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Kingdom Hearts Missing Link is cancelled
How do my fellow KH fans on tildes feel? I'm honestly kind of relieved. Gacha is an inherently predatory business model, and the game by all accounts was extremely unfun. It's still the first KH game to be outright cancelled mid development, so I'm still worried about what this means for the series.
I'm hoping that the devs never return to the mobile space.
Hate gacha and anything even close to it. For me personally, they aren't games. Not in any meaningful sense. It's just a naked cash grab and feels at best icky and at worst, as you said, predatory.
For Kingdom Hearts specifically, I'm not a fan of core story development happening in random mobile games. I know they've been doing it since the very beginning, but I'd really like for them to stick to console and PC. I would definitely consider myself a fan of the series, but moreso the original trilogy of KH1, Chain of Memories, and KH2. I think they started going pretty off the rails, and the scattering the story across a myriad of mobile games was a part of the problem. So for me, I'd say it's happy news if anything.
I feel the same way. I think KH1-CoM-KH2 is a tidy little self contained story. I don't dislike the BBS and onwards era, but that's when it get convoluted (and not in a good way), and when Nomura start undoing deaths and sacrifices for fan service.
I am very glad that I don't need to look up the cutscenes or watch a 2 hour lore video about yet another mobile game to keep up with this series. They really let this series get out of hand treating every spinoff entry's story with the weight of a numbered title. As JordanM said, it's been that way ever since the second game, but now that most of the major stuff is ported to modern consoles/PCs now's a good time to slow down on that practice.
On the other hand, I bet there was a lot of artistic effort that was put into this project which has now gone to waste. Yoko Shimomura said she wrote some songs for this game which she hopes we will still be able to hear someday. I also wonder what they will do with any story threads they originally intended to be covered in this game, if they'll be shoehorned into KH4 or frantically removed from the current plan or what.
I feel like many franchises try to fill their lore through comics, books and side games. While I disliked the gatcha stuff, it was actually really fun for me getting to read through wikis about all the crazy stuff that happened in those gatcha games. I was actually excited to find out about Scala ad Caelum. My worry is that all the backstory will just be trashed. I feel like we actually get more lore in the side stuff than we did in KH3, but I may be misremembering.
It's definitely common practice for spinoffs to have lore, sometimes even awesome lore. The big difference is how important seeing those spinoffs is for knowing what's going on in the next big "numbered" entry. You can watch Star Wars episodes 1-9 without seeing any of the spinoff material and know what's going on. You might need to see Star Wars spinoffs to understand other Star Wars spinoffs, but not the main movies. If you don't look up the lore from Union Cross, Birth By Sleep, and Dream Drop Distance before playing KH3, you'll not know who half of the characters are and why you should care about them.
Yeah, I worry that to. I hope anything they planned can be reworked into other projects, or if they really can't do that, at the very least they can do a cutscene movie.
Yeah, a lot of KH3 was wrapping up plotlines I feel. The big lore thing I remember was the big reveal at the end
KH3 ending spoiler
that Xigbar was a big mastermind the whole time, and is really that Luxu guy from Union Cross.
I'm nitpicking here, but I argue you could play KH3 without UX and not be too confused about the overall lore. The UX cameos were minor and not needed to understand the situation (maybe outside the general idea of the war, but that's also talked about in Birth by sleep). You do need to watch Back cover for the box/secret ending stuff, though.
KH4 is definitely shaping up to integrate a lot of UX lore, though. It may be more important to watch UX than any other side game from what we know.
Welp, I guess I don't expect much sympathy from a western audience on this topic, but this was a real let down for me today. I've played gacha for a while and am used to the model and even played KHUX for a bit (I quit during the infamous Agrabah drought, though). Seeing a mobile game that more closely reflected a mainline title's combat was exciting. It'd be a good side dish while we inevitably accepted that we were going to get yet another 7 year wait for KH4.
