Kingdom Hearts is back! Being the jammy sods we are,
Avant-Garde got an exclusive hands-on at Square Enix’s pre-launch event and a
Q&A with Executive Producer Shinji Hashimoto & Series Composer Yoko
Shimomura. Trust us; you’ll gonna want 1.5 in your life…
In a private Soho cinema an expectant hush fell over the audience. It’d been 10 years since Kingdom Hearts was showcased here for the very first time boldly fusing the games of Square Enix with the world of Disney. A lot has happened with the series since then, heck, a lot has happened for gamers since then. We’d heard about the revamp way back in January (http://avant-gardeexperience.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/kingdom-hearts-15-remix.html) - Could they really bring the goods to entice us all over again?
“The graphics have improved amazingly.” Shinji Hashimoto commented “We made an extra effort to push the original data to PS3 resolution. Of course this data was 11 years old; digging through the archives all of it had to be redone and in some cases built from scratch again”
“Compared to the in game data, we had all the music,” Yoko Shimomura laughs “revisiting my archives was nostalgic but with the new graphics we wanted to improve it all; make it fresh and a little bit new so we decided to re-record everything”
Revamped from the ground up we asked Yoko what it’s like to be responsible for the music on a series like Kingdom Hearts: “It’s very challenging to create something like Disney; you try not to ruin the Disney image and representation that people might already have but I do my best to create tracks that people will like”.
“There were (also) so many impossible requests, I said to Nomura Tetsuya (Director on The Kingdom Hearts series) so many times: That’s impossible! He never listened. A good example was the track to Xion’s battle theme: Nomura wanted more piano concerto, but because the game was on the DS at the time the compression was so different and a real challenge. But Nomura really wanted it so we did it. ”
What about the production side of things? “As a producer Nomura has a lot of aspiration and dreams of exactly how he wanted Kingdom Hearts to look,” Shinji tells us “obviously the Disney creators had their own - getting that balance was probably the most difficult bit. Disney has been great with us though. You’ve got all the different Disney animators that have worked right across all the very different titles and they’ve all been very supportive”
Jumping on a console we gave the game a quick spin. There’s no denying it, it just looks great. Every scene, from high def video to in game play, flows seamlessly plus the enhanced visuals lend significantly to a responsive feel as you play.
It’d be easy to be cynical; dismiss remix as just another way to squeeze money from a popular franchise by making it ‘look’ prettier. But in many ways tonight’s event was a return to the roots of Kingdom Hearts. Chatting with the Square Enix team it seems that they’re just as passionate about the series as their fans are. Shinji’s favourite character? “Of course Sora; he’s been with us for such a long time, I can remember Nomura struggling trying to draw him and finalise what Sora would look like” Yoko’s fav track? “I’ve got all of them on my ipod and it’s more than 300! Picking a favourite is super difficult, I’m asked this so many times but all my tracks are like my children. As a mother I can’t choose one – it’s all of them!”
At E3 this year we saw the short-but-ever-so-tantalisingly-sweet exert of Kingdom Hearts III (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtLkym8-RXU). If you missed KH first time around then 1.5 is the perfect way for you to immerse yourself and get ready for probably one of the best gaming series around (responsible for kinda making Disney cool all over again). Plus if like me you missed out on the other games that were originally released on DS and consequently missed important plot points in the series, 1.5 also features ‘Chain of Memories’ and all the cinematic videos from ‘358/2 days’. It’s a game for fans, old and new, and well worth a look.
Angelic Rogue
Images from phone, Google Images and vids from youtube. All image rights to their respective owners.
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