Here’s a summary of the interview:
The sales for Kingdom Hearts III exceeded Square Enix and Nomura’s expectations. Nomura and the Kingdom Hearts 3 team is currently hard at work on the game’s DLC. Nomura is losing sleep because of it.
Critical Mode will be coming soon. It won’t be artificial difficulty like simply making enemies deal higher damage, but will rather include many changes, to the point that it needs debugging. It will be “fun like only Critical mode can be”.
Unlike previous games, Kingdom Hearts 3 won’t have a Final Mix version, and will instead receive new additions via DLCs. There will be both free and paid DLCs. Free DLCs will be released sporadically, but the paid DLC should all come together in a big pack. They’re trying their best to finish the paid DLC content soon and wish to release it before the end of 2019, and start working on the next game. Though Nomura is already fully booked with projects in 2019, so he doesn’t know when or what to do with the next Kingdom Hearts game yet.
You can read further below for more remarks from Nomura which contain story spoilers, ending included, so beware:
As he already mentioned in a previous interview, Nomura’s favorite world in Kingdom Hearts 3 is Toy Story. It took nearly 2 years for him to write the story of the world, and he also directly visited Studio Pixar to ask them questions.
The idea behind the Rage Form in Kingdom Hearts 3 is different than the Anti Form in Kingdom Hearts 2 in that instead of being engulfed in darkness, Sora is going berserk because of his anger.
Maybe one day Nomura will tell us more about the Organization XIII members, like the human names we don’t know yet, and things like how Isa got his cross-shaped forehead scar. He actually never thought of a reason yet for it though. As for how Xion was revived and joined Organization XIII, this will be one of the things explained in the upcoming Kingdom Hearts 3 paid DLC.
When asked for hints on who is the “person” that Lea and Isa were looking for, and who is the “Nameless Star”, Nomura said that you should be able to guess it by reading the game’s secret reports. And that the “person” searched by Lea and Isa is someone who already appeared in one of the previous games. And if you still don’t know who “Nameless Star” is, it’ll be explained later anyway.
The relation between Scala ad Caelum and Daybreak Town can be guessed if you observe both carefully. And the “black figures” who appeared in Scala ad Caelum are replicas.
You can make various theories on the secret movie, but according to Nomura, we don’t have enough information yet to understand it completely.
