Why I Uninstalled Uχ After 280 days of Play

"Oh, you need Jewels for that too?" Why I Uninstalled UX after 280 Days of Play.
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I am going to begin this by first stating that everyone will play this game in different ways, and it will probably be much different than my personal experience with Kingdom Hearts Unchained χ (Or rather, Kingdom Hearts Union χ). I went through this game in a manner that would probably actually be considered Hardcore rather than Core as is listed on my profile based on just how much time I have spent on this game especially on the weekends.

I have decided to start with overall, what I found particularly fun about this game, and why I ended up on here longer than I probably should have been. Now, a lot of this is going to end up readdressed in my next section, because with any constantly updated game there were changes that ultimately ruined this whole thing for me.
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What I Really Like About KHUX:​

Avatars: I really like the art style. I know quite a few people who hate the designs of the characters in this game but I like it, it has a very “cute” look to it, like it is trying to have a playful design due to the (at first) playful nature of the game. I like most of the outfits, some are just… bad, but I found myself enjoying choosing what my avatar wore.

The Medal Levelling System: It is not easy to get this at first I will admit. When I started, I had no idea how to make the multipliers higher or what the most cost effective way to level would be. But once I had it down, I got it. They later introduced the “Nova” system, which would be based on the percentage you would get for maximizing your medal’s special attack bonuses (also known as “Guilt”) and it felt very rewarding to try and get as many medals max level as possible. My Nova level ended at “199” before I uninstalled, which I’d say is good for someone who had no idea what they were doing at first.

The Challenges (Daily Challenges, High Score Challenges [mostly], and/or Organization Medals): I found these a welcome break from quests and raid bosses, some having strategy to them I could not find anywhere else. And the Daily Challenges were usually not very hard and would net an easy ~200 jewels a day, which is ALWAYS welcome in this game. My personal favorite challenge was the Alice in Wonderland challenge which gave an Alice & Cheshire Cat medal, not because the medals was anything I found myself using at that point but because the challenge was a lot of fun, it was a maze that the cards gave hints for the directions to take. You could just do it wrong and power through the helicopters if you were too powerful, but I did not have that kind of power so I took it the expected way and it was fantastic as a result. Most of these types of challenges I found to be fun, they got me thinking about my medals or how I went about my route.

Proud Quests (For the Most Part): The introduction of Proud Quests made it so the player did the same quests as in ‘standard mode’ but with a twist, you were locked with one type of keyblade and had guidelines your medals had to meet to pass the challenges. These were made under the assumption those playing were already pretty powerful and into the game far enough where they were equipped with high level keyblades and medals. This brought the ‘strategy’ effect into place that I mentioned in daily challenges, thinking more about what medals were being used. Even if I want that powerful attack, I might not have a way to recover my Special Gauge so I need to find something that does a similar effect for less, under the guidelines. Things like this made the game fun for me and brought me back a lot. I only finished to Proud Quest 71 before I quit.
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What I Do Not Like About UX​

For this next part, I am going to split these problems into three parts ‘avoidable, somewhat avoidable, and impossible to avoid’

AVOIDABLE:

I Don’t Need Phone Space Or Anything: The size of this game is very large. My phone can only hold about 5GB of space which, I’m aware for a phone these days this is small, but for me this game takes up almost half of that space. I had to manage my phone files constantly to keep this game going, and I ended up choosing the game over taking photos with my phone. Other people may have larger phones, or can get an SD card and worry less about this than me, but this was an issue for me in particular (size of file for me ended up 1.68GB)

Raid Boss Grinding is a Bore: You could go your entire life without experiencing the Raid Boss Grind, you really could. Other than it being a nifty way to gain a lot of lux quickly, so you can level up faster, it is not necessary to your progress. For me, it became the common part of gaming due to the KHV community’s Weekly Leaderboards, trying to climb to the top of the leaderboards by getting as much as you can. And you might be able to do that for in game rankings to, that was not my motivation, it was the spirit of competition between friends. But really, the raid boss grind is an endless loop of “use medals to get rid of the raid boss’ health, if you die do it again, if you beat it, summon the next one”. Raid bosses did not have a strategy to being defeated in the way that bosses in the Quests did, you just did as much damage as you could to it by using the latest hard hitter medal on your friends list (or if you were lucky to pull and guilt it yourself). The intent behind it was to have a group fight that resulted in your party working on the same raid bosses together, but this seldom happened with me and ended up with me sitting there for up to 20 minutes trying to destroy the raid boss by myself (I would say kill but the word kill is censored in UX).

