χ Reports: My First Day in Kingdom Hearts χ

(Written October 17; publication delayed for proofreading)

"Wait a minute, I'm only level 2!"

I had taken note when KHχ was first announced, and had paid some mind to the closed beta, but after finding out that the game was mostly elements recycled from Re:coded's Avatar Menu I was skeptical of χ. A lot of people were. After all, the game represents the kind of indulgent self-insert multiplayer that had been driving the dark underworld of Kingdom Hearts fanfiction since '02 ("Everybody gets a Keyblade!") and at a glance would seem to have completely dropped the ball on the idea by presenting that fantasy with Re:coded's kiddie mobile platform leftovers rather than the art style that had captured the likes of Fanart Central, DeviantArt and KHInsider for years. But I am gunning to be a Keyblade Master, and that means I can't put the game off forever. Am I swayed? After today I wouldn't call KHχ a media masterpiece like BBS or a crown jewel of gameplay like 3D, and as a game it's just not up to the standards set by the original, but the kind of environment that it's trying to promote is also fundamentally different from the isolating, single-player experience of those games. The points that the game really needs to function on are the experience of adventure and exploration, because it's essentially a very fanciful playground for you and your friends to get lost in, and while it doesn't really succeed as a traditional Kingdom Hearts game, I can't say that it's not succeeding at all because that just wouldn't be true. Welcome to day one of Kingdom Hearts χ.

While I am very critical of the assets recycled and redrawn from Squeenix's mobile ventures, it's true that KHχ has definitively refined them. The character creator is much more robust than Re:coded's Avatar Menu and it has a lot of style even though the freedoms that it presents are limited. Where it fails is the creation of male characters, because it's fallen into the trap of bland male character design that the franchise has otherwise avoided. The girls are fantastic, but I'm seeing most of the KH fanbase jumping on hairstyle #3 for men. One of the things that I've learned to avoid with character creators is the kind of direct self-insert that the Hearts fanbase seems prone to; because character creators in general don't handle male design as well as female design, at best you'll end up with an awkward semi-idealized facsimile of yourself that's identical to 80% of the other characters running around town, or at worst you'll start looking for tutorials on how to make your favorite character instead. Your avatar should be a character you can become, but not you yourself. There has to be some kind of distance between the character and the self. Recalling those middleschool years spent reading the .hack// light novels, I made a ganguro-looking Keyblade wielder with some dual inspiration from Black Rose and Albiero. Me, but not me.

Just me isn't enough, though. KHχ is an MMORPG. And that means you need friends. So of course I had to drag someone into the abyss with me.

(This is how Japanese postal codes get stolen en masse. Yahoo Japan IDs are weird.)

With friend in hand I figured I could work out whatever was needed to take down bosses somehow, so from hereon I dove headfirst into KHχ expecting to do some solo grinding to prepare myself for that cooperative play and get familiar with the game for later.

One thing that I love about KHχ is the storybook presentation. The entire game is framed as being the story of the Keyblade War as related to Kairi by her grandmother, and takes place within a storybook where the scenery, characters and Heartless spring up from the illustrations. You really need at least a moderate level of Japanese comprehension to experience it in full, but this presentation and the spot-on musical accompaniment manages to have a chilling effect despite KHχ's cheery appearance. This is a story of the ancient past that we already know the ending of. It bears repeating;


The outcome of KHχ is already known. A Keyblade can open any lock, except one. This is the story of how people pursued the χ-blade, and forged copies of it to wage a war for the key that would open the way to Kingdom Hearts. By trying to pursue the light, these Keyblade wielders created a darkness that destroyed the cosmology of their World. All this took place within an ideal paradise of light where people fought for righteousness, love and light, just as they always had and as modern Keyblade wielders do--and despite all that, they were still consumed by the darkness. The only question we really have going into KHχ is how.

The Ursus Foreteller saves Touya's scrawny ganguro rear end.

There's probably no more compelling setting in the series, but it's a lot to heap on a browser-based social MMO, and what KHχ has in setting it lacks in characters. The protagonist is a neutral blank slate as expected, and that means that the Disney characters don't have anything to play off of in personality. The most compelling characters are the originals, and most visible among those are the Foretellers, leaders of the five Unions in KHχ. In contrast to the "mere" sixteen Keyblade wielders seen in BBS through 3D, KHχ has literally thousands of Keyblade wielders active at any given moment, and that number grows by the day. Everyone is thus organized into teams of ten, and those teams are themselves part of a Union; Anguis, Leopardos, Unicornis, Ursus or Vulpeus, with each drawing from an animal or mythical creature as its motif. Which Foreteller the player meets depends on their Union, but at the start of their journey the Foreteller cautions them against trusting those that pretend to defend the light but secretly harbor it for their own greed...while said Foreteller wields a unique Keyblade inlaid with the same eye of darkness symbol used by the likes of Riku, Master Xehanort, Vanitas and Terra, all characters associated with the dark. Immediately we have five suspicious characters in the mix. How do you determine who is fighting for the light and who is fighting for themselves, when everyone is going after the same enemies and the same goals? No matter what side they're on, they'll slay Heartless and gather Lux. Those that are in power are the most susceptible to protecting it or pursuing greater heights. Can the Foretellers be trusted? Sooner or later someone is going to bring on the Keyblade War and destroy the World.

