Apparently Squeenix team lead Tetsuya Nomura had been watching too many slasher flicks when he originally conceived Kingdom Hearts: The game’s iconic keyblade weapon was originally supposed to be a chainsaw.
Speaking with Famitsu magazine about the birth of the quirky Disney / Final Fantasy crossover action RPG Kingdom Hearts, producer Tetsuya Nomura said that rather than starting with a base of storyline and characters, the developer conceived the game with the idea of the “Keyblade” in mind – and the idea of keys became central to the story moving forward.
Yet the Keyblade wasn’t the first weapon Nomura proposed to Disney: “[T]the first weapon I showed Disney was a chainsaw. It was this chainsaw-like weapon that I had a rough sketch of when I first showed my concepts to Disney. Everyone got this scrunched-up look on their face and nobody said a word in the entire room. Dead silence. And I thought ‘No, I guess this wouldn’t work, huh?'”
To be fair to Nomura, the Kingdom Hearts series’ Heartless enemies are sort of zombie-esque, and there are few better weapons for slaughtering zombies (or defenseless teenagers). I suppose if you were stretching, you could also make the argument that, much like the Keyblade, a chainsaw has the power to unlock a person’s heart… in a manner of speaking, anyway.
Of course, the idea of Mickey Mouse wielding not an oversized, symbolic, magical key, but a brutal and roaring chainsaw, is a very, erm, “interesting” one. One can only wonder why the Disney executives ever turned down the idea.
The world may never know.
