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.

Kingdom Hearts III D23 Expo Trailer Analysis

Mundane bits first; the new trailer shows the return of Large Bodies and Shadows in Twilight Town, the traditional menu-based system of Kingdom Hearts I and II rather than BBS or 3D's command system, KHII's Munny sprite and a new basic combo for Sora. Like in Kingdom Hearts II he has a four-hit ground combo, but the fourth hit has been made into a gigantic ground-to-air overhead swing with a big lag window. The menu reads "Attack / Magic / Item / Summon." (The original KH menu had Summon in its own window with a context-sensitive fourth option where it is now, and II used this slot for Drive Forms.) Fire has also returned to being a homing fireball rather than forcefield as in II. Sora is again shown in his KHII outfit, but much like how early 3D previews showed Sora and Riku in their first game attire, I suspect this will change.

Most fan attention has been on Sora's new weapons, a pair of gold-and-blue firearms linked by a chain. These seem to be an extension of his Keyblade, comparable to the Keyblade Armor or Ultima Cannon used by Terra in BBS. The "Two Shoot Blaster" as the menu calls it seems to be related to fire magic, since they fire off two shots of fire with every attack. Possibly, this is a mechanic that lets you cast multiple copies of the same spell at once using the Keyblade. Note that Donald's MP was consumed when he cast spells in the video, but Sora's was not when using TSB. The TSB has its own gauge above the menu, it's basically identical to the Command Gauge of BBS. The Attack command was also highlighted throughout, meaning that the TSB probably uses the basic Attack command slot like Wisdom Shot did back in II.

The other feature of the trailer is the "attractions," which seem to function like summons or limit commands. These appear to be modeled on Disney rides, and with the electrical parade as a design motif. Based on the geography and skybox, the Pirate Ship attraction was still being used in Twilight Town. This got its own menu like a summon, with "Roll Splash" and "Jump Off" as options. Like TSB, the Pirate Ship had its own gauge. Sora was constantly swinging his Keyblade, implying that the cross button was being used, so Roll Splash was what was making the ship swing about and damage enemies. Donald and Goofy disappeared for this sequence, and that suggests that these attractions really are summons, like FFXIII's Eidolons.

The second attraction is Big Magic Mountain, a train summon that appears to be based on Big Thunder Mountain but has a name that could potentially get some flack from Six Flags. Commands were "Raid Ride" which used Strike Raid to attack the Rock Titan while riding the train, "Jump Dodge" and "Get Off." Jump Dodge may have been what launched the train at the Titan, as there was still time left on the summon gauge at the end. Donald and Goofy were present, but didn't attack or cast spells and seem to be decorative in the sequence. The arena the Titan was fought in seemed to be some kind of abstract boss area nowhere within the established parts of Greece or Realm of the Dead, but could conceivably be in Olympus because of the clouds below it. It seems that the presence of these new summons actually necessitates the enclosed arenas, because each attraction would need to be reworked around the particular boss--using these against a single enemy with a lot of choreographed motions and situation-specific responses is very different from just whipping out an entire ship against a mob of Heartless.

The EX Gauge from the previous trailer is still a part of the display, and the number next to it probably indicates that there are three stored EX Gauges, making it a Drive Gauge equivalent. However, neither the TSB nor the presumed summons in the trailer depleted it. Since these things have their own Gauges above the menu, the EX Gauge must be used for something else--potentially the return of Drive Forms and/or Limit Breaks.

Regarding the previous trailer, Sora and Donald's HP and MP gauges curve up instead of being straight lines, but given the shape of the "housing" on the gauges this doesn't seem to be an actual change in display design, but instead just higher levels for the demo. One thing that has changed is that the command menu does not have tabs anymore, and Summon has replaced ? so it seems like we won't have a second menu at all. The command menu is also a solid color now instead of being blue with black commands.

Report 1: Kingdom Hearts, Awakening

I first found out about Kingdom Hearts when I was in fifth grade, through a Disney channel commercial around 2002.

The game was the sole reason that I even owned a PlayStation 2 that Christmas, as up to that point I was a devoted Nintendo kid raised on the Nintendo 64 and GameCube, who only knew of PlayStation previously as "that system with Digimon World."

The entire circumstances surrounding how I came into the series are strange and entirely avoidable; I was only able to watch the Disney channel because we had installed cable for the first time since second grade, something that my parents weren't entirely resolved toward, and without my sister's direct intervention I never would have gotten KH in the first place because my parents were pretty much ignorant of what games I wanted. I finally received Hearts as a birthday present in March 2003 from my sister, at which point I had never before played a Final Fantasy game and was there purely because I wanted to fly through Neverland like in the commercials. My sister did a big "I told you so" number on my parents.
 
Yes, let me emphasize the point that I had absolutely no idea what Final Fantasy even was and had zero interest in the internet at the time. This had...consequences.

Kingdom Hearts and Hearts II both give you the option of choosing a sword, a staff or a shield at the start of your playthrough. Hearts gives more options in this regard in that it doesn't just let you choose one strength, it makes you choose another as your weakness, and your strengths individualize your particular Sora much moreso than they do in II. II is dumb.

I will be playing a staff Sora; while each item confers bonuses that are not available "without" them, the sword that everyone picked as a kid is in reality the worst option because its special "bonus" is two extra item slots. This is garbage. The shield gives you three of those, and it gives you Second Chance at level 18, 30 and 33 levels below where you would get it in a staff or sword playthrough. It's entirely possible to beat Kingdom Hearts' maingame without ever getting that ability in a different playthrough, so the fact that shield glues a postgame ability to Sora at a time when you're probably going up against Clayton and Stealth Sneak really downplays any offensive benefits that the sword could confer on you. (I'm not even sure that I ever used Blitz.)

