It's no secret that Kingdom Hearts 3's toughest boss, Yozora, and Final Fantasy 15's Noctis have a lot in common, but a fan's datamine reveals that they originally had even more similarities.
As spotted by Noisy Pixel, a Kingdom Hearts dataminer, known as @TruebladeSeeker on Twitter, has discovered some interesting details about Kingdom Hearts 3 Re Mind's (DLC) very mysterious boss, Yozora. According to the dataminer, at one point during the sequel's development, Yozora was supposed to have an ability called 'Shift Break' - which is reportedly what Noctis' Warp Strike ability is called in Japanese.
What's even more interesting, this ability was featured in the game fairly deep into development. As you can see from the video below, TruebladeSeeker was able to demonstrate the scrapped ability. As the tweet explains, this ability is noticeably unfinished but you can clearly see Yozora throwing his sword and warping towards Sora. It's basically the same as Noctis' Warp Strike, minus the attack at the end.
And this is what Yozora's "Shift Break" looks like.Look unfinished as expected, but he does throw his sword and warp to in front of Sora. So minus the attack at the end, this is really close to Noctis's versionhttps://t.co/mjhXGivbzC pic.twitter.com/v9ExzmphwASeptember 6, 2023
Kingdom Hearts director and frequent Final Fantasy developer, Tetsuya Nomura, has made it pretty clear that Yozora (as well as the rest of his crew from the fictional in-game video game Verum Rex) is a reference to the developer's original vision for Final Fantasy 15, Final Fantasy Versus 13 - so we're really not surprised to see more of Noctis in Yozora.
Elsewhere in the datamine, TruebladeSeeker also found out more specifics about Yozora's abilities. According to the dataminer, the move where Yozora steals Sora's Keyblade is called 'Heart Break' and the one where he steals Sora's health and items is called 'Energy Break'. As for the rest of Yozora's abilities, specifically, the one where the Verum Rex character pulls out a gun is called 'Time Break', and his desperation move is called 'High Voltage'.
The main takeaway from this story is that Tetsuya Nomura will always try and find a way to connect things. So we should all just accept that Yozora is Noctis, Noctis is in Verum Rex, and Verum Rex is actually Final Fantasy Versus 13 without asking too many questions.
On the topic of the Square Enix developer, find out what he's up to at the moment with our Kingdom Hearts 4 guide.
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