042: The Kingdom Hearts Mobile Saga Part 1
In the summer of 2016, a momentous occasion occurred. Kingdom Hearts, one of my favorite video game franchises, unleashed their new mobile game, which was at the time called Kingdom Hearts Unchained X. (The X is pronounced “key” for those unversed in the weirdness of KH lore.) And then in February of 2021 we received a sudden and unexpected announcement. Kingdom Hearts Union X Dark Road (as it was now known… long story) would be shutting down forever. Originally the date was given as May 30th, but this was later extended to June 29th. No one expected this, and the news devastated me. You see, during its nearly five year life span, the game had become very near and dear to me.
Rather than wallow in the depressing news (which I did, don’t get me wrong) I decided to make something of use out of the whole thing. Ever since my first Kingdom Hearts post, I had been planning a lengthy post laying out the convoluted and confusing plot of this game. Well, seeing as how the game would soon be unplayable, I decided I would need to go further with it. So this will now be a four part epic! (Two now, two later.)
First, the housekeeping: This is the latest in my line of Kingdom Hearts posts. (I currently have four out, so these will be the fifth and sixth.) I won’t get too far into the background of Kingdom Hearts and the plot of the main series, since I already covered that in earlier posts. If you’re curious, my Untangling the Kingdom Hearts Saga begins with this linked post. As for these two posts, I will be covering the gameplay and my experiences of Union X (this time the X is pronounced “cross”) in Part 1. Part 2 will be Dark Road, the gameplay and some overall experiences. I had planned to cover the story of Dark Road in Part 2 and have a Part 3 with a lengthy recap and analysis of the plot of Union X and its effect on the Kingdom Hearts series as a whole. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out the way I wanted. (Tune in next time for a mini rant on my frustrating experiences bringing these posts to you!) So instead I will bring you two more posts in the coming months covering the story of these two games.
Spoilers, as expected, follow for the mobile games, but does it really matter now that they are unplayable? I am avoiding spoilers for Kingdom Hearts III. (All those spoilers will be in my upcoming KH3 post.) Got it? Good. Let’s go!
My heart sank when I first saw this banner. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
Although I am a die-hard Kingdom Hearts fan, the one thing I don’t like is online games. Nothing against those who enjoy them… hell Cocoashade plays Elder Scrolls Online and my brothers were big into WoW back in the day… it’s just not something I get into. I’m more of a console, single player kind of bunny. Sure, I played zOMG! on Gaia Online ages back, but that was as far as I got. (Yes, I was on Gaia. Don’t even ask. That was a strange era of my life.) Once I got to the point in zOMG! where I couldn’t advance without a raid party or a stable internet connection, I quit.
So why don’t I like social online games? Maybe it’s social anxiety, introversion… maybe it’s that I don’t like relying on others for my gameplay… hard to say. It’s just not something I gravitate towards. In fact, it’s something that generally turns me off on games. I’ve mentioned this in the past with my nerd-rage at Final Fantasy putting two of their numbered titles on MMORPGs.
In later years I’ve softened this opinion, and I play Dragon Ball FighterZ, which runs on a server and has many multiplayer aspects. I play Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes with my brothers, and Marvel Strike Force with a gang of buddies I’ve never met IRL. So I am able to play online with friends now. And I can pinpoint the game that got me started down this road as Kingdom Hearts Unchained X. (I know it’s going to get confusing as I write this and continually refer to this game by different names, but it’s had three names in its history… four if you count the Japanese browser game that preceded it.)
The final iteration of the title screen! And yes, those are familiar faces in the lower and upper left. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
I was understandably excited when this game was first announced. As with most mobile games, the official announcement came many months before the release. In the case of Kingdom Hearts, it seemed so much longer than it actually was because there was little information available at the time, and it was highly anticipated by fans. I knew there would be a social aspect to the game, but I was willing to deal with that. It was Kingdom Hearts! And when the revelation surfaced that it would actually be a part of canon, excitement levels grew. (Little did we realize just how important it would turn out to be to the canon as a whole.) Basically all they told us at first was that this was part of the KH lore and would take place in “the time of fairy tales” long before Sora and his friends were born. Beyond that we had to wait for the game to come out. (Of course that was all my understanding. There were likely people who had access to info on the Japanese game that came before and more info than I was able to dig up at the time.)
Anyway, Kingdom Hearts Unchained X was released in North America on April 7, 2016. I had an old iPhone 5 at the time and really lousy WiFi. It took me most of a day to download the game onto my phone. I was irritated and impatient. I don’t think I even had time to play it once it finally downloaded and had to wait until after work the following day. But when I finally did play it, I fell in love. It took me a little while to get used to the cartoony style, but the gameplay was easy to pick up. The world, characters, and the gradually unfolding story kept me playing.
