Jul 19, 2018 3:01 PM

Tired of Waiting For Kingdom Hearts III? Check Your Phone

Kingdom Hearts Union χ hit mobile a couple of years ago—and is the perfect appetizer for the long-awaited console title.

Kingdom Hearts 3 was announced more than a decade ago. It was never intended to come out immediately—instead, it would follow a planned series of spin-offs and side games from Square Enix, each of which would fill in gaps in the story and set in motion important plot threads, all of which would eventually be resolved in the third numbered installment, the finale of the current major narrative arc.

In truth, the publisher probably didn't intend to wait a decade. But due to a bevy of complicated factors, here we are, in 2018, awaiting the release of Kingdom Hearts 3 next January. Finally, KH3 will join The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy XV in the pantheon of vaporware made flesh, (or at least made data). If you, like me, are a bit cowed by the prospect of these final few months of that wait, though, there may be respite—in the form of a two-year-old mobile game?

Kingdom Hearts Union χ (which had two previous names, but which I'll be calling Union Cross from here on out) is an oddity. Released in 2016, after an earlier incarnation as a browser-based game, it's a hybrid of two distinct mobile forms: a densely designed, microtransaction-heavy spinoff, and an original, story-driven experience. It is, despite appearances, a full Kingdom Hearts game, cut into mobile-sized chunks, and tucked away in a format where most players interested probably don't even know it exists.

In the first Kingdom Hearts game, one of the most important pieces of lore is the revelation of a creation story, a fable told by one of the protagonist's grandmothers in a flashback. Once, she explained, the world was whole, an interconnected reality united by a great light. But people started to fight over the light, and darkness was born—a darkness that consumed that world. Only the light of children saved it, and the world of Kingdom Hearts was born: a reality broken up into an infinite expanse of fragmented worlds, landmasses floating in space with their own insular civilizations and no knowledge of the outside. These landmasses, conveniently, map to isolated versions of Disney properties, and using magic to flit between them and have adventures is the primary sales pitch of Kingdom Hearts.

Union Cross takes place during that fable. It is, in essence, an origin story for the whole universe, set generations before the original games; its purpose is to explain the saga's central conflict, the Keyblade War, which erupted between the light and the dark and broke the world. You play as a Keyblade wielder, given power of a weapon that can literally decide the fate of the world (though, yes, it looks like a giant key). Narratively, you do what any Kingdom Hearts fan knows as the Kingdom Hearts thing: exploring Disney stories and hanging out with Disney characters within a broader fantasy universe that teeters between whimsical and melancholy, goofy and surprisingly serious.

The play experience is straightforward, but not uninteresting. Missions are simple combat and exploration missions featuring snappy turn-based combat, all rendered in an appealingly bright storybook art style. Attacks are rendered as "medals" that can be collected and equipped, each featuring a character from Disney properties or from the extended Kingdom Hearts universe, letting the player channel the power of other characters in combat.

And, like so many mobile games, herein lies the rub. Collection can be involved and tedious, a miasma of microtransactions and timed missions that is designed to waste as much time and money as possible. Yet it's also optional, and if you can play while resisting the temptation to sink money into it, Union Cross is rewarding.

Kingdom Hearts is notorious among its fanbase for getting weirder as it goes on. Its simple fable of light and dark becomes a complicated cosmology that weaves in existentialism and surrealist coming-of-age allegories, all interlaced through Final Fantasy-esque Square Enix aesthetics and the values and properties of Disney cartoons. And Union Cross is one of the weirdest, melding all of the usual Kingdom Hearts quirks into a high fantasy-styled prequel that's half storybook fable and half The Silmarillion. It's a story that is likely going to prove significant in some form or another to Kingdom Hearts 3, even if only in passing, and it's fascinating in its own right, too.

If you're a Kingdom Hearts obsessive (ahem), you've probably already played Union Cross and gotten what you want out of it. But Square Enix is still actively supporting it, so for the Kingdom Hearts fan, or the merely curious, it's still there, active and waiting, a tightly wound delivery mechanism for all the wonderful strangeness of the series. Just try not to get mad at the menu screens too much. You'll get used to them.