MOSTLY AVOIDABLE:

Jewels, Jewels? Jewels?! JEWELS!!: Jewels is the in-game currency that works in a similar way to Farmville Dollars… what I’m trying to say is you get a small amount in game and you may or may not have to shell out a lot of money for jewels if you want to keep on top. And you need jewels for EVERYTHING in game. You want the newest medal that is just objectively better than anything you’d ever get for free in this game: Jewels! You need to raise up your inventory space so you can hold those medals you’ve been grinding for? Jewels! Your AP runs out (on the off chance you actually do because almost every week is a 0 AP week) but you’re knees deep into the game and don’t want to have to wait for all that AP to restore? Jewels! You want that avatar board because it has a Magic Gem and you already got all the free ones in game you can get for now? Jewels! And nothing is ever super cheap either. You can get 5 inventory slots for 100 jewels which isn’t too bad, but the better medal pulls are around 3000 jewels, the avatar boards are around 2000-3000 jewels. Yes, some pulls are cheaper and some avatar boards are cheaper, but generally they are not. Jewels fortunately can be accumulated in game without payment, so you may not end up having the game become a money sink if you’re wise with your spending, but when the wait gets grating, be careful.

High Score Challenges, for the higher tier rewards: You see that there’s a large gap in prize cost after you find yourself miraculously pulling yourself through the high score challenge without multiplier medals (medals that give a boost to your score, often tied to the current medal pull). But that free medal looks really nice, you just need to get 10,000,000 points in the high score challenge. But wait, you’ve already beaten all the enemies, how would you: wait, you need to have a 100% or more multiplier to even get anywhere CLOSE to that score? Well shoot, that means I need to get that Roxas medal that’s I can get after… oh this weeks medal pull doesn’t guarantee the medal after five pulls. Guess I’m not getting that free medal, huh?

GET THIS MEDAL PULL FOR ONLY 2400 JEWELS THE FIRST TIME THEN 3000 THE REST: These have gotten worse, then better, then worse, then better. Originally these Medal Deals included any medals you could pick up in the game for free, and you were guaranteed the medals after 10 pulls (basically if you weren’t lucky and didn’t pull them in the first 9 and got the guaranteed 10th, you just spent almost 200-300 American dollars on jewels. Eventually this was changed to none of the free medals in the pulls and guaranteed after 5 pulls, which is still a little over 100 dollars American if you are not lucky in the slightest. There were different types of daily medal deals created afterwards, like the “Falling Price” deal which makes the cost lower after each purchase but there’s no guarantee of a medal. There was also the occasional deal where the person was guaranteed the medal each time, but only once a day for a certain amount of days, still the full price. Yes, it is understandable why a paid medal will be better than a free medal, because someone is paying for it, but the issue stems from the fact that these medals are often required to get some free medals. So these medal pulls often ended up where all your jewels went. But if you wanted a medal that could restore gauges, you probably had to pay money for it.

UNAVOIDABLE:

Medal Special Effects and the Constant Crashing of the Game [especially in Union X]: Medal effects are an option that cannot be turned off, and if your phone sucks you will lose out because of this. I had the fortune of getting a rather rare medal for having pulled an Illustrated Terra one week, and I got an Aqua Terra Ven medal. It was great, it was a 0 special gauge medal in an era where this was uncommon, and the effect constantly crashed my game. The flashy effect they used would lag the game until it auto-closed. The issue for a while could be solved by avoiding using that medal in certain quests, but once union cross was out, this was something I could never escape, and I heard from many others the same thing kept happening to them. Combined with multiple player’s medal effects, my game constantly lagged and I knew there were days that using a medal would make me lose out of the quest. If they found a way to turn the lights off it would save that, but it may or may not be tied to the player animation, which due to timed challenges is necessary because some medals have a longer time to use than others. I just had to stand still during Union X quests many a times and become a healer… which leads me to.

