043: The Kingdom Hearts Mobile Saga Part 2

Welcome back to my exhaustive retrospective of Kingdom Hearts Union X Dark Road! If you remember in Part 1 I talked about my history with the game and the gameplay. Now in Part 2 I will talk about the final expansion to the game, Dark Road. We’ll discuss the premise and gameplay, and then cap off with a conclusion to the Union X mobile game as a whole. As of the writing of this post, this game is currently unplayable for those who downloaded the game prior to its shut down, but in the near future a new update will be rolled out to release the final story chapter (chapters?) and allow the game to be played offline.

The majestic Scala ad Caelum. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)

Dark Road was added to the game in June of 2020. For those of you keeping score, this was seven months before the announcement came that the game would be shut down. Ouch. It followed pretty closely on the heels of Kingdom Hearts III and promised to reveal the origin of the main Kingdom Hearts villain, Xehanort. It featured a similar art style to Union X, but drastically different gameplay.

As I mentioned last time, in a later post I will go over the story in its entirety, so I won’t get into that much here. You can read on without fear of spoilers. However, I will set the stage just a bit so you have some context. This game takes place in between the story of Union X and Birth By Sleep. If you recall in BBS, Master Xehanort is an old man with dark designs on the world. In that game, his biggest goal is to unlock the X-Blade (pronounced “key blade”. I know, I know. I think it’s dumb too.). This game takes place when Xehanort is a teenager/young man and follows his first dealings with darkness and Heartless along with his friends, a group of fellow Keyblade wielders. One of them is Eraqus, who you may remember as being the master and teacher of Terra, Aqua, and Ventus. (He was also the Youth in White in Kingdom Hearts III.) Some of the other students at their Keyblade School have gone missing and Xehanort’s young crew have been tasked with the highly dangerous task of locating them.

It’s not the fountain at Daybreak Town, but it’ll do. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)

There is less to this game than Union X, so it won’t take us long to delve into the features and game modes. The home screen depicted the selected world. You could cycle through the worlds and select the star rank (difficulty) using the selectors at the top left of the screen. There were only two worlds: Wonderland and Agrabah. A third area was added later and was called the Tower of Trials. This was similar to the coliseum in Union X, with 100 floors and increasing rewards as you proceeded.

On the home screen you could select your party and access all the game modes in one place, which was handy. There was also a How To Play tutorial here.

This is a good place to mention how Dark Road and Union X worked together. Both games were a part of the same app, so there was some interplay between the games. You used the same pool of jewels (the purchasable currency), so if you had accumulated jewels you could spend them in either game. When Dark Road arrived, purchasing the weekly jewel deal became a better bargain since it would unlock things in both games. You could also earn Battle Points in Dark Road by playing Union X. The little icon in the center of the above screenshot is where you could collect your accumulated Battle Points. More on those later.

I’ll talk more about the battle system later, but I can summarize it here. Where Union X used medals, this game uses cards. (Which was a system used in Union X’s predecessor, Unchained X.) Xehanort and two friends went into battle with the other two characters as NPCs playing support roles.

The gang’s all here. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)

At any time from the home screen you could change which party members went with you. Your party was limited to three. Xehanort was a required party member since he was the only one with actual stats and the only one you could control. I always took Eraqus because I like him. The third member I kept swapping out to try their effects. There was a bit of strategy to which member to take with you. Each extra party member had special effects that would trigger during battle to either buff you or help attack the enemies. For example I could take Vor for Heartless weak against magic since she would boost my magic attacks.

In the story, the characters were not really elaborated on or fleshed out. (Besides Xehanort and Eraqus, that is.) Really, they were pretty interchangeable.

What would be a nickname for Xehanort? Zay? Norty? X-Nort? Biff? (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)

The Stats screen was where you could look at your Xehanort and see his progress. When you gained enough BP (Battle Points) you could spend them to level up, which raised your stats. You could also view and change your equipped accessories and alter your attack deck.

Interesting side note, when the game started, the Strength stat was fairly useless, as Xehanort’s Magic raised about twice as fast as Strength. This made it so that Magic-based cards were much better than Strength-based. This was balanced out in a later update to the game.