And I think that really highlights the real reason that this cancelation: we just don't have anything. Between KH2 and KH3 had 4 side entries, the mobile saga, and then lots of ports and cutscene collections to make it all accessible. Since KH3 we have gotten one side game and PC ports. If you were caught up, there hasn't been a new anything in 5 years now. 3 years since the trailers for KH4. It's been a rough 20's and the lack of KH anything doesn't help.
I work in games so I know a part of that is as simple as "we don't have side platforms anymore". Making a Switch only game doesn't make any sense and isn't much cheaper than porting it to consoles. Mobile titles fill in that void for the East, but something in 2020 changed that: Genshin Impact. Very long story short, China came out swinging and essentially the expectations of a "AAA mobile game" started matching parity woth console development. Including with costs. This is something Japan hesitated to do because they didn't want to cannabalize their console market, but China took advantage of this and quickly established its place in the industry with this approach. This hits all of Japan hard, and I'm sure part of that pressure lead to this decision. Things just changed so fast (and the economy isn't helping either).
That's my rant. An unpopular one but I wanted some place to post it amongst all the joy and glee I see over a cancelation announcement and usual cynicism over those who don't understand the mobile world (even the mobile game communities in the west are mostly just console gamers, so that doesn't help). As well as the usual "gamers don't understand the industry" kinds of takes.
KH4 won't be affected by this development-wise as this was a separate team. Will the team join KH4? Impossible to say without being on the inside. They could join, they could scatter, they could be working on a separate mobile title altogether. Likely not be fired thanks to labor laws, fortunately. It depends on where square wants them.
I'll also throw out a note that KHUX is a strong contender for best story overall, and second only to 358/2 Days in writing. Having another entry like that woth proper, voiced cutscenes was exciting. But alas.
I want to respond to you in good faith, even though I want the opposite thing you want. I don't want to argue, but I do want to explain where I'm coming from.
I consider gachas to be inherently unethical and immoral. They don't have to be. It's' not impossible for a company to implement monthly spending controls, to make sure the 1% of its fanbase that is in a vulnerable place doesn't destroy their lives. But to my knowledge, only Nintendo did this, once. Aside from that, no company has ever done this, and ML didn't see to be any different. Again, this model is inherently immoral. It destroys lives, companies know this and do nothing about it because more money. It relies on terminally online depressed people, kids and gambling addicts to fund the rest of the game for the people not spending a dime. Kingdom Hearts, of all IPs, should not be in the business of abusing other humans like that.
So that's the ethical side as I see it. You mention KH not having anything, but hat's for the exact same reason; gachas. If SE hadn't discovered mobile gaming, we'd be getting quality titles like CoM, BBS and Days. The reason we're not getting those is because easily cheap gachas like UX are cheaper and more profitable than proper games like CoM. The gacha model has annihilated the possibility of getting good side games.
You are 100% correct that Genshin Impact changed the game, but I think in a good way. It's not acceptable to throw a couple of assets together, release and print money for nothing. If you want to be a profitable gacha (again, still an unethical model), you do now have to put in some effort.
Square Enix is perfectly capable to putting together a short, cheap KH game, and it might return a tidy profit since it'll cost little. But lately, they seem to want it both ways. If you want Genshin Impact money, you need to give your game a Genshin Impact budget. If you want to throw together a few assets together for cheap, then sell your cute little game for 10 bucks on Steam. But they no longer get to make something as cheap and basic as KHUX and print free money. That era is over.
This is where the glee is coming from. A large part of this community didn't want Kingdom Hearts, a series about love and connection, involved in the gacha business, a business that has devastated so many families.
At this point I'm pretty apathetic to this point. Consider the following:
Being a part of games means accepting that a big success could indeed ruin someone's mental state due to the ideas of an addicting game loop triggering similar parts of the brain as a drug. I almost never drink but I take a similar stance here as I do with alcohol : most people overall will not fall for this, and many that do fall for this would be prone to many kinds of of other addiction to escape their lives. Ethical or otherwise
When I was making well into 6 figures, I could spend a few hundred on gacha and still put 20% savings away and still aggressively spend down on my student loans. By 2021, I probably spent north of $5000 on Fire Emblem Heroes over 3 years, and also paid off all my student loans while having $10000 as an emergency fund. After buying a few new appliances, I just didn't spend much on anything else day to day. Was I exploited? You can argue that. Was I irresponsible? Yes, and no? Could hat $5k have gone somewhere else? Of course, but you can always say that. You got to draw a line somewhere.
