Historically, Square Enix has been a company of exclusives. They used to only develop games for the SNES; then they only developed games for the Playstation and PS2. When they decided to expand to the Gamecube, it wasn’t to port the PS2 titles, but to create exclusive games for that system. Since Square is a third party beholden to no one, this kind of behavior was never mandatory; it’s just how they did things.
Last week, Square announced a major shift in strategy: for the first time, the company will focus on multiplatform games for as many consoles as possible. They’ve been making slow steps toward this strategy, but never a full-on embrace until now: every time you hear about a major Square game there is usually some kind of timed exclusivity deal in place. For the next few months, PS5 is still the only place to play Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and for the previous few months, the only place to play Kingdom Hearts on the PC was through Epic Games Store.
But the latter deal has now expired and all things Kingdom Hearts will appear on Steam simultaneously in the middle of next month. That means the definitive editions of all three main games: Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 Remix, Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8: Final Chapter Prologue and Kingdom Hearts 3 + Re Mind DLC. You’ll be able to get all three at once with the expansive “Integrum Masterpiece bundle,” which also bestows an exclusive Keyblade called Dead Of Night (Square hasn’t revealed what advantage it has if any).
This is a big deal because most PC gamers exclusively use Steam and, for the first time, the Kingdom Hearts series will be fully accessible across all modern platforms. During the series’ first decade and change of existence, you needed a Playstation console to play the main games and a Nintendo handheld to play the spinoffs.
This also means the Kingdom Hearts series will be fully portable for the first time, thanks to Steam Deck. The games are technically on Switch, but “through the cloud,” which means it’s a streamed feed you need a constant internet connection to support — something that’s unreasonable for a device on the go.
Kingdom Hearts 1, 2 and 3 (plus the spinoffs, which are bundled with it all) will arrive on Steam June 13.
