Phil Snyder is taking over from the late Eddie Carroll as the voice of Jiminy Cricket, the voice actor’s web webpage explains. So, does this mean we’ll get to hear Mr. Snyder’s voice in Birth by Sleep? No, because Jiminy doesn’t make an appearance in BbS. But wait! What’s this other blurb of text on the page…?
On May 19th Phil took over as the voice of Jiminy Cricket for Disney Character Voices. The first project was “Kingdom Hearts Recoded.” Kingdom Hearts is an ongoing video game series produced in partnership with Japanese publisher Square Enix, who are best known for the Final Fantasy series. Click on his name to view cut-scene footage containing the late Eddie Carroll’s work as Jiminy.
Kingdom Hearts…Recoded? We know Birth by Sleep is coming to North America under its original name, and it’s a little hard to get BbS confused with a title like Recoded. Could this be an English port or remake of Kingdom Hearts: Coded, originally released for Japanese mobile phones? Coded is an episodic game set after the events of the Kingdom Hearts II. The game focuses on a cryptic message left in Jiminy Cricket’s journal, which Mickey digitizes in order to investigate the meaning of. As Mickey enters the resulting virtual world created from the journal, he awakens a virtual Sora inside, who also joins in the investigation.
Perhaps this is the project Square Enix’s team in Osaka — the same one responsible for developing BbS — have in the works, for which Tetsuya Nomura and Shinji Hashimoto met earlier in the week. Then again, note that Mr. Snyder’s blog uses the past tense with regard to his work on Recoded. The Osaka team project sounds like it’s still in the early stages of development, which means they can’t be the same game.
If we’re lucky, we’ll find out more at E3, or in Game Informer’s July issue, which features an interview with Nomura, when it’s published.