Likewise, today I'm laid off of full time work. And whike I didn't cold turkey gacha I went from spending a few hundred a month to $50-60 or so. Mostly battle pass kind of purchases and simply skipping banners I'd pull on a few years back. Again, I can't say I'm a fully responsible spender, but I do gave some impulse control on such matters.
Under that lens, my overall response isn't to disagree, but to note that I understand the risks and choose to partake anyway.
I disagree. The death of the handheld simply slowed things down and shifted processes to mobile. Because it traditionally had cheaper development costs (pre-genshin). If mobile gaming disappeared tomorrow, that reality of console development costs would still be looming over.
Final fantasy shows this isn't just a problem limited To KH. FF versus 13 turned FF15 had some 8 years of development under one of the most infamous development hells in the industry. FF16 clocks in with... 8 years. As far as I hear, it was a smooth development cycle too. It didn't try to scope too high like FF15. But still, they needed about the same amount of time in the oven.
That tells me that even if the games don't show it in raw scale and content, they are much more complex these days. Even for experienced teams that long learned from its woes of before.
I'm kinda mixed. You say "effort" and I hear "money". And that's the whole thing to try and cut down on when making side games. So we come back full circle: everything is expensive to develop for.
Would I want a Kingdom Hearts Impact? Absolutely. Do I think there's any chance in hell Square Enix is going to put in $100m for a "side game"? Absolutely not. Would I take that over KH4? I personally wouldn't. I still do enjoy a game with an ending packaged in.
I recognise that you're apathetic to this point. It's your life to live and to play the games you want with your time. But I think it's telling that you're apathetic and not outright opposed. There I no defense for the business model. As I said, it's inherently exploitative. It's successful if and only if it's able to hurt enough people. The last last last thing I want KH to do is destroy someone's life.
There is absolutely a difference between MMOs, bad DLCs and gachas. The former two might be bad deals, but they are not gambling. They don't prey on people (unless the MMO has loot boxes, which some do). A bad DLC deal is open about what is, but I've never once heard a story of DLCs destroying people's lives, because ultimately, it's quite hard to spend 10k on DLC. Similarly, it's quite hard to spend 10k on an MMO (again, depending on mechanics). But there are countless horror stories of the damage gachas can do and have done.
I think there might be a philosophical difference here. You mention spending tens of thousands on gachas because of a well paying job. If you're rich enough that you can spend that kind of money on what are (for most gachas) pngs, that's great, but I'm not concerned about you. I'm concerned about the person who doesn't have that kind of disposable income and destroys their life trying to match you in the arena.
You might turn around and say, hey, my money my choice. And here's where the philosophical difference might be. I'm from a more collectivist country. I don't consider your right to spend your money to be more important than the right of society to not have to deal with a bunch of ruined men, either socially or economically. It's the same reason we regulate gambling. It might be your money, but the ability to spend your money in that way is deeply damaging to the society we all live in, and therefore I cheer when that ability is curtailed. Because (and I know this is a very non American view) I consider your individual rights less important than the well-being of society as a whole.
You're right on your last point, I do mean money. Or rather, you need an actual big boy budget if you want big boy dollars. Again, I'm not celebrating this, I'd ban the entire industry. But that's the reality of the market now. Low effort gachas just struggle more and more.
I think (by coincidence, I promise!), we're also discussing the contraction of the industry on a different thread. I want to say that this is why I (selfishly) want a collapse. I don't want games to cost 100m anymore, and I don't see a way that changes until large parts of the market move on to something else (like TikTok), and the gaming companies remaining either have to sell to a small niche audience or pack up.
I just gave one. You are free to dismiss it, but thst doesn't erase the existence of it. I'm not here to convince you, just here to share and discuss my views. If you don't want to discuss them, that's fine.
