Hands On Preview: Kingdom Hearts 2.5 HD at TGS 2014

Kingdom Hearts 2.5 HD is playable on the show floor at Tokyo Game Show 2014. I attended the show today and played through a demo of the game for 20 minutes.

As the demo starts, you’re presented with a menu that features the KH2.5 cover artwork and the choice of playing Kingdom Hearts 2, Birth by Sleep or Re:coded. I tried both Birth by Sleep and Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix.

First up, Birth By Sleep. Overall the game looks stunning in HD, in particular the 3D Character Models and surrounding scenery – I played as Terra in the Castle of Dreams (based on Cinderella).

The character models look like they are much higher in resolution than their PSP originals and particularly shine during the cutscenes. Although, the game menus look a little pixelated on the big screen, perhaps the original art files were lost during development.

The controls are fairly similar to earlier Kingdom Hearts games on the Playstation and you’ll be spending a lot of time manually changing the camera angle using the R3 Analog Stick as the camera is as troublesome as ever.

Next up was Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix in which I played through Space Paranoids (based on Tron) before our demo time was up.

Again the in-game character models look great, but haven’t aged as well as Birth By Sleep. Noticeably the ‘Human’ characters look a little bit out of place in full HD when they blended quite well into the original game, perhaps because the character models were really impressive at the time (in 2005!).

Other than that, it’s simply a nice HD upgrade of what is now an iconic game.