Kingdom Hearts Collection box art accused of AI use as fans spot telltale artifacts

Square Enix revealed the box art for Kingdom Hearts Collection [I~III] on Switch 2, and fans almost immediately flagged it as a likely AI job. What started as a raised eyebrow over Donald Duck's hand has turned into a full community investigation.

The first red flag was Donald's left hand sporting five fingers — Disney characters famously have four. From there, fans kept digging and found more: clock tower gears in the background look warped and inconsistent, the mesh on Donald's zipper is oddly distorted, and the treads on one of Sora's boot soles show the kind of nonsensical patterning that generative AI produces when it doesn't understand what it's rendering. The current community theory isn't that the entire image is AI-generated slop, but that original Tetsuya Nomura artwork was touched up or altered using generative AI tools — making it a hybrid rather than a full replacement.

The timing stings a bit, because the collection itself is genuinely good news. The same Nintendo Direct confirmed that Kingdom Hearts 4 is coming simultaneously to Switch 2 and other platforms, and that the first three games are finally getting proper native versions — not the cloud streaming ports that were widely criticized and have since been pulled from sale entirely. Fans were celebrating before the box art controversy landed.

Square Enix hasn't responded to the allegations. The community is waiting for an official statement on whether AI was deliberately used or whether something went wrong further down the production pipeline.