Ever since ‘Project Xehanort’ was announced and the contest was open to guess the name, Kingdom Hearts fanatics were so excited to hear Xehanort’s backstory. Now that’s it’s launched and I’ve been playing it for a decent chunk of time, here’s what I can tell you about it!
Beware, small spoilers ahead!
Grind, grind, grind, grind, grind
This game, while very simple to go through, is a grinder’s heaven and hell at the same time. Going through the fighting is super easy and once you get high enough leveled you can auto through most of the fights. The tough thing? The leveling is so incredibly steep and seems very IRL money driven. You can buy for currency to get more cards or you can grind out for a day and a half to get from 17-18.
Battle is easier than I expected
When it was premiered in screen shots exactly what the game was looking for, many gamer’s hearts dropped when they saw cards and had Chain of Memories flashbacks. The gameplay is actually supremely simple and fits the mobile scene very well.
When you collect cards, duplicates merge into one another to make them stronger. Once you get so many of a card and it becomes unmergable, you can choose the currency it turns into.
The actual battle mechanic is similar to many anime mobile games we’ve seen a million times over. 5 action commands are on the bottom, select three, user attacks, rinse and repeat. Using all of the same color gives a bonus and certain cards have special abilities. Queen Minnie card can cure you if you select it first, Maleficent will do a darkness based attack, etc.
As you are playing cards, you’ll notice behind the cards will have a golden gauge that’s slowly creeping up. Once that’s filled no matter what you play will be double in value. That does mean that it doesn’t matter if you get all three the same color though, as it can only go up to 2.0.
Leveling and powering up
The leveling system has two different parts. One for your actual level, one for completion and mastery. The more heartless you find, the more cards you get and merge, the higher your stats go. Most of these additions are pretty small, but they defiantly add up over time as each card and heartless has 4 different power ups it can do.
Leveling of your character in particular is a bit different. You battle in the open world in order to get BP. You then trade this in to get Xehanort stronger. If you lose a battle in the Open World, the BP you’ve farmed doesn’t go away, which is great. The biggest downfall here? The sheer amount of BP you need to level up. I’ve been playing pretty heavily the past three days and I haven’t hit level 20 yet. I haven’t put any money in either.
Story
The overall story of the game is more vague then I expected. There are four other characters that join you, Vor, Bragi, Urd, and Hermod. You also meet Xehanort’s and Eraquis’ teacher, Odin. You find that other, stronger, keyblade wielders also being taught by Odin have gone missing while on missions and you set out to find them! That’s where the grind begins. After a little bit, there’s a cutscene that shows you joining back with your four others and setting back out again after reshuffling the teams.
The amount of story released at the game release is incredibly small. I haven’t gotten to level 20 yet, but I’m done with all of the missions for the story so far. This was my biggest disappointment. I had hoped that there would be a bit more to me to learn and discover before I get to the wait period.
Overall
As a die-hard KH fan girl, I both love and am annoyed by this game. I love it because it’s familiar enough to so much of the series that It’s a great step, where it’s different enough that you’re old strategies are useless. I’m annoyed by the type of grinding and the lack of story in the beginning. The biggest reason I’m continuing my grind is I can feel that with this it will uncover so many questions about the story that we’ve wondered about Xehanort and show that he wasn’t just evil for being evil. 7
