Kingdom Hearts: VR Experience was supposed to launch on PSVR sometime around the holiday season last year, and while it may have missed its mark, the franchise’s first official VR experience is now available for free in North America, Europe and Japan.
Update (March 1st, 2019): After a Japan-only launch back in January, Kingdom Hearts: VR Experience is finally available in North America and Europe. If you’re able to read this article, that’s good news, because the only supported language unfortunately is English.
YouTuber KHInsider first captured a playsession with the Japanese language version at launch, which you can see below, although you can find a new video featuring the entire 10-minute English language version here.
Original Article (January 23rd, 2019): If you want to jump ahead and play Kingdom Hearts: VR Experience before it launches outside of Japan, it’s technically possible right now by simply setting up a Japan region PlayStation Store account. No special tools or interweb VPN trickery is needed to do this, although it won’t do you much good if you don’t speak Japanese; the experience (and the store) is entirely localized for the Japan region (see update).
What’s more, it appears to be the first half of two VR experiences, with the latter installment slated to arrive sometime in spring 2019.
‘KHInsider’ captured a 10-minute video showing off much of the experience. And yes, Donald Duck sounds exactly the same in Japanese.
The experience seems to be a collection of set pieces featuring scenes with the series’ characters. According to the KHInsider’s playsession, you can navigate to two worlds at the moment (Destiny Island and Gumi Ship) via a central menu, with more worlds “coming soon.”
Kingdom Hearts III is seeing a strategic Japan-first launch schedule, which sets the game’s release for January 25th in Japan and January 29th everywhere else. Following that logic, we would expect to see the VR experience launch sometime before next Tuesday in regionally applicable languages.
We’ll update this article as soon as it launches outside of Japan, so check back soon.