Five-Fingered Donald Duck Wasn't AI, Square Enix Insists

"These assets were created by our development team without the use of generative AI, and the issues resulted from human error."

That was Square Enix's response to GameSpot after two months of fans pointing at the Kingdom Hearts Collection [1~3] artwork and asking why Donald Duck had five fingers on one hand. Disney characters famously have four. It's one of the most recognizable design conventions in animation history. Getting it wrong is like drawing Mario without a moustache.

The controversy started back in early June when Square Enix revealed the collection during the June 9 Nintendo Direct. Players immediately flagged irregularities in the promotional art: Donald's extra finger, a keyblade chain on Mickey Mouse that seemed to change shape halfway down its length, inaccurate details on Sora's shoes, and clock tower hands that appeared to bend in directions they shouldn't. Taken individually, any one of these could be a sloppy oversight. Stacked together, they look like the telltale artifacts of image generation tools that don't understand what they're drawing.

Square Enix has since updated some of the artwork. Donald now has four fingers on both hands in versions spotted on the Xbox Store. But as Eurogamer noted, the fixes are selective. The clock tower, the chains, and Sora's shoes remain untouched. If this really was human error across multiple distinct elements of a single piece of art, the partial fix raises its own questions. You'd think a correction pass would catch everything, not just the one detail that went viral.

The Two-Month Gap

What strikes me most here isn't the artwork itself. It's the timeline. Fans raised these concerns in early June. Square Enix responded in August. Two months of silence before issuing a two-sentence denial is not the behaviour of a company that feels confident in its answer. Studios that communicate well address this kind of thing within days, not after the discourse has already calcified. The artwork is attributed to Tetsuya Nomura's team, and Kingdom Hearts art has historically been a point of pride for the series. A quick "our artist made a mistake, here's the corrected version" in week one would have killed this story dead.

Instead, the delayed response and incomplete fixes have only made people more skeptical. I'm not going to claim I can definitively tell AI art from human art in every case, but I can say that Square Enix's handling of this has done nothing to put the accusation to rest.

Kingdom Hearts Collection [1~3] bundles Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX, Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, and Kingdom Hearts 3 + Re Mind into a single package. It's priced at $74.99 and launches on PC, Switch 2, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on October 8. Unlike the cloud-only versions that appeared on the original Switch, these will be native ports, and save data from those cloud editions will carry over. Square Enix also has a Kingdom Hearts: Deep Dive panel scheduled for August 14 at D23 to mark the franchise's 25th anniversary.

Whether the art was AI-generated or the product of a remarkably careless afternoon, Square Enix letting this fester for two months before offering a vague denial and a partial fix is the real problem. Studios across the industry are watching trust erode around AI use in creative work, and "human error" without any further explanation isn't going to rebuild it.