Kingdom Hearts 3 almost got a world based on Cars

Disney Worlds are arguably the biggest selling point of the Kingdom Hearts franchise, since fans endlessly speculate about the movies they’re going to be able to revisit every time Square Enix announces a brand-new game

. But some fans recently discovered a strange level that was scrapped from Kingdom Hearts 3, and it left them absolutely dumbfounded. What if Sora, Donald & Goofy visited a world based on the Cars franchise?

Fans discover plans for a Cars World in the files of Kingdom Hearts 3

A group of dedicated fans unveiled a bunch of development screenshots and documents from around 2017, simply known as the “KH3 Premium Showcase Files”. Longtime Kingdom Hearts YouTuber & Researcher, 13th Vessel, has posted about this revelation on his Twitter/X account.

There are a lot of interesting parts about this discovery, but the most fascinating one is a text list of the worlds that were in development. It contains 19 different levels, and it includes both playable worlds like San Fransokyo or Toy Box and areas that appear only in cutscenes, like Daybreak Town or Radiant Garden. However, Kingdom Hearts 3 only featured 18 worlds, so fans immediately noticed that there was a standout.

The text at #6, clearly reads “カーズ(仮)”, which translates to “Cars (Tentative)”, meaning that at one point Square Enix was planning to include an entire world based on Pixar’s sometimes infamous but wildly successful Cars franchise. This not only surprised fans but also created a lot of speculation on how this level was going to work.

Was it going to take place entirely within Radiator Springs? Were Sora, Donald & Goofy going to transform into different vehicles? How was Sora going to fight with his Keyblade? Was it going to have a racing minigame? However, most fans believe that this world was scrapped very early on in development, since this list is only made up of text, and they couldn’t find any 3D models of characters or environments either.

The other fascinating findings in the Kingdom Hearts 3 Premium Showcase Files

The KH3 Premium Showcase Files did not reveal any more information on unused Disney Worlds, but there is another fascinating finding that has shocked and amused Kingdom Hearts fans. In the final game, when players enter the Toy Box world (based on the Toy Story franchise) they will immediately witness a high quality cutscene with lots of action and impressive graphics that is promoting a fictional video game called “Verum Rex”, which is a parody of Final Fantasy XV. Square Enix created the Verum Rex characters exclusively for use in the Kingdom Hearts franchise, including the protagonist, Yozora, who later appeared in the Re Mind DLC, a secret boss.

The Premium Showcase Files revealed that Verum Rex was not always supposed to be a parody, since its introductory cutscene was originally going to feature Final Fantasy XV characters. A prototype version of this cutscene has models that are extremely similar to Noctis and Stella, meaning that Tetsuya Nomura’s plans may have changed at some point in development. Yozora is highly likely to play an important role in Kingdom Hearts 4, so he may have chosen to avoid further using characters from a separate franchise.

Tetsuya Nomura and his team are currently working on Kingdom Hearts 4, so there’s a possibility that they may reuse the idea of this scrapped Cars World in this upcoming title. Whether fans will approve of it or not, depends entirely on its execution.