Craving a current gen Kingdom Hearts fix that isn’t stuck on handhelds? Want a refresher on most of the convoluted story that’s occurred so far? Missed out on the series completely first time around? Square-Enix have you covered as an HD Collection of various titles from the Kingdom Hearts series will be hitting the PS3 next year.
But which titles are going to be included? The Kingdom Hearts universe is lengthy and numerous thanks to all of the handheld spin-offs and prequels and interquals and spin-off prequels and spin-off interquals. Well, Square are doing it as a trilogy and giving us HD versions of the original Kingdom Hearts, the Gameboy Advance (and, later, PS2) spin-off Chain Of Memories and the DS spin-off 358/2 Days, However, that last one is only getting its cutscenes HD-ified and sent off as, being a DS title natively, a lot of fundamental changes would have to be made to the game to make it playable on a Sony console.
Both of the playable KH games will come with full trophy support (presumably, Square don’t want to make a trophy for 358/2 Days for sitting through every cutscene) and KH 1 is the Final Mix edition. This version was never released outside of Japan and features numerous gameplay tweaks; best known as the definitive edition.
But that is not all on the Kingdom Hearts news front! No, the other story is not news that Kingdom Hearts III is finally being made. Don’t be ridiculous. Instead, a Kingdom Hearts social game is inbound. Not much is known, but it’ll be a browser based game and will return to the card based system of Chain Of Memories. There’s no release date for it yet, but it’ll be interesting to see if it actually works.
As for the Kingdom Hearts HD Collection? It’s called Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD Mix and will be coming to Japanese PS3s next year. No word on a Western release date, yet, but it can’t be far behind, surely?