In the years that followed I steadily advanced in the game, playing almost every day, at least for a little while. I generally kept up to date with the story quests as they were released, but at times I got behind and had to binge them to catch up. The story moved slowly, at times barely advancing at all. Clearly the developers were in no hurry to resolve anything. The slow pace of the story and the habit of logging in every day to get my log in bonus gave the illusion of permanence. It felt as though the game would be around forever.
The unexpected announcement of the game’s shutting down in only a few short months rocked me. No official reason has been given, but everyone just assumes that it’s not cost-effective to keep it running. Which, from a business perspective is understandable, but it leaves many loyal players homeless.
So what follows is my memorial to a game that has brought me a lot of enjoyment over the past five years. Gone, but not forgotten… this is the tale of Kingdom Hearts Union X Dark Road.
This little moogle has been greeting me for years. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
I’ll delve into the incredibly dense story in a later post, but for now I will say that the premise is a mysterious cloaked figure known as “The Master of Masters” issued books and tasks to five powerful Keyblade wielders known as “The Foretellers”. Each Foreteller had their own agenda and group of young wielders known as their “Union”. Each Union went out into the various worlds competing against each other to defeat Heartless and gather “Lux”— a kind of currency made of light. The fated endgame only the Foretellers knew is that all the Unions would eventually come to conflict in a tragic yet inevitable event known as the great Keyblade War… a skirmish that would leave most of them dead.
So this brings us to a big point I want to make in the design of this game. The online format and the competing and cooperating players were built into the game lore very well. As you begin the game, you choose one of the five Unions. Every week on Monday when logging in you saw a listing of how your Union ranked among all Unions, and then your ranking in your party, and the prizes for each.
This gives you a built-in alliance and camaraderie with other players. (Something similar happened later with the Teams in Pokemon Go.) You not only feel like you’re all working towards a common goal, but also that you’re working against the players in the other Unions. It helps to bring you into the spirit of the game. These other players have the same goal as you, but they’re technically your opponents… and not only that, they will eventually become your enemies as the Keyblade War breaks out.
This lends a foreboding and darkness to the game that was also present in Birth By Sleep. I mentioned in my previous post about watching the opening video for Birth By Sleep, realizing that none of these characters were around in the first Kingdom Hearts game, and feeling like it would be a very dark and tragic game. You were meeting and learning to care for characters that you knew wouldn’t have happy endings. This feeling was very much the same in Union X. The end goal of this game was to depict the Keyblade War and the likely tragic endings of all these characters who are not in the later games. The cheerful and jaunty art style, the cuteness of the Disney-inspired additions, and the occasional silliness of the plot works in tandem with the overarching darkness to create something that is undeniably Kingdom Hearts to its core.
The main character is you, so I will from here on out refer to this character as “Player”, which is what a lot of fan sites and guides do. I will also be referring to Player with male pronouns, but that is not for any exclusionary reason. This is just for ease of writing, due to my own experience playing despite this being a two-gender-option game. Just know as I continue that Player is the customizable main character who is the focus for much of the story, and all of the game play.
A battle against Prize Egg Heartless. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
The gameplay was simple. Each keyblade has six medal slots. You inserted medals to power up your keyblade. Then you swiped or poked with your finger to attack. From there it got more complex, but that’s the basics.
The medals change as they grow. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
The main method of stat progression was with the medals. The medals made this essentially a collectible card game. The medals are decorated with the familiar images of the characters of Kingdom Hearts and the Final Fantasy and Disney properties within it. (And sometimes unrelated Disney characters too, if they were promoting something, like when Zootopia came out.) The look and border of the medals change as they are evolved. Shown above is a portion of my medal album showing different incarnations of some of the earlier medals.
When the game started, all the medals were Upright (light attribute). They could be one of three categories that worked in a rock-paper-scissor fashion. Magic (blue) beats Power (red) which beats Speed (green). Speed beats Magic. Using an attribute that is strong against another attribute grants a damage bonus. Using an attribute that is weak against another attribute still does damage, but the damage is lessened.
After a time, Reversed (dark attribute) medals were also added. These could also be Speed, Magic, or Power and generally featured a villain or antagonist. The Reversed medals had a black border while the Upright medals had gold when fully ranked up.
