Kingdom Hearts Unchained χ Review

Play at your own expense!

Let me start by saying this game is a bare bones mobile game. I know a lot of hype stands behind the Kingdom Hearts series but let’s try to look more objectively at just what we’re playing here.

Foundation:

KHUX is supposedly taken place before the Great Keyblade War. You are faced with a choice of clans in the start of the game, this will essentially be your alliance/server for where you will be meeting your comrades / joining parties. You also have a player rank for whatever that means to some of you, I take with a grain of salt. Before you get excited let’s elaborate on the social system.

Who are you again?

The game will at some point, ask you to join up with a party. This is where you will be essentially piggy-backing on your team mates just for Raids. You won’t really need them for anything else, and then you have a small chat room where you can discuss..basically nothing. The chat room is useless because you won’t be needing your comrades too much. You’ll encounter a raid every-so-often or have the option to join another person's raid when available.

Your outfits are generally free to get by purchasing with earned currency, but you can easily run out and then the pay feature is always there. Additionally I don’t see many choices that make you stand out from the crowd. The games personal choices were underwhelming, until you hit later game where I did some attractive outfits like Organization XIII’s robes.

The Cost Of Anything:

When I started rolling into the game, I have to admit I was impressed and excited to see where the game was going. After a good couple of hours of gameplay - I found myself slowly growing frustrated with the “AP Cost” system which is your “pay-to-play” gimmick. Whenever you take on a single quest, or Dog Forbid, a raid you will lose the allotted AP. Sometimes you will get “half AP cost” day which is self explanatory. You’ll still find yourself running into slow downs when you hit on event quest which are most costly, and again - raids which are good for EXP and material but hit your AP pretty hard, so you may not be inclined to help your party.

Gameplay:

When starting out, gameplay is satisfying and efficient. You get some combos choices, well two that I know of. You swipe for a wide swinging attack that’ll hit most enemies, and the other combo is tapping directly on the enemy for straight forward attacks. Mixing these up can lead to some exciting combat at first, but slowly depreciates. You get what is similar to an ability list of three “coins” that are a weird crossover between cards and triangular elemental system. You can expect to see the same coins after a while because as you drag through quest, you’ll hardly find anything that is worth getting excited over from what you started with (unless you played enough to hit end-game)

Grind:

You unlock keyblades once you beat a world. I unlocked a total of three before I put the app away.

Another unlockable will be outfits for your avatar which have a unique aspect of upgrading using “costume coins” to actually unlock the outfit and then additionally stats with it. This is where things get to be a little redundant. The Keyblades don’t have any initial state (that they tell you about) so unlocking one feels well..pointless. Yeah you can level it up, it gets stronger, but again - it doesn't feel like such a big deal.

Story:

Really, I couldn’t tell you about the story. As soon as I started playing it became so drab and heavy with pointless dialogue that you really need to be a true fan to dig in.

Overall:

KHUX has a charming incentive to be a mainstream mobile app however as you look further in you will discover that this is more or less another casual free to play app with a different coat of paint. You’ll find yourself enticed to begin with but slowly grow tired and bored as you later progress unless you are a true fan of the series. I stopped playing it totally.

FINAL SCORE: 5/10