When Kingdom Hearts 3 went gold, two parts of the game were deliberately left out.
Tetsuya Nomura, the game’s director, is apparently very concerned about leaks. He’s so concerned, in fact, that he recently questioned the merit of simultaneous global releases – in an interview with Famitsu (translated by Siliconera) – versus the risk of leaks.
“The risk is higher with simultaneous worldwide releases,” he says, “and because of this incident I can’t help but reconsider what I’ll do for my next games.”
One step that the Kingdom Hearts 3 team took to reduce the risk of leaks, was to leave both the game’s epilogue and its secret, bonus ending, out of the disc version of the game. Both of these ending videos were then made available as a digital download, as part of the inevitable day one patch.
The epilogue is very straightforward: just finish Kingdom Hearts 3, and that video will unlock. That is, of course, presuming that you have the patch. It’s unclear whether the game will allow you to get this far without it, and players who have a retail disc version of the game and no internet connection will probably never get to see this ending (without the assistance of YouTube).
In order to watch the Kingdom Hearts 3 secret ending, though, you’ll need to do some legwork.
To unlock the secret ending, you need to find and photograph Lucky Emblems. Lucky Emblems are – true to Disney’s branding form – the iconic Mickey Mouse symbol. They look a bit like this:
Most of them are just embossed into surfaces, like the first two there, but some of them are arranged out of things in the environment, like the plates and balloons in the second two. It’s a bit like those infuriating secondary puzzles in The Witness, but you know, for children.
To help you find them, our heroes – Sora, Donald, and Goofy – will often let you know when one is in the area. That will give you the impetus you need to scout around for them.
How many you’ll need to find and photograph to see the Kingdom Hearts 3 secret ending varies based on the difficulty you’re playing, and at the time of writing, we’re not 100% certain what the numbers are. As far as we know, you need to collect all of them playing on easy (don’t you just hate games that penalise you for playing on lower difficulties?) while on the tougher difficulties, you can make do with less.
We won’t list every single one here – that takes some of the challenge out of it for you – but we will tell you how many you can find in each area:
- Olympus: 12
- Twilight Town: 8
- Toy Box: 10
- Corona: 8
- Monstropolis: 10
- Arendelle: 10
- Hundred Acre Wood: 2
- San Fransokyo: 10
- The Caribbean: 12
And once you’ve photographed enough of them? You’ll finally unlock the Kingdom Hearts 3 secret ending.