Some of my best medals. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
The medals themselves have a lot of components. Each medal has a Strength and Defense stat that pools into your total when the medal is affixed onto a Keyblade. Every medal has multiple Star levels, starting at 1 and increasing to 7. (Although some later medals only come in 6 Star and 7 Star varieties.) Evolving the medal requires certain special medals and allows for higher levels. It also raises the Cost for the medal. (Each Keyblade has a Cost threshold for the medals that can be equipped to it.) Evolving a medal requires it be raised to max level… Rank 2 is 30, Rank 4 is 40, and so on. Huey, Dewey, and Louie medals increase the level.
Each medal can also have a skill, which is gained by Uncle Scrooge medals. The skills include such handy abilities that trigger by percentage on attack such as Attack Boost, Poison, Paralysis, Sleep, and more. Others have defensive abilities like Defense Boost and Second Chance (which revives you after defeat). Others have passive abilities like Lux+ (which gives you more Lux after the battle) and SP Attack Gauge abilities that lowers the cost to use special attacks.
Kairi’s special attack. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
The medal’s special attack is unique to each medal. They can effect one enemy, multiple enemies, or random enemies depending on the attack. Each attack does a set amount of damage and requires certain numbers of gauges to use the ability. (This is done in battle by dragging the medal to the center of the screen to activate the attack. )
While special attacks can be used once per turn (as long as you have the gauges for them) some medals also have a hugely powerful Supernova attack. This is activated by selecting the appropriate medal on the right of the screen (the blue icon shown above) and can only be used once per battle. (Unless you die and are revived, which resets the Supernova attacks.)
A side mention is that there is also a Nova attack that can be selected on the right side. (The circular icon shown above.) This is not tied to a specific medal, but is player-related. The Nova level is increased by 1 for every medal that unlocks its special attack (as I discuss below, that’s done by merging similar medals and filling in the dots.) It’s also increased by 1 when you max out the medal’s special attack. This attack was super powerful early game, but pretty much useless later game after the Heartless became more powerful At the end of the game my Nova level was 2,623, so that should tell you how much time I spent levelling up my medals. (Incidentally, this Nova attack in-game was implied to be evil. The Power Bangle that allowed Player to access it was eventually revealed by Nightmare Cirithy to utilize the power of Darkness. More on that in my story post.)
One of my favorite gilded medals. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
Seen above is the anatomy of the medal. This is an example of a fully-upgraded— or gilded— medal. You can keep track of your Level, Strength, Defense, and Cost stats here. The strength and defense raise with the level. The number to the right is the increase I added with Chip and Dale medals, which boost strength and defense respectively above the max. The cost for a 7 Star medal is 46, but can be reduced up to 20 points with Cid medals.
In order to raise the power of the special attack, you need to fuse identical medals to the main medal which fills the little yellow dots. Once you reach six dots, you unlock the ability to raise the special attack by percentages. This is achieved by a random roll when fusing more identical medals, or with the special Magic Mirror medals. The latter raises the percentage by 1 per fused Magic Mirror medal. Each special attack has a rank, which is shown by the symbol on the sixth dot. The rank determines how high the percentage can get before being maxed out. This one is a rank 10, shown by the number to the bottom left of her picture. In order to evolve a medal to 7 Stars, you must have the level and special attack maxed out. (Told you it gets complicated!) This practice is what I was referring to above when talking about the Nova attack.
There are many other support medals— medals to grant experience when fused with attack medals , medals to evolve to higher star ranks, elemental medals needed for higher ranks, Moogle medals that give you Munny when you sell them, medals to reroll the special attack bonus, special evolving medals to reach 7 stars, trait medals, and medals to fill in keyblade subslots. (More on that later.) There were various ways to obtain these support medals in the game, mostly as rewards for completing quests and events, as weekly ranking prizes, avatar boards, and more.
Kairi’s traits. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
Shown here are the traits. These can be added with special trait medals, merging the same medal onto the medal, or buying traits from the Moogle shop. These power up the medal by adding Strength, defense, or HP. They can decrease the Heartless’s defense on ground or in the air. You can also increase your resistance to status effects like poison, paralysis, and sleep. A special trait can be added by training the medal with your pet.
Some medals are more powerful than others. Like I said earlier, Supernova medals add a special powerful attack that can be used once per battle. There are also upgraded versions of some medals giving them the designation of Supernova+ and Supernova++. There were also Prime medals that had more trait slots than others.
My favorite Keyblade. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
The medals would be useless collection fodder if not for the Keyblades. There were 16 Keyblades in the game. All of them were original to this game. (Although later on the Starlight appeared as a Keyblade in Kingdom Hearts III.)
