Good morning, everyone. It’s time for another Rising Sun, but this time, we’re going to talk about a game movie.

There are millions of Disney fans out there, and most of them have heard of Kingdom Hearts. In the simplest, Kingdom Hearts is a series of Disney RPGs created by Square-Enix, the company behind Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. The series has consistently recieved critical acclaim, and has finally branched out into feature films with Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days and Kingdom Hearts Recoded.

Kingdom Hearts Recoded is a animated feature film created from cutscenes in the Kingdom Hearts Coded game for the Nintendo DS. The film, set directly after Kingdom Hearts II, follows Mickey Mouse as he tries to figure out the meaning of a strange message in Jiminy Cricket’s mostly empty journal, which was written to chronicle the events of the first Kingdom Hearts, and was erased in the GBA game Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. To figure out the mystery, the journal is converted into data, and a copy of series protagonist Sora is created to investigate from within.

The animation is as crisp and colorful as one can expect from Kingdom Hearts, and the storyline is enthralling in it’s simplicity, going through the Disney movies and material covered in the first Kingdom Hearts as well as Chain of Memories. The key problem in the 358/2 Days movie was that the fight scenes weren’t animated, but this issue is partially adressed in Recoded. The fights are entertaining to watch, and the ending paves way for the later installments, by mentioning a “Book of Prophecies”, and by Data-Sora realizing that the time will soon come for the real Sora to ease the pain of those who had fought before him. How exactly this ending is important to the rest of the series will be revealed when Kingdom Hearts III comes out.

The Kingdom Hearts Recoded movie is only available to those who have purchased Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix on the PlayStation 3, which also includes enhanced versions of Kingdom Hearts II and Birth by Sleep, but it is a fun adventure that helps address loose ends in earlier installments and paves way for the series’ future.