Fundamentally, no. The difference is how quickly they can consume money and that seems to be where we disagree on morals. It's ultimately their money and if they choose to drop $500 on a gacha, getting drunk to Vegas, shooting up drugs, or on a prostitute: it's their choice. All things people would say is a bad investment and arguably illegal, but we still allow them. I'm not going to be a moral compass on how people enjoy life.
Am I against regulation? No, not really. If you wanna ban anyone 18 or under from playing the games, I'm not opposed. But western regulation only goes so far for Asian games. We're too connected for such a ban to really stick.
Well that's the issue. Do we regulate to save the most vulnerable or preserve most people's freedoms? There are many legal means for a person to ruin their life. This is something every culture draws lines in the sand on.
Traditionally, the US has stayed mostly on the sides of freedom (and attempts to ban have been catastrophic). So I say to focus resources to directly help the vulnerable instead of on regulation banning it for everyone.
If you're from a more collectivist society, I can see why we are clashing so strongly. I just want you to know that my view wasn't some knee-jerk reaction. I've thought about it a while and considered a mix of my own history as well as the larger culture and historical effects of regulating in my country what works or doesn't here may in fact have worked perfectly in your country.
I see. I wasn't aware of it myself, but I'm not too surprised. Seeing a canceled game and then shifting to "is the industry screwed" seems like a logical train of thought.
I work in the industry, so I'm clearly biased here. I won't go too off topic if we really are already discussing this over there, but I'll just say this: the culture of investment and lack of respect for the arts in the US is harming the industry more than anything. There's a reason all the current darlings are from EU teams.
The speed of spending the money is the problem. That's why gachas are a problem in a way TCGs are not. It's not impossible to ruin yourself buying Yu-Gi-Oh cards at a store, but in practice, it's much harder. It takes time to go to the store, get a pack, pay for it, leave, and open it. The physics of reality prevents the vast majority of people from spending 10k on booster packs, because they wouldn't be able to open them. It is far far far easier to spend on a gacha. Indeed, they make it as seamless as possible.
From my perspective, I don't see the US as worthy of emulation. People there don't see very happy in general. Entertained, sure, but not happy.
On that last post, for what it's worth, I don't think the industry is screwed. I just wish it was, but I have no expectations that these megacorps are going to suffer anything beyond a mild inconvenience.
And fully agree on that last point. I think it's because Europe believe in a state funding of the arts (and news) in a way that the US just doesn't anymore. There are remnants of the Great Society of the US, like public libraries, but there's no political will to revive that sort of state structure. Europe, some European states anyway, still sees the worth in that.
Edit: oh, one last point about freedom. I don't particularly consider Americans to be a free people. Freedom is having quality education and healthcare, allowing you to travel the world, learn new things, raise a family, eat good food. And you might have that yourself. But Americans living in a tiny rented apartment, dropping out of school, having never left their state or even city, too poor to afford kids or a house? They're not free. Government might tell them that they are, but they're not.
Freedom isn't the government not telling you what to do. Freedom is the ability to live your life the way it makes you happy. At least, that's my cultural perspective. I realise the American perspective is different (lower taxes are really culturally important, I think?), but we define freedom very differently.
I feel the same way about Kingdom Hearts in regards to the first three games being the best. There is something that I think kind of ruins all types of games; the expectation of sequels. The first three really didn’t feel like they expected to make more; they were self-contained for the most part; they were trying to make the best game they could and they had freedom to try new things. But the longer a series runs the less freedom you have to create, and so the resulting game will always feel constrained.
This is part of the reason why I enjoyed Final Fantasy in spite of the long run; they wipe the slate every time, and the similarities are only slightly more than tropes. It allows them to have a lot more freedom to make interesting games. I somehow still like the series in spite of not liking most of the later ones.
The first three games being KH1, Chain of Memories and KH2?
Because Chain of Memories really doesn't hold a candle to birth by sleep and ddd, which are basically mainline entries in all but name.
I’m also the weirdo who actually thought Chain of Memories was better with the card battle system than without. So feel free to think of me as weird.
