Kingdom Hearts 4
Sora's Realistic Kingdom Hearts 4 Design Is Still Going Over Everyone's Heads
Even though we’ve known about Sora’s Kingdom Hearts 4 redesign for years now, it’s still being criticised for doing exactly what it’s meant to.
It’s been a long time since Kingdom Hearts fans have had much to get excited about, but that’s finally started to change over the past few months. June’s Nintendo Direct ended the drought with our first new trailer in years, but things really started heating up at last week’s D23, which revealed Coco and our best look at Kingdom Hearts 4 to date.
As the Steam sales figures prove, Kingdom Hearts is finally back in the conversation after far too long without anything to say. That’s resulted in a bunch of new discussions about the game, including one particularly viral topic about Sora’s redesign that makes it clear a lot of people are missing the whole point of Quadratum.
Sora’s Quadratum Look Is Being Criticised For Looking “Sauceless” And Too Realistic
That’s Literally The Whole Point!
Following Kingdom Hearts 4’s big D23 trailer last week, Square Enix shared the clearest look we’ve ever had at Sora’s Quadratum design. Ever since Kingdom Hearts 4 was announced more than four years ago, the more realistic visuals have been a big sticking point for a lot of fans, who feared that the series was moving towards realism.
This exact complaint has come back with a vengeance thanks to all of the new images of Sora’s redesign. Twitter user Genki_JPN shared a PNG of Sora’s new look in Kingdom Hearts 4, leading to a bunch of fans complaining about the “sauceless” design that looks like a “generic Square Enix character”. Sora’s smaller shoes are a particular pain point for a lot of fans, despite us knowing about the new look since early 2022.
While I can’t disagree that Sora looks a lot more realistic and normal than ever before, that is literally the entire point of the redesign. Kingdom Hearts 3 saw Sora effectively banished from his reality after breaking a nature taboo and ending up in Quadratum. The metropolitan city is described as an “afterlife” for people like him, and is basically another plane of reality.
Since Kingdom Hearts’ reality is one that features cartoonish Disney characters, Quadratum is presented as a realistic world. Basically, Sora looking more human and realistic than ever is a big part of Kingdom Hearts 4’s narrative and makes total sense within the lore, which some fans clearly still don’t understand. Just wait until you hear the theories that Sora is actually from Quadratum.
As we can see from the Coco world in the most recent trailers, Sora looks a lot more cartoonish when he’s in one of the Disney worlds, with brighter colouring across the board. It’s just Quadratum that purposefully makes Sora look so much more realistic than we’re used to seeing him which, again, is the whole point.
There’s also the fact that Sora’s Kingdom Hearts 4 design is far from sauceless, and might actually be one of his best in the whole series. Some of you don’t remember the lows of Nomura’s plaid obsession.