Big news! Kingdom Hearts IV was just announced today. We don’t know much about the game’s plot, when it will be released, or how it connects to other games, but we do know one thing: Series protagonist Sora no longer has his big clown shoes anymore. And the internet isn’t taking it very well.
(Also we saw Sora’s feet and uh... yeah, its a whole thing.)
Today, as part of the 20 year anniversary of Kingdom Hearts, Square Enix, Disney, and series creator Tetsuya Nomura announced the next entry in the franchise, Kingdom Hearts IV. After watching the new trailer, fans learned that after 20 years Sora was seemingly done wearing big ass goofy clown shoes.
Instead, in the new, more realistic-looking world of KHIV, Sora is just wearing a normal pair of shoes.
They are nice-looking shoes, I think. (I’m not Luke. I don’t know much about what makes a shoe good or bad looking, sorry.) But the shift from the goofy, large and cartoony shoes seen in the previous games to these standard kicks was a lot for fans of the franchise to handle.
A quick search of just Twitter reveals a lot of emotions happening right now as people process the loss of Sora’s old, big shoes.
“You come into my house, on MY weekend.. and you put regular sized shoes on Sora in KH4. You disrespect me and my family this way,” tweeted SmallBuStudio.
“YOU MFS CAN STOP SAYING HE HAS CLOWN SHOES NOW,” tweeted DatChaosGuy.
While many seem to be sad or even upset to see the big shoes vanish into the ether, others online were excited to see Sora finally be allowed to wear practical shoes for once. And others demanded Square Enix sell these normal-looking shoes at some point. I guess it does make it easier to cosplay this particular Sora, compared to past ones who had much bigger, sillier boots.
Of course, it wasn’t just Sora’s new shoes that had fans freaking out. Others were shocked to learn that Sora has normal-sized feet, too. (Though this one Reddit user from 2019 will be stoked, I guess.)
At one point in the trailer, Sora is seen laying on a couch and walking around barefoot and it seems that for the last 20 years nobody helped properly size Sora’s feet when he went shoe shopping.
“Giving Sora normal-sized shoes and feet is the most fucked up thing you could do after 20 years of this,” explained Chris Person, former-Kotaku video producer and host/creator of Highlight Reel.
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