Kingdom Hearts Games for Nintendo Switch Could Still Be Natively Ported

10/15/2021 05:54 pm EDT

Just last week, Square Enix finally revealed that it would be bringing essentially every game in the long-running Kingdom Hearts series to Nintendo Switch. Although this news was met with widespread joy at face value by many fans, the caveat of this release is that every title was instead in the form of a Cloud Version, meaning that the games themselves could only be played via the internet rather than natively on the Switch. Fortunately, according to some recent comments from Square Enix, the company might still opt to bring these Kingdom Hearts games to Switch natively in the future. 

In a new conversation with Nintendo Life, Square Enix's Ichiro Hazama, who serves as the series producer of the Kingdom Hearts franchise, it was explained why the publisher opted to bring the games to Nintendo Switch in the form of Cloud Versions. In short, Hazama said that the process of porting the titles to Switch was more difficult than expected. However, utilizing the Cloud made this easier, which allowed Square Enix to at the very least bring the saga to Switch. "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," he explained. "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."

Despite utilizing the Cloud in this instance, though, Hazama didn't close the door entirely to bringing the Kingdom Hearts games to Switch in a native format down the road. "At this moment in time, the production of a native version is undecided," he said of the matter. "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 feedback from our fans and want to thank them for all their support."  

Are you someone that would like to see Square Enix natively port every Kingdom Hearts game to Nintendo Switch at some point in the future? Or are you content with the Cloud Versions that have been released? Let me know either down in the comments or over on Twitter at @MooreMan12.

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