My experience of CoM is really Re:COM. Honestly, my biggest problems were (a) the combat and (b) how slow the plot is
I could imagine CoM being better than Re:COM with just a basic card battle system.
I havent played Re so I can’t give you feedback there, but Chain was the first Kingdom Hearts game I played. It is probably one of the better games of its type for the GBA in my opinion, if not the best. Playing Kingdom Hearts after that made me think that the combat in that game was kind of dumb in comparison. I don’t mean that as a bad thing; it was still engaging enough, just not as interesting.
Completely at odds with me. I loved CoM, it and KH2 are my two favourite games in the series. By contrast, I had to force myself to finish BBS, and I couldn't even complete DDD, I was so bored.
It is an interstesting feeling. If you don't like FF16 you may still try FF17 because the series almost never retreads old ground in their entries. But it also means that if you hit that sweet spot (maybe you like FF7R) there's a bittersweet feeling knowing that FF17 may take none of the good stuff from it and go down a trench.
Kingdom Hearts does have that FF identity in it when you look at how much it tends to experiment with gameplay systems. COM was this card action battle game, BBS decided to play with crafting and form changes, Re:coded experimented with minigames, and Days focused heavily on tweaking loadouts for missions a la monster Hunter. But since it's all a continual narrative, you kinda feel "obligated" to play them all because it's all part of a larger story. It's a weird feeling, so I completely understand the relief some have in that the "experiment" didn't take them down the road to yet another mobile entry to keep up with.
I do wish in some ways that KH4 would have been a clean slate of some sorts. I guess we'll see how this "soft reboot" goes in practice.
Did KHUX really have a good story? If it did, it was for me marred by the typical trappings of what I, a non-gacha player, associate with these games - a system that promotes round the clock play, content that grows increasingly difficult to keep up with without putting a significant amount of money in, and a plethora of "free to play" enthusiasts who are really just converting an insane amount of time to make up for not putting coins into the machine. I played from around launch (April 2016) to November of that year and "only" spent $100 across 5-6 months. But it wasn't the money that made me quit and swear off gachas; it was realizing that I was spending 15 bucks for every limited time pull event, getting unlucky, and struggling to complete some later events, which made me... really unhappy.
I completely checked out of KHUX so I don't know how feasible it was to consume this story over the course of its service lifetime or how difficult it was to keep up as a very very casual player. Maybe they changed it after I quit. And note that I'm not saying I should be able to consume this content for free. But "good story" told over the course of years in a game that was frankly not balanced to be friendly to nonspenders/casuals is... well, that's a shitty medium at best.
I noted I'm not a gacha player and while I know Genshin Impact really made its mark in that space, I know nothing about it. The only other "gacha" game I played was Maplestory circa 2016-2019. Same shit - content that requires either a large amount of money (not a small amount - a LOT) or a large amount of time spent grinding to even begin to keep up. The upside was that one could sell most of their gear via outside markets; I walked away with maybe 4k USD, where 2.5k of it was a single item.
I'm saying this because I don't want to play the unethical/immoral card with gacha systems, which I've willingly participated in myself. I've played with a lot of people who spent far above their means in Maplestory, mostly not even just to meet the bare minimum requirements but for virtual clout.
My point is, do you think that we're playing the same game as people who spend a small fraction of what we've spent on our respective games? Maybe FEH was balanced better in that regard and you can educate me on that, but to say (insert gacha game) had positive qualities and were absolutely worth playing, while being in the upper brackets paying customer, seems a bit oblivious to what playing the game feels like as a lesser paying player. KHUX really was the worst possible example where you got absolutely no content out of paying, just made it much more palatable to complete content.
I don't even have an issue with paying for my games; I've apparently paid nearly 1k USD purely on subscription time for FF14 over the last five years. It depresses me a little when people talk about subscriptions like it's a crime to be charging money for the service of keeping up an MMO, especially when same MMO is pretty damn good at not capitalizing on FOMO. Then they turn around and play gacha games and happily pronounce that they're free to play / pay minimally without disclosing just how many dailies they're cycling through, on multiple games. I have some friends who will cancel plans because they need to finish their dailies. That's not a fault of the game, that's purely on my friends, but it's difficult to say that that model - a system that incentivizes paying to get out of inconvenience - makes for a game worth playing for the casual who just wants to follow along with a story that they've followed since 2002.
