occasional observation of how weird it is to see Disney characters scrubbed out of art that they’re supposed to be in, and yeah, a Final Smash that had Sora teaming up with Donald and Goofy would’ve been rad.

But it’s Disney.

This observation about Sora’s own company not wanting to deal with the mouse is from a 2020 interview via Eurogamer with Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn director and producer Naoki Yoshida. The question of crossover potential came up since FFXIV has had crossovers with games like Nier: Automata. Now you’d think since Kingdom Hearts is a Square Enix title that a crossover should be easy, like, a Slack work chat discussion, perhaps, or a Zoom meeting.

But nope.

Because Disney.

In fact, the Disney part is so daunting that Yoshida didn’t even entertain the thought of a crossover.

“We’ve had lots of feedback and lots of hopes that with the FF7 Remake that we’ll do some crossover with them. It’s just part one of the journey, so we need to kind of nail down all the details and flesh it out, so it may take a while, it will take time to actually make something great. That said, we are positively looking into it, and we have hope that we want to do something with this at some point in the future. As for a Kingdom Hearts crossover, for this idea, one of the troubles is that we have to coordinate with Disney, and so I feel that there would be so many hurdles and challenges around working with them, so I try not to think about a crossover with Kingdom Hearts.”

That Sora Is Finally Here message on his announcement takes on a whole new meaning now. I don’t even wanna think about the licensing fees for having a Disney Princess in the background of a stage, let alone having anything Disney as an assist trophy or, dear lord, a song. I know the tweets are joking about that five-second shot of the Mickey Mouse keychain, but there’s probably some major truth in how much money was dropped just to have that little reveal.

So yeah.

Sora’s just gonna have to get some new besties. He’s a nice kid, I’m sure it won’t take long.

(Image: Nintendo)

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Image of Briana Lawrence
Briana Lawrence
Briana (she/her - bisexual) is trying her best to cosplay as a responsible adult. Her writing tends to focus on the importance of representation, whether it’s through her multiple book series or the pieces she writes. After de-transforming from her magical girl state, she indulges in an ever-growing pile of manga, marathons too much anime, and dedicates an embarrassing amount of time to her Animal Crossing pumpkin patch (it's Halloween forever, deal with it Nook)
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