The Keyblades initially had five medal slots. Any medal can be affixed to any slot, but matching the attribute and Upright or Reversed value of that slot granted bonuses in damage. Each Keyblade had a set configuration of slots. Starlight was a mix of all three attributes, Upright and Reversed. Treasure Trove was all Power attribute, 3 Upright, 2 Reversed. Lady Luck was Speed, Three Wishes Magic. Later on, more Keyblades were introduced using a mixture of attributes, or straight attributes with mainly Upright, straight attributes mainly Reversed, etc. When I unlocked the Fairy Stars Keyblade (shown above), that was mainly the one I used, because I liked the mix of attributes. (It was also the first one I brought to max level, but more on that later.) A sixth medal slot was opened up when the game introduced your Spirit/pet.
To level up your Keyblades you first needed materials which were collected in quests. (These showed on the ground as glowing spots.) After a certain point the Keyblades needed elemental Gems, which were incredibly rare early in the game. They became much more plentiful as the game continued, and the level cap of the Keyblades kept increasing, requiring more rare Gems. Side note: Many pick ups in the game became somewhat unimportant as you continued. Munny, for instance, was fairly scarce early in the game’s lifespan but then became so common as to be nearly useless. The same went for the materials used early in your Keyblade levelling. After reaching the levels where your Keyblade required Gems, there was really no need to keep collecting materials.
Levelling Keyblades would raise the damage percentage of the different medal slots. It would also permanently raise the damage of different attributes on the Keyblade. For instance Light Medal damage would increase, or Magic medals.
The Starlight, your beginner Keyblade. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
As mentioned before, each Keyblade had a cost attribute. The costs of the equipped medals could not exceed that attribute. Each Keyblade also had values for Strength and Defense. These were increased by the values of the equipped medals. There was also a value for how many Special Attack Gauges the Keyblade had. This determined how many of your medal’s special attacks you could use in battle. (Drops from defeating enemies could increase this on the field.) There were three different medal configurations you could use for your Keyblades and you could toggle between them before battle.
Lots of froggies. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
The other thing that should be mentioned about the Keyblades is the Subslot list. This was a later addition, greatly powering up the Keyblades. By equipping medals into the Subslots you could increase your attack. Each slot had to be filled before the next could be used. There were sometimes requirements such as Upright or Reversed, but any 7 star medal could be used. Equipping the medal into the Subslot did not prevent it from being used in other Keyblades, but it did prevent them from being sold or used to power up other medals. Later on they made filling up the Subslots easier by introducing Lord Kyroo medals as shown above. These were all a special attack bonus 10, the highest you could reach, which made them the best option for powering up your Subslots. (Also they could not be used in battle, so they were only good for Subslots.)
Is me. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
A first for the Kingdom Hearts franchise, this game included a customizable character. This served the purpose of bringing you more fully into the game. You could set the looks, the gender (male or female only) and the name. (Although it was set to 7 characters or under, which as you can tell above, doesn’t work for my preferred alias.) You could set a title… titles were based on two words or phrases that could be combined as you wished. More titles were earned as rewards for various tasks in the game. (My title above is “Rabbit-Loving Hero”, which likely surprises no one.) You could also set a message from the character screen that could be seen by other players on the home screen.
One of the main ways you could customize your player character was through outfits. There were many, many outfits, including hair, clothes, full suits, and accessories. You could set your hair and skin color and the expression on your face. Some costumes had perks that you earned by wearing them. For instance my Organization XIII coat with accessorized sea salt ice cream had a Rare Enemy +2 perk, allowing rare enemies to appear more often in battle. You had a cost limit of 5 for your outfits, with accessories and costumes adding to that cost.
A notable downside to the outfits was that they were gender-locked. Which meant that only those with the male gender or female gender could use certain items. Any player could earn either gender’s items however, and gender could be changed if you wished.
Avatar boards. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
More outfits could be earned with avatar boards. New boards were unlocked occasionally when levelling up and also through special events. Avatar boards required avatar coins, which were earned at level up and by winning some quests. As you can see above, I completed 303 avatar boards throughout the course of the game and ended up with more coins than I could spend. (Another currency that became unimportant with time.)
As you earned Lux you gained levels. The levels would give you more AP (which was expended by going into many battles) and opens up more avatar boards. The level cap raised throughout the lifespan of the game, finishing up at 999.
My little buddy. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
Later in the game they added a Spirit that would follow you into battle. For those of you familiar with Dream Drop Distance, the Spirit was a Dreameater. Your Spirit was customizable, with avatar parts being unlocked through special events.
The Spirit gave several benefits. Most notably it added a sixth medal slot to each Keyblade. This slot carried no attribute, so any medal could be equipped to it without penalty. It also did not add to the cost limit. Another great value for the Spirit is that it helped you in combat. By equipping medals to the six Spirit slots (shown above) you could raise its rank, which would teach the Spirit tricks. The tricks included HP Recovery (bringing you back to life with 1 HP) Attack boosts for all attributes, status effect boosts, Blast (which deals high damage on low HP enemies) and more. Raising the rank would also increase the multiplier for the Spirit Keyblade slot.
