20 years ago,Bandai Namcoproduced a PS2 game called Kaena, based on the movie of the same name. It follows the titular heroine on the planet Astria as its giant central tree starts to run out of its life-imbuing sap. The game was only released in Japan, but there was an English language version in development that was even advertised in Europe.
As reported byTime Extension, that scrapped English port has finally surfaced all these years later thanks to Twitter user Robin Davies. They revealed last week that they had found a full debug preview copy, dated November 2003.
They’ve since posted clips that show off the English voice acting, and even promise to share the game online for others to play.
What makes this case especially bizarre is just how star-studded the cast was, with Kirsten Dunst (Spider-Man), Anjelica Huston (The Addams Family), Keith David (Mass Effect), and Richard Harris (Gladiator) reprising their roles from the English dub of the CG animated movie. In fact, it was Harris' last performance after playing Dumbledore in Harry Potter before he passed away in 2002.
Bandai Namco never explained why Kaena’s English dub was scrapped, but the answer probably isn’t that interesting — the movie bombed. It made $9,000 in the US, and just $465,000 worldwide. To make matters worse, it only has an aggregate score of seven percent on Rotten Tomatoes. With that dire of a box office performance and the awful reception it released to, I can’t imagine Bandai Namco were all that optimistic about the game.
Kaena Owes Its Existence To Video Games
Interestingly, Kaena: The Prophecy started life in the first place thanks to a video game. Director Chris Delaporte revealed inan interview20 years ago that he showed a 25-minute CG sequence from Heart of Darkness (a PS1 platformer developed by Amazing Studio) at a gaming festival in LA. It caught the attention of none other than famed directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who said that Delaporte had to make a movie out of the game. However, he was only a graphic artist, and the game’s creator wasn’t interested.
But Delaporte dreamed of making a CG movie, so he left the company and started his own project in 1995. That project became Kaena: The Prophecy, Delaporte’s first and last film. It’s also his only writing credit outside of the Kaena game, which like the movie that spawned it, faded into complete obscurity. So much so that the interviewer at the time wasn’t even aware that a video game tie-in had released.
