New Kingdom Hearts Trailer Shows Off Original Game In HD
I was pretty thrilled when I first heard about Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix. The collection gathers Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories, and the cutscenes from Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days and puts them all in HD on PS3 with trophy support. Now there’s a trailer to show off what the game looks like, and it definitely gets me pumped.
The trailer starts off with that horrible presentation Square Enix likes to give its trailers for handheld games, due to their lower resolution. Here, it represents these PS2 games’ smaller, 480i resolution, which I was all ready to be annoyed by before the presentation shattered, revealing a full-screen trailer. Finally, Square Enix! Now do this for your handheld games, because I promise you we can handle that lower resolution if it’s on YouTube!
Kingdom Hearts Final Mix is looking good, though of course not as good as its sequel. Re:Chain of Memories also looks fairly crisp. Strangely, Final Mix has Japanese voices, whereas one of the selling points of the Final Mix versions of the games was not only additional content compared to the original Japanese release, but the voices from the American version of the game, which reflect Disney’s official voice actors for their characters. I’m curious if this PS3 release might actually include both Japanese and English voices, since a Blu-ray disc could surely handle both for mere updated ports of PS2 games.
The cutscene from 358/2 Days is surprising, since it’s completely different from the original version. In the DS version, there would usually be a cutscene after every mission, and only a small amount of those were actual cutscenes with voice acting and full animation. They were prerendered videos, so I assumed that Square Enix would just take the original, non-compressed versions of those cutscenes and upscale them to 1080p. What they’re actually doing is recreating cutscenes that were just canned animations and text boxes, voicing them in the process. It still doesn’t change the fact that the story of 358/2 Days is pretty lame and nonessential, but it’s good to know that Square Enix is putting some thought and care into this collection. Here’s hoping this does well for them and they can put out an HD version of Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix+ that fans are already clamoring for.
Source: Destructoid