This is a pretty Album. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)

The Album showed your collected cards. Tapping on each card would show its stats: the Power of the card, the element, the Effect and Sub-ability, and how many of the card you had collected up to the maximum of 10. The effect was the extra power the card had when placed first in the combo. The sub-ability— which not all cards had— would take effect if they were played second or third. (More on combos later.)

Cards had two classifications: Light or Dark. Within these classifications they were further divided by the attributes of Power, Speed, and Magic. Each card could be one of two types. There were Physical cards that dealt physical damage based on Xehanort’s Strength stat. Magic cards dealt magic damage based on Xehanort’s Magic stat. Both types of cards could have an element associated with them such as fire, water, wind, etc. Different Heartless had different weaknesses and resistances to these elements.

As you can see in the Stats screen, Xehanort’s attack deck held thirty cards, half light and half dark. They were further broken down by the three attributes. (So you could have five light Power, five dark Power, and so on.)

Collecting multiple copies of the card would increase the card’s power and at certain ranks would give you passive stat increases. For instance, the KH III King Mickey card would give you HP +1 at both 1 card collected and 3 collected. At 5 you would gain Strength +1. When you had collected 10, the card was considered maxed out and you would earn Defense +1. These stat increases were permanent and did not require you to have the card in your deck.

Placeholder because I didn’t think to get a screenshot of the Enemy Catalogue. Oops.

The Album also showed your list of Heartless and how many of them you had defeated. You could earn passive effects from these Heartless such as HP +1, Strength +1, etc, depending on how many you had defeated in the course of the game. These effects were granted after defeating 1, 10, 100, and 1000 of each enemy.

Gotta love games with crafting. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)

Crafting was a later addition to the game. In this mode you could use the materials you had gathered in battle and craft them into accessories using BP. There were various tiers of accessories requiring the earlier items to craft. For instance to make a Badge II you had to use several Badge I. (Five I think? I can’t recall.) Accessories gave passive stat increases or elemental resistances for as long as you had the accessory equipped. You could only equip five accessories, and you could not equip them to the NPC party members.

I killed so many of those Gold Tricholomas. I don’t think I got to 1000 though. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)

Events were the place where you could use your Quest Keys or fight special difficult battles. Keys would give you access to 10 battles where you had a chance to fight a normal shadow heartless, a gift-wrapped heartless, or a Gold Tricholoma to earn massive amounts of BP. The Heartless that showed up were random. It goes without saying the Premium Quest Keys give more BP than the normal ones. The Premium Quest battles were limited to three a day. When crafting was introduced, you could use your normal quest keys to battle difficult Heartless in order to gain rare crafting materials. There were a few other events as well featuring special limited-time Heartless, or Heartless that would only appear in the event, such as the Ringleader Heartless. If there was a limited event happening, this was generally where you would find it.

Missions was a mode where you would get Weekly, Monthly, or Special mission boards to earn rewards. Fulfilling the requirements on the board would grant you bonus BP, Quest Keys, charms, cards, or crafted items. If you purchased the Weekly Jewel Deal, there was also a special Premium Mission Board unlocked.

Nice, simple shop area. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)

The Shop had two tabs: Draw and Items. Draw was the area where you could get new cards. There was a free daily draw, with an additional one being earned if you purchased the Weekly Jewel Deal. You could also spend jewels to draw 1 or 10 cards. (300 and 3000 jewels respectively.) Some draws were only available from the Weekly Jewel Deal and could include more rare or newer cards. If you drew a card you already had, it would rank up, earning you perks at certain levels. Once you’d maxed out a card, any further duplicates would be changed to Shop Points. There was a setting to change them to BP instead if you wanted, but I always did Shop Points.

The Item area was the place where you could purchase charms, keys, or specific rare cards using your earned Shop Points. The rare cards were pretty pricy, and Shop Points accumulated slowly, so this could be a tedious practice. There were some fairly powerful cards there, however, so I found it worth it to rack up the Shop Points.

I didn’t realize the game would be unplayable so I didn’t end up getting a gameplay screenshot. I will add one later. For now here’s another placeholder. Enjoy!

