Continued from - http://n4g.com/blogs/detail...
Kingdom Hearts 2 (2005) - PlayStation 2 / PS3 2.5 HD Remaster / 4.33 Million
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So, straight after the events from the previous game Sora and his friends wake up and have to learn about Organization XIII again, fresh starts and memory wipes, tough times! The trio again journey through many Disney world defeating the Heartless and the Nobodies.
Eventually, they manage to find King Mickey and together they encounter Xemnas, the leader of Organization XIII. Xemnas is the Nobody of Xehanort. Xemnas plans to use Kingdom Hearts to restore all of the Nobodies. It is revealed that DiZ is actually a disguise for Ansem the Wise.
The original Ansem the Wise used to do experiments on hearts with his apprentice, Xehanort. Ansem the Wise was a "good guy" but he was betrayed by Xehanort, who had of course far more sinister intentions that we learned about during Birth By Sleep. Xehanort then took on the identity of Ansem and banished the real Ansem the Wise to the realm of Darkness.
So remember Ansem that you defeated in Kingdom Hearts 1? Yeah, well he was actually the evil Xehanort in disguise as a Heartless! Heads starting to hurt…. Anyway, The good Ansem the Wise sets out for revenge against Xehanort and has been using Riku and the other characters to help him. After Ansem the Wise saw the lengths Riku was willing to go to save Sora, he became regretful and abandons his plans.
Ansem the Wise begins an attempt to seal Xehanort’s Kingdom Hearts within a machine but something goes awry and the machine consumes Ansem and disrupts Kingdom Hearts after Ansem sacrifices himself to defeat the Organization.
Meanwhile Sora and his friends manage to defeat Xemnas and are returned to their world and reunite with Kairi! Wooooo, epic game is epic… and now completed! Well, kinda…
Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance (2012) Nintendo 3DS / 1.35 Million
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Firstly I'd like to mention Re: Coded Exists prior to this game, however it isn't as important as this title. Its basically a retelling of past experiences. However, important parts from coded, I will specifically note as such.
Anyway, it has now been 1 year since the events of Kingdom Hearts 2, Sora, Riku and Kairi receive a letter from Mickey. The letter informs the three of the events of Birth By Sleep and tells how they are all connected to Ventas, Aqua and Terra. Mickey found out this information during the events that took place during Kingdom Hearts: coded.
Now in the knowledge that Terra was converted into Master Xehanort’s new, younger body, Ventus’s heart was merged with Sora and Aqua was locked in the Realm of Darkness, just like DiZ/Ansem the Wise once was!
The destruction of Ansem, aka tge young Xehanort’s heartless, and Xemnas, aka young Xe-Han-ort’s Nobody "its ok…. My head hurts too!" have now allowed the true Master Xehanort from Birth by Sleep to resurrect himself, uh oh! Sora and Riku decide to take a test to become true Keyblade Masters themselves, its time to now defeat Master Xehanort at long last, I think he should at least supply us with a steady supply of painkillers…. That headache, right!
During this test, the two enter the Realm of Sleep. They encounter the young Xehanort who has the ability to travel through time. It is here they learn of Xehanort’s true goal of creating 13 replicas of himself to battle the Seven Guardians of the Light in order to create another final Keyblade War, as mentioned at the beginning of the blog. Riku has to save Sora from Xehanort during the test. While inside Sora’s body, Riku learns from a digital copy of Ansem the Wise that there might be a way to save those who are lost and those who have ceased to be, such as Roxas, Ventus and Xion. They literally MUST appear in kingdom hearts 3!
Riku passes the test, but Sora has to continue training to become a Keyblade Master. master Yen Sid now knows from what young Xehanort told Riku and Sora that the resurrected Master Xehanort now intends to form the true Organization XIII, the Thirteen Seekers of Darknesses. Xehanort also knows the identity of the Princesses that are pure of heart, the same ones he as Ansem went after in Kingdom Hearts 1.