The other thing you could do in the Spirit screen was Training your medals. This would grant your medal a special trait like the traits medals could gain normally. This was the only way to add a special trait. You could train one medal once a day, with three additional slots opened up by purchasing jewel packages or medals from the shop.
As mentioned above, the game started out straight-forward, but by the end there was a lot of strategy to keep in mind. The elemental weaknesses… what traits and skills to use… even the order of the medals in the Keyblades mattered. In later quests and events, Heartless could have immunity to special attributes or types of medals. They could have reflect abilities, to throw a percentage of the damage back at the Player. They could have attribute absorption, which would recover some hit points when a certain attribute was used. There were countdowns to powerful attacks and retaliations, with some medal’s abilities reducing or resetting those countdowns.
One of my favorite strategic discoveries were the traits for Ground Enemy and Air Enemy Defense reductions. I had no idea how vital those traits were until late in the game. (They were the key to beating the Keyblade war levels, which I’ll talk about later.) Essentially, higher level Heartless could only be damaged by a high enough percentage. If you didn’t reach that threshold, your damage would be 1. These reduction traits helped you to pass that threshold and do normal damage.
A few other things I didn’t have a place to mention: You could join a Party. This was used for Party Rankings, where weekly on Monday you would get prizes depending on how much Lux your Party earned over the course of the week and where they fell on the leaderboard. A similar ranking was done by Union. My Union was Unicornis. (I chose this because at the time the game released, I had just discovered Chuck Tingle and he often wrote about handsome and charming unicorns.) We usually came in second behind the Vulpes. They were consistently the highest-ranked Union. (Because who doesn’t want a cute fox girl to be their boss?) Before most battles you could select a friend medal— a medal of one of your Party members— that you could use in the battle. There were also Weekly and Monthly tasks you could accomplish, both solo and with your party, such as gathering a certain amount of Lux, defeating a certain amount of Raid bosses, and more. There were on occasion attribute boosters available that increased the damage of those attributes for a set amount of time. (7 days if I recall.) There was a Lux Boost button later added to the home screen. Tapping this would give you a 5% increase in your earned Lux for one hour. This could be used once a day. Another game mode was introduced to hype the upcoming Kingdom Hearts III. This was called X3[ex tres] and consisted of Classic Kingdom Minigames. (Those were the Game and Watch style old school games featured in KH3.) Gaining a certain score on these games could grant you a code to unlock the Starlight Keyblade in KH3.
Choose your path. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
Now with the mechanics explained, let’s move on to game modes. The Quests option in the menu opened the above screen, where you could select your game mode. The primary game mode was Story, although there was a lot of additional content to be found in the other modes.
The beginning of a long road. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
Story is where the Union X tale played out. This was doled out in episodes which were released gradually over the course of the game’s lifespan. (Sometimes dropped in groups of 5-10 episodes a month, although the release schedule varied a lot.) There ended up being 979 Quests in the game. Each Story episode had three objectives, with prizes you could earn for completing them. The objectives were generally things like defeating your target enemy in a set number of turns, defeating a certain number of enemies, opening every treasure chest, and more. Common objectives were to defeat every enemy in one turn and win without continuing. Thankfully you could filter out the completed episodes so you could easily see which ones you still had unfinished objectives on.
Once you selected a level you could see what element the target Heartless was and you could select your Keyblade accordingly. This was also where you could select your friend medal.
Killin some Heartless. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
Each story quest had a map that you could travel along by dragging your finger on the screen. You could pick up Keyblade crafting items that were indicated by glowing sparkles on the ground, open treasure chests, and fight Heartless. Sometimes there were NPCs to talk to. After every battle you would be awarded Lux, HP and prize orbs that refilled your special attack gauge. Some levels had a timer counting up that would count towards the objective for that level. Some Heartless were hidden and would only show up when you moved close to their hiding spot. The episode would end after you completed the Target Battle. You also had the option to let the battle run in Auto mode. (I usually used this for raids.)
Some levels had cinematics before or after them, indicated on the level select screen by the symbol of a film reel. This is how the story of Kingdom Hearts Union X unfolded.
This is where I gave up on Proud mode. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
Every Standard Quest had a Proud Mode equivalent. These were released more slowly than the Standard Quests. The major differences in the Proud mode were stronger Heartless, a required Keyblade you had to use for the level, and requirements that needed to be met in order to use special attacks (only Upright, only Random, set number of gauges, etc.)