And this is how you're supposed to face a raid boss.

Despite this ongoing tension, KHχ at its core is a very cute and understated game, in part because it can't tell its story in the same way as a core Kingdom Hearts game. It has to rely on giving the player time to think the situation through while exploring and come to their own conclusions, and the plot is accordingly subtle. The foremost characters that you really encounter in KHχ are actually the other players. This is one advantage that KHχ has over the other games in the franchise. While the player may be a bland cardboard cutout, the people that you meet and form parties with are anything but. There can't be a better character than a real human being, and KHχ capitalizes on this by emphasizing the cooperative experience as the main game. Any single player grinding or questing you do is purely to make yourself a more desirable team member, to help your team defeat raid bosses, and gather the Lux from defeating Heartless to support your Union's ranking. That's part of what's best about KHχ. Because of how the Union system is set up, you will never meet players that aren't a part of your Union, so you're always competing against other people but never against people that you know. The competition is between abstract groups. Even if you can't dedicate a ton of time to the game, or aren't very good at card fusion, or don't have the highest level character in the world, at the least you can be a part of supporting your Union as a whole and being a part of something bigger than just yourself. Which is what the Kingdom Hearts franchise is all about.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is KHχ's biggest weakness. The player character is controlled with the mouse, moves where you direct them through the Disney worlds, and the environments themselves are massive spaces checkered with hidden passages, other routes and treasure. This is good. But the combat just consists of clicking while the game selects three random cards at a time to dictate your attacks for you, and has exactly the same amount of interaction as advancing dialogue in a cutscene. There are no in-battle options other than to proceed. If your cards, Keyblade and character have bigger numbers than the Heartless you're fighting, you win. If you don't, you lose. You raise these numbers by defeating weaker enemies that drop enough XP to raise your level, but your actions are restricted by your 50 Action Points that you get when you log in each day, which are consumed when you select an enemy to fight or an item to pick up, and regenerate gradually or can be restored with potions. So combat is just a function of figuring out what gives the most XP relative to the AP you invest and clicking on that enemy for an hour until your numbers are big enough that you can beat the current storyline boss or support your team in fighting a raid boss.

KHχ is a deckbuilding game. There's no active involvement in battle, but out of it you can find and change out cards in your deck and power them up through fusion to raise their levels. Attack cards are divided into ground, air and magic cards, and which ones you want to use are dictated by your Keyblade. Following the tutorial your Starlight Keyblade is upgraded for 1.0 multiplier to ground, 1.1 to air and 1.1 to magic, so green and blue will be your primary deck colors. The difference in one decimal point can climb as high as 300 damage, which makes your deckbuilding very restrictive early on.

I could see people playing it mindlessly in a lecture class, but that defeats the whole point of playing. This isn't involving activity that you're absorbed in. You don't even have to look at the screen while the battle music's on. Just keep clicking until it's over. It's absolutely baffling because the character creation and exploration is done so well, and the setting has so much potential, yet Squeenix managed to drop the ball on the RPG gameplay so hard after twenty five years of making RPGs. KHχ isn't even a failed experiment because there's nothing experimental about it--it's a simplified Final Fantasy XIII. And if they were going to copy something for the battle system, old-style Final Fantasy never actually stopped being fun. It weighs heavily on my mind that the old attack-on-AOL Flash game that was all the rage back in 2003 is more fun to play than KHχ. And because you'll spend most of your time in KHχ fighting, this is probably the worst Kingdom Hearts game to actually come out of Squeenix. It's not horrible on its own merits like Battle Network 4 or Superman 64, but you'll honestly get a better RPG experience out of Adventure Quest.

Regarding the environments, this is really where KHχ shines. The attention to detail here is spectacular. It may be a Flash MMO, but it's clear that the developers were actually watching the movies the Disney worlds are based on when designing the areas. Wonderland isn't the cramped pastiche of movie elements that it was in the original Kingdom Hearts, but an actual mapped out Wonderland with rooms that correspond to the movie's at about 1:5 the scale instead of the original game's 1:3. The room where you encounter the Doorknob makes this the most clear. In the first Kingdom Hearts it was a combination of elements from the movie's Doorknob room and the White Rabbit's house to collectively make up the Bizarre Room, but in this game it's exactly the same environment as in the film and the White Rabbit's house is instead a really good level grinding area in the Lotus Forest.

I was able to play up to the first boss of the Dwarf Woodlands and a little bit of Wonderland before putting KHχ down for the first day. I'm reserving final judgment for now, but so far my opinion of the game is negative. Community or no, it just doesn't do enough to be a video game. It has the addictive elements of an MMO, but needs more substance. I shouldn't feel guilty or as if I'm wasting my time when playing Kingdom Hearts.