The gameplay, like with Union X, was fairly simple but with an aspect of strategy to it. Heartless attack one at a time. Your deck of cards shuffles and you are given five cards to choose from. A combo is made up of three cards that you flick (or tap depending on your preferred setting) to the top of the screen. The effect of the first card selected was used for the combo. (For instance Minnie Mouse would heal you.) Selecting cards of the same color gives a bonus. The colors are familiar to you if you’ve played Union X (or read my post about it!) Green for speed, blue for magic, red for power. After the combo, the used cards were refilled from your deck. When you ran out of cards, you tapped the reload button quickly to shuffle. Speed was vital to the battle system, since the enemies would attack every few seconds on a timer. The more combos you could get off, the more likely you were to win. A yellow gauge atop the selectable cards would fill up with each combo. When it was full, you entered “Bonus Time”. The screen would flash and for a time you would get the attack bonus regardless of the color of card selected for the combo. Some cards— like the Kairi card— could increase this gauge.

On the left side of the screen the faces of the characters showed as a sort of initiative indicator, showing what order the characters and enemy would act in. As I said earlier, the NPC party members would use their special ability without your help, either attacking the enemy or buffing you. There were usually a number of Heartless to defeat in each battle, which was shown in a counter on the top of the screen. Defeating Heartless would earn Battle Points, which you could spend to level up, in crafting, or in the shop. The Heartless could also drop crafting materials.

As with any Kingdom Hearts game, your Hit Points showed in a green meter around your character’s picture and were depleted with each hit from the enemy. There were various cards that could heal you. Leveling up and passive bonuses raised your max HP. Cards and companion skills could also boost your attack or magic stats for a set number of attacks, and this was shown up near the HP gauge. If you were defeated in battle you could use a charm if you had one to revive yourself.

The two main modes were Story Stages and World Battle. In Story mode, you would fulfill certain requirements to proceed, such as battling a certain number of Heartless in World Battle, earning a certain amount of BP, or fighting special Mission battles. After some of the Stages, cut scenes would play to advance the story.

In World Battle you would select which world you wanted (out of either of the two choices! Such options!) and the Star Rank of the battle, ranging from 1 to 4 and increasing in difficulty and rewards with each rank. Different Heartless would show up in either world and at different Star Ranks. World Battle was the endless mode where the Heartless would continue coming until Xehanort died or you abandoned the battle. This was the mode you used to grind for BP and materials, or to fulfill the weekly and monthly missions. Occasionally there were also special events stored in the World Battle, where you could face powerful enemies like a Heartless version of Final Fantasy’s Ifrit.

X-Nort and his pals. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)

Story-wise, not much ground was covered. The events of this game appear to take place about 60 years or so before Kingdom Hearts… at least that’s what my research is showing. This causes some confusion with the two Disney worlds featured. Interestingly enough, Agrabah was empty aside from Heartless, while Wonderland was inhabited by the same characters Sora meets nearly 60 years later. They seemed to have not aged at all. (And actually an explanation is given for that in this game, which was unexpected. I’m not used to Kingdom Hearts explaining its weirdness!)

Dark Road did a surprisingly good job at making the Kingdom Hearts Big Bad Master Xehanort likable. The story is a little bare compared to Union X, but as stated above, it’s not complete yet. Perhaps the final story chapter or chapters will expand on it in a meaningful way. But so far Dark Road seems completely unnecessary to the saga as a whole. The story brings up more questions than it answers, although any experienced Kingdom Hearts fan should be used to that by now. Where did Scala Ad Caelum come from? What is their culture? Where, exactly, on the timeline is this and what happens afterwards? For being focused on Xehanort, very little of his backstory is actually revealed. We know he grew up on Destiny Islands (home world of Sora, Riku, and Kairi) but not how he ended up at Scala Ad Caelum or why. How did he meet Eraqus? How did they become friends? The game is not really concerned with giving us these answers. Maybe some of this will be answered in later chapters, but for now it’s unclear. (Although Union X does kind of answer some questions. More on that in a later installment.)

Pros: This was a nice companion piece to Union X. Having the two games on the same app made for good interplay between the games. As I mentioned earlier you used the same pool of jewels and you could rack up some decent Battle Points to spend in this game by playing Union X. This game had the same sort of collectable card game aspect I mentioned about Union X, except in this game it actually was cards. There was another side to that with ranking up your cards by collecting multiple copies to make them more powerful. And you didn’t have the complicated gilding system that Union X had for its medals. Rather than collecting dozens of support medals of different types and doing several things to make your medal powerful, the card system was easy. Collect more and they get stronger. Collecting the Heartless and gaining perks from defeating them was also a nice feature. I loved the idea of the passive stat boosts. It gave you more of an incentive to collect the cards and defeat more Heartless, as these normally inconsequential practices served to make Xehanort stronger. The crafting mechanic was fun, although underused.

