I.5 Remix

After making a surprise announcement of it last month, the 'Kingdom Hearts' series has finally been released on Steam, with 'Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5+2.5 HD ReMIX', 'Kingdom Hearts 2.8 HD Final Chapter Prologue', and 'Kingdom Hearts III' (including DLC) now available to download for Steam players:

Additionally, all three collections (purchased under the 'Kingdom Hearts Integrum Masterpiece' package), are available at a discounted price of $68.99 until June 27th:

And to celebrate the Steam release, Square-Enix is holding a Kingdom Hearts/Steam Deck sweepstakes (more information here), with the following prizes up for grabs:

• 1st Place: Tetsuya Nomura Signed Steam Deck OLED 1TB | KINGDOM HEARTS INTEGRUM MASTERPIECE | HiGround Keyboard Selection (Crystal Collection or Topograph Collection) | 1st Choice of KH Merch (See T&Cs for list)

• Key Bearer Status Winner: Steam Deck OLED 1TB | KINGDOM HEARTS INTEGRUM MASTERPIECE | HiGround Keyboard Selection (Crystal Collection or Topograph Collection) | 2nd Choice of KH Merch (See T&Cs for list)

• #KHonSteam Winner(x1-2) - Dependent on Community bonus: Steam Deck OLED 512GB | KINGDOM HEARTS INTEGRUM MASTERPIECE | 3rd/4th Choice of KH Merch (See T&Cs for list)

• General Pool Winner(x3): Steam Deck LCD 256GB (Dependent on Community Bonus) | KINGDOM HEARTS INTEGRUM MASTERPIECE

Lastly, a special message was posted by Hikaru Utada in celebration of the Steam release, discussing the recent re-recording of "Hikari/Simple and Clean":

EDIT:

Here are comments made by Tetsuya Nomura, celebrating the Steam release:

More than two years since the Kingdom Hearts III OST was released officially on streaming services (and was the only official KH release on these services during this time), Disney and Square-Enix made a surprise announcement that the Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 HD ReMix OSTs will be releasing to streaming services as well, providing fans with even more amazing KH songs to listen to on Spotify and Apple Music!

The songs will be available tomorrow, February 8th, and will comprise of 187 songs!

Square-Enix announced earlier today that cloud versions of 'Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX', 'Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue', and Kingdom Hearts III' (with the ReMind DLC) will all be released next month on February 10th! These titles can be purchased individually or by purchasing an all-in-one package called the Integrum Masterpiece. Additionally, those who either purchase the Integrum Masterpiece or 'Kingdom Hearts III' individually will get an exclusive keyblade in 'Kingdom Hearts III' called the Advent Red Keyblade:

Following the exciting reveal of Sora's addition to 'Super Smash Bros. Ultimate', Square-Enix revealed plans for the 20th anniversary of the series:

As the above video shows:

• Cloud versions of 'Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 HD ReMix', 'Kingsom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue', and 'Kingdom Hearts III' (with the ReMind DLC included) are coming soon to the Nintendo Switch!
• Multiple merchandise to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the series!
• The rest of the 'Kingdom Hearts: Dark Road' story (up to the ending!) will be released this winter in one go!
• A Kingdom Hearts 20th Anniversary Event will be taking place! More details to come at a later date.

Hey everyone!

Two days ago marked the 19th anniversary of the original Kingdom Hearts game's release in North America. And with fortuitous, only slightly delayed timing, I just finished my most recent project: Kingdom Hearts Final Mix cutscenes in 4K! Just like our recent 358/2 Days and ReCoded releases, they have some really cool features: no subtitles, and an additional audio track that has the background music turned off, so you can isolate the dialog/sound effects.

And since this was captured from the PC release I took advantage of a couple texture mods. I used the HD Textures mod by TieuLink to make things look even crisper, and the Vanilla Heartless mod by DaniZaya to restore the Heartless to their original, non-Final Mix color palette. Also of note, the music toggle was made possible by TopazTK's Re-Fixed mod by allowing the game's volume sliders to fully mute the BGM when set to 1). And I personally created a mod to Disable Subtitles.

And finally, the pre-rendered Opening, Ending, and Secret Endings have all been upscaled to 4K using machine learning software (Topaz A.I. Gigapixel V3.1.1). Meaning the overall quality should be higher than in the actual game!

Due to the larger file size of these vids, we couldn't include the option to download all of them at once. You will have to download each individually. Apologies for the inconvenience, but I promise they're worth it ;) You can download these absolutely stunning scenes here:

Kingdom Hearts Cutscenes (4K)(no subtitles)(music toggle)

I'm particularly excited about this release as it's a bit of a turning point for us. From here on, our focus is on high-end videos with the absolute clearest quality. 4K resolution is a huge part of that, but we've also moved on to a new video codec. The H265 codec uses a more complex form of compression, which gives us a massive boost in quality without having unreasonably large files (though don't get me wrong: they're still 3-4 times larger than our 1080p vids).

Unfortunately this makes them a bit less compatible. I highly recommend using VLC Player for viewing purposes. If your video editing software is on the older side (more than 5 years old) it may not support them. If this is the case you'd either need to upgrade your software, find a plug-in that fixes it, or re-encode the videos to H264. If you go with the latter, Handbrake is an amazing video encoder (in fact it's what I used for these cutscenes). It can even preserve multiple audio tracks (which most/all future videos will have, in the form of the music toggle). Just go to the Audio tab in Handbrake and click Add Track>Add All Remaining Tracks for each vid.

Had a lot to cover there lol The next announcement will be more brief.

Enjoy!