Kingdom Hearts is a great game series, one that I have enjoyed from the beginning. While I have not been able to play every game in the series, it still remains one of my favorites overall. I feel that it is a series that exemplifies the games industry at its best. It has a compelling story, accessible game mechanics, beautiful art direction, and the game is a whole lot of fun to play. This is definitely the type of game that should be preserved for future generations. However, its preservation is not so easy.
IGN reports that in making the Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix, SquareEnix had to recreate all the assets from scratch. Why? Because they lost all the master files for the original game. Title Director Tetsuya Nomura stated in a recent video:
Leave a CommentKingdom Hearts 1 was created a long, long time ago, so actually the original data was missing already. It was lost, so we had to research, and we had to dig out from the actual game what was available and recreate everything for HD. We had to recreate all the graphics and it was actually not that easy.