Yen Sid says that it is the light of these princesses that is the only thing that is keeping darkness from enveloping the world. He resolves to use any available Keyblade user to form the Seven Guardians of Light to oppose Xehanort’s evil 13 darkness wielders in the upcoming Keyblade War!
Kingdom Hearts 3 (TBA 2016/17?) - PlayStation 4 & Xbox One / Expect OVER 9000!
Kingdom Hearts 3 is currently in development, directed by Tetsuya Nomura and co directed by Tai Yasue and with music composed by Yoko Shimomura, the game is also being produced by Rie Nishi.
The plot is going to focus on closing the Xehanort's seeker of darkness saga. And sets Sora on another journey through many Disney worlds in search of a keyblade that can return hearts. Nomura has hinted that Riku and Kairi may be playable, but of course he hasn't directly confirmed this.
The game was originally running off the luminous engine. An in-house engine largely created for final fantasy 15. Alongside a tool named "kingdom shader" which creates a Disney style of illustration to all the different worlds. However, recently it was announced that they would be switching to the unreal engine 4.
The unreal engine 3 was largely very unimpressive, difficult to use and generally not very highly regarded. Unreal engine 4 however, is a totally new beast and its actually one of the better engines around. It has new developer features to reduce iteration time, allowing c++ code to be updated while the engine is live. Basically the engine and the dev tools allow for a far more streamlined experience reducing many of the more archaic approaches to game design, with almost beginner friendly tools doing most of the hard work for you!
So let's assume they wanted to make changes to the games keyblade damage values upon attacking a monster. Usually, in older engines, you might sound countless hours, even days iterating. Then waiting for the compile to complete, testing in game… then again, and so on. However now you simply edit within the tools, make changes, switch to game, play, attack monsters and done! Literally seconds! This can only be a good thing to help speed up development times.
You can bet the team at square working on kingdom hearts 3 will also be heavily modifying the unreal engine 4 and also continuing to implement their kingdom shader!
So there you have it! We now await kingdom hearts 3, come December all but dream drop distance will be available on PlayStation 3, and rumours suggest even that may get remastered! The end of the Xehanort saga, what awaits after that? Is this the end of soras saga also? Maybe roxas and all the others lost will get their own games in kingdom hearts 4 "calm down" or will feature heavily in 3. I'm seriously hyped for thus game! I hope you guys enjoyed my blog, I'd love to hear your experiences playing kingdom hearts and your views on kingdom hearts 3!
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
Thank you for the retrospective for such an awesome game series (My all-time favorite as a matter of fact) and I feel extremely distraught that my PS3 had to die before KH 2.5 HD ReMix releases... I really wanted to try out KH Birth By Sleep at least ;_;
I would love to see KH DDD to be remastered but it would be appreciated if they could put it on other consoles other than PS3 (Basically my own selfish request because of my bricked PS3 xD)
Once again, thank you and I would have approved it if I could :/
While i dont doubt that UE4 is a beast , its just i dont know if it will be capable to do those awesome sort of pixar quality like in that trailer , and seriously though SE has an amazing engine thats used for FFXV , they should have used that because it looks out of this world . And believe me you are not as hyped as i am for this game . When the trailer popped i literally stopped breathing for a second . All those years of waiting . I have got really old since the original kingdom hearts and this is a must play day 1 . I will most definitely buying the final mix of it too :) . And that was an awesome blog . Keep up the awesome work :) .
Just beat KHIIFMHD on Critical a few hours ago. Can't wait to do it again on the US release. This difficulty was fun. Having so much abilities from the beginning was so awesome. I can't wait to also do BbSFMHD on Critical later on, after I get most of the trophies in II.
Not much longer now. The engine switch probably means 2 years for KH3 at best, but I've waited this long already, 2 more years is nothing.
Thanks for the refresher, btw.
Thanks to those who have read the blog and enjoyed reading it :) I figured I'd post it here as I only have 3 bubbles and can't post many times lol :(