A new leak has revealed that a Cars world was considered for Kingdom Hearts III during its development, but didn’t make it to the final release and was left on the cutting room floor.
Five years after the release of Kingdom Hearts III the title’s Premium Showcase files have been datamined, which are files that essentially show off behind-the-scenes development of cutscenes, mechanics, and other content. This isn’t the first time a Kingdom Hearts game has been datamined to discover what fans didn’t get to experience in the final release, as the same treatment was applied to previous mainline Kingdom Hearts games. However, this is the first time it has been applied to Kingdom Hearts III.
It appears developers were considering a Cars world for the 2019 game, as X user @ligero_miguel highlighted the word, “カーズ（仮)” which translates to “Cars (Tentative)“. Unfortunately, the dataminer was unable to find any files related to Cars, which leads me to believe that it only existed as a potential idea for Kingdom Hearts III, and perhaps didn’t even make it to the conceptual phase of development where rough sketches or assets were created.