Proud mode was a nice addition, making for more challenge and better prizes. It was a struggle to get through them in the beginning, but once I powered myself up more and had a wider selected of medals, I was able to sail through them. I did quit playing the Proud episodes after a while, though, once the announcement came that the game was ending. Seeing how difficult the Standard missions had become, I didn’t want to bother with the Proud versions. I knew once I got to the Cy-Bugs there would be no chance of completing the quests… especially considering at that point in the Proud quests the developers introduced the concept of having to complete all three objectives at once in order for them to count. Prior to that you could play through multiple times to get each objective. For instance you could play through once to complete the objective of only equipping two medals and then again with a full slate of medals to complete the defeat all Heartless objective.
As a side note, I always suspected eventually the developers would introduce a third playthrough on Critical difficulty increasing the difficulty more and providing better rewards, but now we’ll never know if there were plans for that. It would make sense if it was planned… the Final Mix versions of the Kingdom Hearts games often included Standard, Proud, and Critical modes.
A big boi enters. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
After certain missions, a raid could trigger. (At least this was the way it worked at first.) Raid battles were much stronger Heartless with multiple spots you could target. Once the additional targets were destroyed, the Heartless would be stunned for a turn, allowing you to attack more. If you failed to defeat a raid boss, you Party would get a notification and other Players could jump in to help. You could fight the raid boss as many times as you needed (as long as you had the AP available— raid battles required much more AP than standard quests), with the damage carrying over from one battle to the next, until the timer ran out. Each time you fought a raid boss of a certain kind, its level would increase by one, with the counter resetting at the end of the month.
This was, like I said, the way it worked initially. Later the game introduced a “Raid Lure” mission in Events that would always trigger a raid boss. These events reset every week and had multiple difficulties.
The Events menu. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
Now for the other game modes. The Events menu included the weekly raid event, whatever other limited-time missions were out at the time, the Monthly Gem missions, and a few permanent events. These included the Tutorial Quests, the Training Stage, the Chasm of Challenges, and later on, the Keyblade War. The Chasm of Challenges were insanely difficult quests that honestly I couldn’t finish all the way through. The Keyblade War was the only story-related series of quests and was actually a pretty important part of the story. They were also very difficult quests, but I did manage t get through them after several tries. (More on that later.)
The Special menu. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
The Special menu included a rotation of quests designed to help you get stronger. Although these quests were only available on certain days, purchasing the weekly jewel deal would unlock all of them for the entire week. Doing this also gave access to several other special quests to get more jewels and medals and avatar parts. (The weekly jewel deal cost $15 USD.)
Another quest featured here was the Moogle O’ Glory missions, which gave access to a new Keyblade and the parts needed to level it up. These missions were very difficult in early game. Originally this mission was only available at certain times (Saturday if I remember right) but eventually it was permanently unlocked. This was the first great challenge of the game. Up to this point, Keyblades were unlocked in the main story quests, and this gave an alternate method to unlock a new Keyblade. It took me months to unlock the Moogle O’Glory, and I rarely used it afterwards, but it stands out as one of the most satisfying accomplishments I had in the game. I worked hard and overcame a great challenge that I was woefully unprepared for.
There was really a lot you could do with your avatars. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
In phase 2 of the game a hugely hyped addition was Union Cross. I tried it… once. At the time Union Cross was introduced, it was relayed as the next big evolution of the game, allowing for real-time playing with multiple people, all working towards one goal. In practice it just looked like chaos. To me, anyway. I’m sure there were people who loved this game mode and played it regularly. It wasn’t my thing… it felt too much like I was playing WoW or something.
In Union Cross mode you could race around a map with up to five other players from your Union, fighting powerful Heartless and taking out a target boss. If you ran out of HP, the other players could revive you. Completing the quests granted you Cross Coins that you could use to unlock prizes on weekly Cross Boards.
Still more modes. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
The final game mode was the Coliseum. At first the only option that was there was the PVE, where you entered the Olympus Coliseum to battle wave after wave of Heartless. Winning would unlock a number of higher levels, allowing you to play each one or skip to the highest unlocked level. (Skipping would still grant you the previous level’s rewards granted you won.) There were 10 tiers with thousands of levels. Wins would earn you Coliseum Coins, which could be used to unlock prizes on Coliseum Boards. These boards and the levels reset every month, giving different rewards and Heartless each month. This was a good mode to earn Skill Medals, gems, and other goodies. For a time, it was one of the only ways to earn the rare Sun or Moon gems.
