Kingdom Hearts 1, 2, and Birth By Sleep on PC get a wealth of new nonintrusive features and enhancements with the Re:Fixed Mod

It has been over a year since Square Enix brought the Kingdom Hearts series to PC through the Epic Games Store. These ports have been largely serviceable and the work put into the Kingdom Hearts III port stood out from the bunch.

Still, the Kingdom Hearts community wished that some of the older titles were in a better state, so they have come together to release the Kingdom Hearts Re:Fixed mod that brings a lot of fixes and enhancements to Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix, and Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep Final Mix. Support for Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance HD may be coming in the future according to its GitHub page, though nothing has been officially confirmed at the moment.

For those fearful of mods that drastically change the experience, fear not; Re:Fixed does not introduce anything that change or remove any of the games' core gameplay, nor does it alter any content in the games themselves. There are features that apply to all three games and additional aspects that only apply to each game exclusively.

Features for KH1 Final Mix, KH2 Final Mix, and BBS Final Mix

For starters, game audio can now be completely muted by setting the appropriate audio channel sliders to 1 in the sound settings. Cutscenes have had their 30fps limiter disabled, so now all those iconic scenes will run in a smooth 60fps or beyond, if your PC setup supports framerates beyond 60. A more frequent auto-save occupies save slot 99, so it is entirely out of the way until players need it. KH1, KH2, and BBS now auto-save when switching to a new world and every few rooms with Re:Fixed. That is just a very small, initial taste of the imperfections in the PC ports of these older Kingdom Hearts entries.

There are several other features added for the three aforementioned Kingdom Hearts games. People who want to share their current session on Discord can enable the Discord Rich Presence included with the mod. Those interested can view which Kingdom Hearts they are playing, along with the player's HP, MP, level, difficulty mode, and the current world they are in; Discord updates all of the information in real-time. The soft reset feature that was removed from the PC ports have been re-added, allowing players to instantly reset the games through pressing L1, R1, Start, and Select buttons simultaneously.

Oddly enough, the PC ports start Sora and Roxas off with a MP bar before they even learn their first magic spell. Re:Fixed reimplements a tiny, yet appreciated detail where they do not have a MP bar until they are able to cast magic for the first time. People that have used the Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) program to livestream their play session may have suffered crashes when trying to resize the game window; Re:Fixed rectifies this, along with indefinite hangs when shutting the game down and keeping the mouse cursor from leaving the game screen when it is active.

Kingdom Hearts 1 Final Mix Only

Re:Fixed adds a handful of useful features for the first Kingdom Hearts. Players can switch to an alternate "enhanced" field of view at the Camp Menu that slightly zooms the camera out, making it more akin to the field of view in Kingdom Hearts 2. People can now examine objects and open chests in the environment while in the middle of battle. Abilities can now be equipped and unequipped swiftly with the Triangle button, a feature that was initially introduced in KH2 originally. 

Smaller fixes applied to KH1 has the title's PC port auto-detect the aspect ratio when the game is running in fullscreen and correctly adjusts accordingly to that. Those who were irritated that they could not pause during a cutscene fade effect now can.

Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix Only

Players receive the option to skip the entire Roxas segment at the beginning of KH2 upon starting a new game. After a person chooses their stat growth progression through the weapon selection in the Dive to the Heart section as Roxas, they will immediately skip ahead to the first time they control Sora.

KH2 on PC gets the the option to instantly retry forced encounters now, which was a feature that debuted in Birth by Sleep. When a player failed a forced enouncter originally, they were transported back to the room before it. If a person does not want to use this retry function, they can switch back to how it was by pressing left or right on the D-pad when the game over screen pops up as they fall in battle.

Another function from a future Kingdom Hearts installment was backported to KH2 in Re:Fixed - the ability to reorganize the Magic menu on the fly. This came from Kingdom Hearts III and all players need to do to utilize it here is through L2 + D-pad to move the highlighted spell around.

Speaking of the command menu, Re:Fixed makes the KH1 Command Menu option more faithful to how it was actually depicted in the franchise's first entry, exhibiting a more color accurate darker blue and the 3D icons by commands have been reverted back to the more simplistic icons from the original game.

The names of applicable Limit Commands in Kingdom Hearts 2 have been changed back from their new names introduced in the HD 2.5 ReMIX re-release; for instance, Infinity back to Ragnarok, Last Arcanum back to Ars Arcanum, and Sonic Rave back to Sonic Blade.

Re:Fixed also adds a dual-audio option to Kingdom Hearts 2 on PC, letting players switch between English and Japanese voices in the game.

Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep Final Mix Only

Birth By Sleep now supports dual-audio with English and Japanese with the Re:Fixed mod too. It rectifies an issue in BBS that forces 30fps when talking to people too, so those interactions run at much higher framerates now.

Lastly, the feature to rename finishers has been re-added to the PC version of Birth By Sleep. The original release of BBS on PlayStation Portable allowed this, but was arbitrarily removed in its later re-releases on the Xbox and PC ports.