Cons: A big downside to this game is something I’ve seen players complain about all over the place— the repetition. The game can certainly become repetitive, especially if you’re grinding for levels, materials, or to stock up on defeated enemies to earn perks. There were often events requiring thousands of Heartless to be killed to unlock prizes or cards. In between Story Quests there were tasks to defeat a certain number of Heartless in order to advance. This was best accomplished by setting Xehanort and Pals to auto and walking away. (And muting it… the sound effects could get irritating after twenty minutes or so.) There were times when it was important to control the actions, especially with difficult enemies, but much of the game was best done on auto, and that can get boring and feel pointless. The crafting feature was somewhat squandered, with fully crafted accessories being introduced shortly into it, and a limit of 5 accessories that could be equipped. The new characters introduced for this game weren’t developed or focused on in the course of the game and ended up being forgettable.

Design-wise, Dark Road was weaker than Union X. The way it was designed, you could put the fights on auto and the game essentially played itself until Xehanort died or you shut it off. It had some good ideas, but I feel like more objectives and less autoing would have made it better. I do appreciate that it used the same art style as Union X. It gave it instant familiarity, but with different gameplay and a different story. Dark Road was a creative idea, executed decently. Pity it didn’t get more of a chance.

No it wasn’t Mr. Mysterious Robe Guy. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)

And so that’s Dark Road. It was a fun little game. A little too “endless runner” for some, but I enjoyed it. (Endless runner is a genre of games where your character either goes in a straight line until they die, or can be put on auto to fight until the game is turned off.) While at this point the story didn’t really add much to the overall Kingdom Hearts mythos, it was enjoyable and the teases at the end of the chapters were tantalizing. (It would flash forward to after the events of the game hinting at some pretty dark turns.) The other characters besides Xehanort and Eraqus were a little bland and empty… they didn’t get much personality or depth and the game would have been better served fleshing them out. I liked the tower challenge, although that wasn’t around for very long before the end. The story ended abruptly, but I understand there is at least one more chapter to come, if not more. All of the remaining game content will be released and playable when the game next updates.

And that leads me to the rant I promised in the previous post. I love Kingdom Hearts… you all know this. Sora is half my name, after all! But this whole experience… the games hastily shut down, the delays in end of service and final updates, and the impacts that all had on crafting these posts… my patience was worn pretty thin. See, originally end of service was supposed to happen May 30th. I was working on these posts (at the time three of them) at a breakneck pace, trying to get it all done in time. It wasn’t an easy task, what with the extremely convoluted storytelling and all the game mechanics I wanted to go over. Plus the story of Union X, when put all together is over 7 hours long. Yeah… you read that right.

Then what I thought was the final story chapter of Union X released. It threw a curve into my layout, making it difficult to reveal the story of Dark Road before the story of Union X. (I can’t explain why yet without spoiling it.) Also it seemed very much open-ended and unsatisfying. Later I learned that was because they actually chopped the finale into two parts and extended the end of service to June 30th to correspond with this. Which delayed me in getting these posts out. Well, I could at least work on the first two posts in the series, right? Right?

Nope. The next huge wrench in the gears that I didn’t realize until I started working on the Dark Road post was that Dark Road had NO theater mode! So I couldn’t revisit the story and get screenshots until after the end of service, when they planned to release the theater mode. Then service ended and I got one more kick while I was down. Dark Road was now unplayable and inaccessible until September (two plus months away!) when the offline mode would be released with the rest of the game. So that’s why Xehanort’s story ended so abruptly and with no conclusion… it wasn’t actually done. (If I’d known they were planning this, I would have gotten more screenshots than I did. If you’re reading this in the future, I originally posted this with a couple of placeholders where I intended on putting more screenshots.)

So this is where my biggest dilemma came in. I had planned the next several month’s posts around this trilogy of Union X posts. How was I going to do it now? Release two and then wait almost 3 months for the third? But then how do I deal with my afore-mentioned structuring issue with putting Dark Road after Union X? I couldn’t put the stories together since that would be way too long of a post. It was a headache to try and figure out the solution. So I gave up, took a nap, and found the solution as soon as I stopped worrying about it.