Another big addition to the game was PVP. This was, from what I understand, a highly requested feature. I played this mode for a bit, enough to get some prizes. It was a good way to earn the Fairy medals needed to rank medals up to 7 stars. In this mode you set medals in three Keyblades that were chosen for the week. You got to choose the medals and the order the Keyblades were used. You had some attempts daily to fight opponents in a ranking system. (More daily tries were granted as part of the Weekly Jewel deal.) You took turns using your Keyblades with their set medals. You had infinite hit points and any damage taken was transferred into points for the opponent. The one with the most points in a round won, best two out of three was the ultimate victor. Rewards were given at certain point thresholds, and more were given at the start of the next week based on the rank you finished on.
This was not real-time battling… the AI would run the opponent. If either Player didn’t have one of the week’s Keyblades unlocked, the Player would be empty-handed and that round would forfeit to whoever had a Keyblade. This was an interesting mode… it took a lot of strategy to decide which medals and set up to use. Also the defense trait was super important in this mode, greatly reducing the damage you took and therefore the points earned by the opponents. Other traits like HP boost or Second Chance were useless, as you could not be defeated.
I didn’t think to get a screenshot of it (oops) but there was also a Moogle Shop where you could purchase medals, traits, and upgrades for your medal storage. I talked earlier about currency. Arguably the most important currency was jewels, which you could spend real money to obtain, or earn in-game and through log-in bonuses. Jewels were used to refill your AP or special attack gauges, continue after death, or buy medal packs in the Moogle Shop.
Let’s do this thing. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
So that sums up the gameplay and mechanics. Like I said before, the developers rolled these things out gradually over the course of the game, expanding and tweaking it as it went on. Since I played from the beginning, I got to learn all the changes and new modes as they came out. I could see the game being pretty overwhelming for those who jumped on it later.
Complexity aside, the game was a lot of fun, and well thought out. The collectable aspect of the medals and Keyblades added to the experience, although I was more concerned with accumulating the strongest medals I could than with filling out my medal album. Honestly, I kept forgetting my album was there. But I can appreciate the drive to collect the medals and fill it out, and I’m sure it gave a lot of fun to many players.
The collectability of the medals added to the play value and fit in well with the pay-to-play microtransactional slant of many mobile titles. Although you could play for free, paying for jewel deals and medal packs could give you shortcuts. There was good value with those deals on occasion. But with a little patience you didn’t have to spend anything and could just wait for the developers to gift you jewels.
Pros: The biggest pro I can think of on this game was that it was Kingdom Hearts. It brought everything to it that Kingdom Hearts has always been… light-hearted characters mixed with dark themes, an increasingly convoluted plot, and lots of charm. The gameplay was fun, the art style was cute and familiar, and the game mechanics were fresh and satisfying. It was an easy game to dip into on occasion, jumping on to play a couple of quests and log off again. The gameplay was fast-paced, but required enough strategy and planning to make it interesting. The developers were good about giving out free jewels and medals, especially when there were problems with the game or unexpected maintenance.
Cons: A big con against the game was its transactional nature. It was a free to play game, but like all FTP mobile games, spending real money advanced you faster. The weekly jewel deal was sometimes a good value, depending on what quests were being offered with it. Purchasing jewels outside that deal gave less value, as the exchange rate between money and jewels was pretty lousy. The medal packs also had a low drop rate for the higher-tier medals, requiring you to spend more to get the newest, most powerful medals. The FTP model, as with other games of the type, leaned heavily towards whales, or those who are willing to spend large sums of real cash to advance. That made the PVP difficult, as the higher ranks were saturated with whales who had purchased enough packs to get top tier medals. I’ve seen this environment become much worse in other games, however. Union X was a game where it was fairly easy to advance just spending the free jewels they gave out. (Like I said, they were pretty generous.)
Owww. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
One of the biggest cons was the power creep. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, this is a common occurrence in long-running games. The developers of the game continually roll out more and more powerful gameplay elements, be they characters, weapons, medals, what have you. This is to entice the players to to purchase or earn those elements to gain an edge over their opponents. As more people get these powerful elements, ever more powerful elements have to be introduced, leaving behind those who cannot get them in a timely fashion.
In the case of Union X, as the game went on, the medals became more and more powerful and the Heartless had to be scaled stronger to match. The devs continued to add new, stronger abilities and raise the Keyblade levels, which led to the need for stronger Heartless and then stronger medals… and it continued in a vicious cycle. This all came to a head in the Wreck-It Ralph world, where the Cy-Bugs were introduced. I was sailing through the quests until then, three-starring everything without fail, and the sudden resistance I was encountering was a little jarring. You would expect more of a gradual increase in difficulty, but these creatures were way stronger than those I had encountered before outside of special events.
