Kingdom Hearts 3 makes good on PlayStation’s apocryphal promise

There’s a quote often attributed to Sony about its goal with the PlayStation 2.

“Characters in games could look as good as they do in Toy Story” with the new and improved PlayStation 2 technology, Sony said in 1999 — or so the story goes.

It turns out the company never claimed such a thing. Instead, Sony simply pumped up the PS2’s “movie-quality 3D graphics” in its press release introducing the console to the world. (Funnily enough, it was Bill Gates of Microsoft who actually said that his company’s system, the Xbox, was nearing Toy Story-levels of graphics.)

But the comparison’s stuck in the years since. Even though Pixar has exceeded the graphical high bar set by Toy Story, its debut feature film, the dream that video games could someday match its strong art style, realistic (but not jarring) animation and extreme level of detail lived on.

Kingdom Hearts 3 will finally, literally close that gap. While the world of Toy Story has been featured in its own video game adaptations over the years, Kingdom Hearts 3 is the first to recreate it in such a way that it’s hard to tell the game and film apart.

A world based on Toy Story will appear in Kingdom Hearts 3 — the first Pixar film to be represented in the role-playing game crossover franchise. When Disney debuted our first look at how Toy Story will appear within the series’ next game, fans were rightfully impressed.

Kingdom Hearts 3’s Toy Story world is breathtaking, at least in what we’ve seen of it. And that’s actually a fairly substantial amount; the trailer shown at the D23 expo over the weekend had both cinematics and gameplay to see. The dream of seeing Sora interact with Buzz Lightyear and Woody is now reality, and they look almost exactly as they did on the big screen.

Take a look at this tweet, which helps to hammer that in:

Another tweet, from Dorkly editor Tristan Cooper, gives us another point of comparison:

Toe to tip, that’s a Toy Story. We’ll get to see the game in action ourselves sometime next year — and that Kingdom Hearts 3 manages to look this much like one of the best animated films of all time is a huge reason why we can’t wait.