KHUX was also the game that killed gachas for me. I didn't have a life ruining amount of money being spent, but there definitely was a realisation after about 2 months and €100 that I could have had two games with more detailed gameplay than swipe the character portraits occasionally for that, and the story I'd gotten through was still 90% retreading the OG game just with your OC instead of Sora.
I never spent any money on it, but I remember after a session just sitting up and going... wow, this isn't a game. I haven't done anything. The next 500 missions will be pathetically easy, so even if I don't click the auto button, it'll just take one click per encounter to "win". And I'll be doing that for the foreseeable future. I'm just looking at shiny lights over and over.
And that's the day I uninstalled my gachas. I realised I could be playing actual games, or reading books, or talking to my friends.
Yes, with the biggest asterisk. If you ever felt the mainline story with Sora was a bit too naive and childish, KHUX gives a completely different angle to so many of the themes of Kingdom Hearts. Your character is pushed into war, betrayal, and taken to the brink of death multiple times in the story. The story wasn't afraid to outright kill certain people or have otherwise fine folk perform some devious tasks. And sadly, this is also where time travel mechanics were even more thoroughly fleshed out.
Now the asterisk... calling the story's pacing glacial would be an insult to icebergs. The setup is very much like 358/2 days where it wants to have more of a happy slice of life vibe as you do your job, with occasional doom setting up in the background. Then things suddenly explode into tragedy. Now instead of a year, imagine that taking some 2 years, then things calm down, and then 4 years later the other big boom hits. I don't think it's a hot take to suggest in many ways that KHUX at times felt like Nomura's dumping grounds of ideas for stuff he wouldn't be able to fit in the console/handheld games.
Even if the game was alive today, I'd say the best way to experience it is in fact through plot summaries. Mobile game pacing is usually slow, with updates happening every 4-6 weeks, but KHUX's schedule was erratic and would have 4,6+ months without significant plot progression. Then add a few more months since Global was always behind.
indeed. The game came out in 2015, and this was a bit of where there was a transition in how gacha modeled its games. Early KHUX was brutal and nearly impossible to traverse through without minmaxing strategies or paying for stronger gearing. This would lighten up a lot by 2019/2020, when gacha decided to focus less on using artificial difficulty to sell their games and make the main content extremely accessible. They'd instead focus more on leaderboard content of PvP (something KHUX didn't have) to monetize the most competitive players instead of gatekeeping the story.
That plus the pacing very much makes it understandable if you dropped off. Wheras someone later on may have a completly different experience from you and breeze through the story.
I'll note that I never spent on KHUX and didn't last too long either myself. But I have spent a lot of money on other games, including FEH that you mentioned.
It really depends on the game, if I'm being honest. These days, as mentioned above, A free player should have no issues clearing mainline content as long as they spend a bit of time understanding the gameplay and gearing. At worse, there's some optional endgame modes that would be a struggle.
You also did note that even f2p has various divides in itself; a player who diligently grinded 2 hours a day every day will look a lot different from even a low spender who may log in a few times a week. A time grind can be just as big a difference as a money grind (though most gacha tend to gate such a progression gap with stamina systems or limited entries per day).
Even still, it's inevitable that someone who spends thousands to either have every character or max out duplicates on certain characters approach a game very differently from a free or low spender. The better gacha try to minimize such a divide by not making duplicates that impactful, but it'll always be a notable difference in the two accounts. it can make community guides and tips a big divisive since you always need to keep that power divide in mind, as well as maybe a divide from events with limited/collab characters (even if they were free, not everyone may have been around for them).
The name wasn't crazy and nonsensical enough.
Kingdom ][earts: 4096 Whisper of Sorrows:remix H4DK Remastered Doritos Locos Supreme Edition
⅜
*pronounced 3 over 8
Why, it's obviously a missing link from the chain of memories!