Another example of this was in the Keyblade War levels. I was so excited to play these levels, as the Keyblade War had been hinted since the game Birth By Sleep. And now we were finally going to see it! Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. The Keyblade War quests were among the most difficult, and it took me months of attempts and leveling my Keyblade and trying different medal combinations to pass the quests and finally see this portion of the story. Not that I’m complaining, exactly. It was frustrating, sure, but it was satisfying to ultimately beat these challenging levels and fill in some of the blanks in my Kingdom Hearts knowledge. (I imagine I will feel the same way when I eventually master the Limit Cut Episode of Kingdom Hearts III and see the final ending.)
Right around here things started going crazy. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
The difficulty took another steep uptick in the last set of Quests after the announcement had come to discontinue the game. I suspect they did this so that it would take players a bit longer to consume the last bit of content they were given. Honestly, I don’t feel like the game was meant to end when it did. With where the story went, it sort of made sense that the last Disney world visited was the Wreck-It Ralph world (I’ll explain why in the story post) but it did seem odd… the ending felt a bit rushed. I feel like they planned to keep it going well over 1000 Quests and just never got the chance to get that far due to the decision to end the game. Of course I could be wrong, and maybe they always planned to end it here. It just seems strange that they would go to all the trouble of introducing Dark Road mere months before ending the game altogether.
Quest 963 is the first one I couldn’t manage to get three stars on. (Well, Mickey Heads. I call them stars because that’s the ranking most games use.) The last batch before the conclusion gave me so much trouble at first that I couldn’t even clear them. I figured I was going to need maxed out Keyblades, but even though I had accumulated over a thousand of each elemental upgrade gem, I needed Rainbow and Radiant gems to get my Keyblades higher. There were no further events being released to grant those, so I was afraid I was stuck. Thankfully I realized that those gems were now on sale in the Moogle Shop, along with all sorts of abilities and traits. (Sort of like a close-out sale I suppose.) I had over 100K crystals accumulated and nothing to spend them on, so I went on a shopping spree! This did the trick and I was able to at least clear the quests to see the ending.
The final con I can bring up is that this game and its importance to the Kingdom Hearts mythos presents a huge problem for the future of the series. Such an important part of Kingdom Hearts lore has been relegated to a now unplayable game. This was not thought out well. Fans who did not realize this game would be so important to the plot going forward or who just didn’t want to play a mobile version of Kingdom Hearts will now have to slog through pages of recaps and summaries to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. This game is lost media now, and that’s a problem that the developers will need to come up with a solution for. They’ll need to find a more convenient way to present the information to maintain plot integrity and fill in the fans who missed out on the Union X Dark Road experience. I’m hoping they make a console installment set in this time frame, possibly following a member of the final incarnation of the Unions, the Dandelions.
The Master of Masters and his disciple Luxu. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
As mentioned earlier, I will not be getting into the story in this post, but I will mention that the story was very confusing at times— especially midway through when it was rebranded as Union X. Without giving anything away in the story, I will say something happened at this time that altered the direction drastically and left me a bit baffled. I had to backtrack in theater mode and rewatch a large portion of the story to see if I had somehow missed something. The sporadic episode releases made the story even more difficult to follow— along with the tendency for the over arching plot to rest in the background as Player continued their adventures on the various Disney worlds.
Union X had a dense, hard to follow plot and was chronologically the earliest game in the series. This brought up a lot of questions while playing. In the forefront of these questions was the most obvious one… if this game took place long ago, before the worlds were split… then how were Sora, Riku, Kairi and the rest able to be depicted as medals? At one point Mickey, Goofy, and Donald arrive in their Gummi ship, looking exactly as they did later in the series. The Princesses of Heart, Aladdin, and more characters show up, long before they should have existed. If this happened long ago, how would those things have been possible? It made for a very confusing experience that for the longest time felt as though it couldn’t possibly be connected to the whole of the Kingdom Hearts mythos. I assure you, this game is connected and later on I will explain just how.
Of course, I can’t promise it will completely make sense after I explain it… but this wouldn’t be a Kingdom Hearts game if it didn’t raise more questions than it answered.
So many memories. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)
So that covers the game mechanics and my opinions and experiences with it. The game started out fairly simple and straight-forward, adding more complexity and depth as it went on. Next up in Part 2, we’ll talk about Dark Road, the late edition to the game. This is the game that set out with the tricky intent of making you like and sympathize with Master Xehanort, the big bad of the series thus far who consistently tormented all of our favorite characters. Did the game succeed in this lofty and unlikely goal? Tune in next time to find out!
