Will We Visit Shibuya in Kingdom Hearts III?

In general, Kingdom Hearts uses characters from three sources: original characters created for Kingdom Hearts, Disney characters whose worlds exist in the KH universe, and Final Fantasy characters altered to fit the KH universe.

Dream Drop Distance, however, brought in characters from an entirely different Square-Enix game.

Neku and his friends are from The World Ends With You (which is getting a Final Remix for the Switch), another action RPG from Square Enix.

In Dream Drop Distance, they appear in Traverse Town, and Neku invites Sora to visit him in Shibuya someday. Ever since this line, many fans have wondered if Shibuya – either the real Shibuya or the “Underground” Shibuya where most of TWEWY takes place – might be a world in Kingdom Hearts III.

If so, it would be the first world that isn’t an original Kingdom Hearts world or a Disney world.

More fuel has been added to the theory thanks to a forum discussion in December where someone claimed Shibuya was a leaked KH3 world. One user responded with “Square Enix will never take us back to Shibuya,” and another person responded to them with “You will be ashamed of your words and deeds come January.”

Indeed, the January Nintendo Direct Mini revealed that Square Enix had not forgotten The World Ends With You after all and was releasing a new version for the Switch.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the Shibuya leak was also accurate, but even the existence of The World Ends With You: Final Remix shows Square Enix is doing things with that universe again. In other words, it’s plausible that the characters from The World Ends With You, if not Shibuya itself, might return.

Now, let’s consider one more problem: will Neku remember Sora?

Since the worlds visited in Dream Drop Distance are mostly Sleeping Worlds, Sora and Riku meet characters that aren’t the “real” versions of those characters. If this applies to Neku and the others, they’ll have no memory of ever meeting Sora.

However, it’s possible the TWEWY characters are an exception. We do not visit the Sleeping World of Shibuya. Instead, Joshua pulled them from their vanishing world into Traverse Town. Therefore, it’s possible that they are the “real” versions of those characters, as they exist in the Kingdom Hearts universe.

(And since TWEWY has canon alternate universes, that could mean just about anything as far as TWEWY canon is concerned.)

What do you think? Will Shibuya make an appearance in Kingdom Hearts III? Will we see Neku and his friends again? And if so, will they remember Sora? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Tags: sora, twewy