The answer turned out to be pretty simple. I wanted to talk about KH3 and Melody of Memory anyway. So I could expand the final post into two and add to my Untangling the Kingdom Hearts Saga to cover the entire series to date. So that’s the current plan. (Unless Square Enix throws more curveballs at me…)

Ahh, the memories. (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)

But enough complaining. Conclusion time! I’m going back to discussing both halves of the game now to close out this chapter. I spent a LOT of time playing Kingdom Hearts Union X Dark Road, and it’s still a little unsettling to me that it’s over. The developers gave us a little time to say goodbye, but how much time is ever enough when a game has been such a constant in your life for so many years?

Here are some fun stats. At the end of Union X, I had racked up an impressive 1,890 log in days. I reached Player Level 454. Spirit Rank: 16. Nova Level 2,623. Maxed out Keyblades: 2. Total Keyblades: 16. Collected medals: 1,248/1,930. 64.7% completion of album. Accumulated Munny: 256,711,200. Unspent jewels: 136,020. In Dark Road I have reached Level 50. I have defeated 76 out of 77 enemies and collected 77 out of 88 cards.

As I said in the previous post, the announcement of the end of service for these games came as a big surprise to the players. Rather than lessen support and stop updates while still keeping the game up and running for new players and old, they chose to completely sever service in one fell swoop. This was jarring and to some of us it felt like a betrayal. For those of us who had been around from the beginning (or at least years) it felt like the game would always be around, especially with the inclusion of Dark Road shortly before the end. The main Union X story pivoted unexpectedly towards an ending after the announcement, barreling towards a conclusion that honestly felt rushed.

Regardless of what the plans originally were, the game is over, and it was a fun ride. I enjoyed playing it, with all its strengths and weaknesses… through confusing story, plot and theme inconsistencies, and frustrating leaps of difficulty. The story, all told, was sweeping and fun, causing ripples of effect throughout the entire lore of Kingdom Hearts. It was the Kingdom Hearts game that did the best at bringing you into that world, making you a character, and investing you in your own growth and advancement. And for those reasons it should always be remembered.

Kingdom Hearts Union X Dark Road was a free-to-play mobile game that provided millions of players a more personal and personalized Kingdom Hearts experience. It had all the humor, action, confusing narratives, and quirkiness you would expect in a Kingdom Hearts title. But for the first time ever, you weren’t playing through the actions of Sora, Riku, Roxas, Aqua, or the rest… you were playing as yourself. This game brought the fans into the Kingdom Hearts mythos as characters… something that actually paid off during a significant moment in Kingdom Hearts III. (I’ll tell you about that later too.)

Losing this game was like losing an old friend. I will forever miss it and the adventures of Cirithy and the spiky-haired, mouse-eared boy unfortunately named SoraRab. But you may be wondering now… what happened to them? Did they die with the game? What happened to all those millions of real-world Keyblade wielders that this game created and injected into the history of Kingdom Hearts? That is actually a very interesting story and it does not end at all the way you would expect. But that, as they say, is a story for another day. Join me in Untangling the Kingdom Hearts Saga Part 4 to experience all those twists and turns for yourself!

Two posts down, two to go! (Credit: Square Enix, Disney)

Thank you for reading this duo of posts. It was a lot of work putting these together and will be a lot more work before I’m done, but I like to imagine it was worth it. These two posts are here to memorialize and celebrate a game that meant a lot to a lot of people and I wanted to do it justice. Hopefully I succeeded in this and helped you all to appreciate the game a bit for what it was… a lengthy, yet fleeting experience that is now over, living on in posts like these and our memories. The pages of this book come to an end, the back cover closes. Time to look ahead to the next story.

I’m going to miss this game… the mystery slowly unfolding, the distinctive and cute art style, the excitement of seeing new story quests arrive, the thrill of upgrading my medals and Keyblades, strengthening my little black-robed avatar and making him into a hero that could stand side by side with Sora himself. It was more than just a fun game… it was an unforgettable experience. One that I’m grateful I got to have and to share with you all. Until next time, thanks for reading. I appreciate you all. Never take for granted those things you love. You never know when you’re going to get your own unexpected “end of service” announcement.