The staff is the best choice of them all because its bonus is +2 maximum MP. Magic points are the only core stat that you cannot cap using stat boosting items or equipment alone--a staff playthrough is the only way to get those last 2 MP. This may seem insignificant, but magic is actually the most important stat in the original Kingdom Hearts, surpassing both strength and defense because of how the magic formulas work out. I will get to why when we pick up real spells.

After much deliberation I have decided to give up the sword. While the points in defense are not really key to Kingdom Hearts because you can avoid all but one attack in the entire game using the analog stick, in the early game it can be problematic to go up against enemies with a base defense of 1 and because of how bonus XP is awarded, you will in the long run gain levels faster by dealing less damage to enemies. We'll actually see an example in action by the end of this update!

(Most of the screenshots in Awakening through Destiny Islands came from my initial run where I dropped the shield instead and played more hastily, but after reviewing the material I had I went back and these were my final decisions. This is why the HP values are wrong for a lot of screenshots.)

Next up in customizing our keywielder is experience progression. These conversations actually come up later on in the franchise, and if their use there is any indication the "canonical" answer to this question is "Friendship" but the remaining two are ambiguous because the exact answer isn't present here. Just based on the position of the answers, I'd guess it's "broaden my horizons" and "being indecisive" but the customization is really more about linking the player's experience to the gameplay than it is picking one canon path.


There are three ways that answering Selphie, Tidus and Wakka's questions can go; you begin at dawn, begin at midday, or begin in the dead of night. This is really a measure of how quickly you level up, with dawn providing easy leveling at lower levels but petering out into a serious grind after level 50, midday requiring a steady amount of XP for all levelups, and night giving you slower levelups prior to L50 and faster ones after.

A side effect of this setup is that beginning at night causes you to need about 100,000 XP less than if you began at dawn, so while in a normal maingame playthrough where I was just looking to defeat the evil wizard at the end of the game, I would probably go for a shield-dawn setup, in here we're going for a serious postgame file.

That means we're more concerned with spending less time grinding experience points.

And I begin the first step to becoming Keyblade Master. So now that our preliminary setup is out of the way, how does Sora actually play?

In comparison to other Keyblade wielders, Sora has not the fastest nor the slowest groundspeed in the series and comes with one of the better basic combos. The first two hits deal a lot more relative damage than they will in II, while his finisher is powerful but swings him too far forward and leaves him dangerously exposed to counterattack. Part of smart fighting with Sora is recognizing exactly when an enemy is going to be finished, because you don't want to launch into a finisher if they're going to die in the second hit. Doing so is like wearing a big "KILL ME" sticker on your face, and even Shadows at this point in the game can be a concrete threat.

Sora's aerial combo is basically the same until you reach the finisher, where he performs a tight spin with his weapon held in close. Unlike his ground combo, this doesn't overextend Sora at all as he recovers the instant he touches hard ground again, so we can firmly establish that Sora is an aerial character. Any time he has the chance to be in the air, he will. The lack of a recovery time means resuming combos quicker and to more devastating effect, so with only physical attacks available to us at the moment the challenge is getting enemies in the air.

Having foregone a lot of the tutorial, our first serious fight of the game comes out of the glasswork.

(Stats: 240 HP/2 ATK/2 DEF)
Darkside, as the first boss of the game, is limited in what it can do and isn't a very serious threat because of that. His first attack is to drive his right fist into the ground, manifesting a whirlpool of darkness that spawns three Shadows. If this punch connects it can pretty well halve your HP, but it's easy to avoid.

At this point his fist will remain vulnerable to attack for several seconds, but we have better ways to deal damage. A combination of running and jumping up his arm will give us direct access to Darkside's head; each combo that we complete on his head gives us 2 Tech points.

Tech points are an interesting mechanic. One-for-one, each point of Tech gives you XP, and are awarded mid-battle so you can actually level up during fights rather than after them. I can get a maximum of five combos in on Darkside's head before he pulls back completely, so that's 10 XP right there. The Shadows are each giving 1 XP of their own, so this attack is like a free 14 XP and to level with you, in my final run of this fight I leveled up less than a half minute after the battle began.

In-between attacks Darkside will throw his arms out and roar. This does serve a practical purpose, since it gives you time to clear out the Shadows and buckle down for his next, much more dangerous move.

Darkside's second attack is to kneel down and fire a series of beams from the space where his heart should be should not and is not. The "standard" strategy is to loiter around where his wrists are, like I am here, and combo them because he's vulnerable for much longer than when punching, but that's not really going to give you the biggest bang for you buck.

By swinging at the apex of each beam's flight when out in the open in front of him, you can repel Darkside's beam for 1 Tech point. Even better, if you're locked onto one of his hands or his head, the reflected beam will home in on that point.

Recall that each hit that connects with Darkside's head awards 2 Tech points, and beam that you repel awards 1. Darkside's finisher for this attack is to launch three beams. That's 9 tech points for hitting the cross button at the correct moment. This utterly blows away some of the grinding methods I'll be forced to resort to later on. In my final run I leveled up again right after this attack came out, bumping Sora's strength up to 4 while also ending the fight after Darkside got just two attacks in.

...though, let's keep in mind that said strength started at 1. I have the same defense as a level 6 Sora that dropped the shield even so, and everything goes down in the same number of hits at this point anyway, so there's not much to feel bad about.

We end this update as we began it; in darkness.

Well, we're ending it with Sora's baby face.

Next report: Destiny Islands.