The release of Kingdom Hearts III is narrowing down and coming up a lot quicker than you may have been anticipating. It's now just weeks away from launching on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. But even after it launches there's still going to be more to glean from the game's story with a post-launch title update.
The news was made available over on the official Kingdom Hearts Twitter account, where it was announced that following the launch of the game there will be a free update on January 29th rolling out with the release that brings the game up to version 1.01. This includes various data fixes and bugs that the team didn't catch during the lead up to going gold. There will also be a Memory Archive added, which features videos that you'll unlock throughout the playthrough of the game. You'll be able to access the Memory Archives from the main menu at any point once the update has finished. This ties into the post-launch Epilogue and a separate secret video.
The tweet is part of a longer chain of tweets from the account, which details how the content will be unlocked and added between January 29th as part of the title update for version 1.01 and January 31st.
So the way it works is that once the Memory Archive is active, on the following day, January 30th, the Epilogue video will be made available for those who complete the full game and view the original ending to the game. So this means that the ending-ending won't be spoiled and you'll only be able to experience it after beating the full game. This is a nice way to prevent spoilers, especially after the leaks that occurred for Kingdom Hearts III coming out of the tail end of 2018.
But it doesn't end there. The title update is also a hook for yet another special video set to be made available on January 31st. This secret video requires that gamers must have completed the entirety of the game, seen the main ending, and also played at a presumably high enough difficulty setting in order to unlock the secret video. This is apparently after the special Epilogue video since the requirement for unlocking the secret video is higher than unlocking the Epilogue video.
Both of these videos will then be available in the Memory Archive video gallery, which Square Enix notes will allow players to experience the entire Kingdom Hearts story from the entire series up that point. And so the Epilogue and secret video will compliment the other videos you unlock to apparently put closure on things? I suppose we'll find out when January 30th and January 31st arrive.
It's an interesting way of dealing with spoilers for a highly anticipated game. Usually diehard fans attempt to go on a social media lockdown to avoid having anything spoiled, which is what some gamers did with hotly anticipated games like Alan Wake when it first came out, or Naughty Dog's The Last of Us back when it first released. In this case, Square is getting proactive and actually preventing the actual true ending from being made available until a day after release, and only through an official title update, so even if someone does pirate it or play it on a cracked machine, they still won't be able to access the ending without a legitimate account.
You can look for Kingdom Hearts III to launch for the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 starting January 25th in Japan and January 29th for the rest of the world.