Union Cross, and the Most Unteamlike Teamwork Ever: You run in with a team of six people and you are going to be of no help to any of the others. There are no medals that give team healing, team buffs, or debuffs to the boss the rest of the team you can use. It is under the guise of a multiplayer but the team work is basically a real time raid boss. Times challenges in these quests may be the only thing multiplayer is actually helpful for. You need to defeat 100 heartless in 2 minutes? Pssh, yeah just split the party and get all the large groups and you’re all set. Otherwise, everything is just a mess with Union X. You are not grouped by level, so as someone who was max level by the time Union X went out, I was stuck playing with people who had to be at least level 20… heck, maybe even less than that. Which is really helpful since they generally do not know how the mechanics work and you end up having to resurrect them more often than you really should be [some people just leave them to die, I don’t have the heart for that… I mean, at least until it gets to resurrection 4, then I might leave them.]

Perk systems, and how they ruined unique costumes: I mean, unless you enjoy looking like an abomination, the perks system really ruined what was special about the costumes. I was someone who would invest in particular costumes because I loved the look of the outfit and wanted to wear it. I’d do quests for hairstyles, I’d finish Coliseum Boards for the monthly costumes, I had a blast with it. When they introduced perks, they made it so abilities were locked to specific costume pieces. This meant if you wanted to have a better chance at summoning Omega Raid Bosses, you had to wear an outfit made entirely of items with that ability. Same with skill perks. And almost none of them were matching outfits. There really was no point to going for outfits once this was made, except for the fact you didn’t know which pieces might have a perk, but I never wore outfits I wanted to because of this system.


A Personal Tangent About The Plot of KHUX, and Why I No Longer Find it Worth my Time [there are spoilers up until Quest 615 and Backcover is sprinkled in there for good measure]:

I did not playing Kingdom Hearts Chi. And I have bare minimum knowledge of Kingdom Hearts Chi. Under the assumption with was a different story, and it very much is, but it’s… pretty bad. You’re playing as a player avatar who is introduced to Chirithy, this adorable cat-like companion who aids you on your quest to collect enough lux for your union. It starts off with about 350 quests of nothing really plot relevant, just a bunch of Disney travels until it thrusts you into plot… for a moment before disappearing again. Whatever the overarching plot is supposed to be, it is sidelined by the Disney worlds which go on forever, and result in outright boredom until OH WOW THEY MIGHT HAVE MENTIONED PLOT.

Japan is much further ahead in terms of plot, but from where I was, you meet a friend named Ephemer who is on his own personal mission separate from the unions, and he disappears. You try to figure out what happened to him with a new friend (who happened to also be a friend of Ephemer’s) named Skuld. You find out about Ava’s plan with the Dandelions, and how she made Ephemer their leader, and you are offered a place with them. You refuse… and… that’s it for the plot right now. Yep. What I said in these two paragraphs is all the main plot has accomplished. Oh wait, there was a brief spar between two foretellers you witness at one point but you don’t follow them to figure out what it’s about. I… assume it’s one of the fights that happened in backcover. Of course, Backcover has nothing to do with the plot either. It details what’s up with the foretellers but that doesn’t directly effect UX in any manner other than “yeah this is probably happening”.

There is something that pops up, where other characters are turning into these heartless and Chirithy’s are going dark. It barely taps into that before taking us to Cinderella’s world to make her a dress. Ya know, cause that’s important.

It also feels as though they are not sure what to do with presentation either. For a while, your character is this silent avatar until you start speaking 400-500 missions in. It doesn’t know how dark it wants to get, how involved it wants your character to be in the central plot and it’s really annoying and it loses me. Maybe there are people who like this plot, but I find the plot to be the weakest part of UX overall.



This is it, my wall of goodbye to UX. I won’t say the hours I have played were a waste, but they are just not enough to keep me here. Even if they managed to fix multiplayer or the plot got more kicked off, I’m not coming back to this game. I’ll look up summaries instead. It’ll save me time, money, and space on my phone. I may be gone, but I’m sure the journey for others will go on for much longer. Best of luck.

My wall of retirement:

Spoiler: Images Entirely

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I know this is a really old thread but I agree 100%. After a while I was playing the game simply to understand the story and it was such a chore that I ended up hating playing it. Not just that but I felt a lot of pressure to do literally everything - make sure to do the quest for the fairy medals, the cid medals, the high score challenge etc, because I wanted to make sure I had the best possible chance without spending any of my personal money on the game. Honestly it began stressing me out - I would time when all my AP would come back to go grind to get XXX level up medals, then let it all run out, set a timer for 7 hours when it would come back again to do it all again everyday. Because the game told me that only jewels really matter so you'd better do everything you can to make sure without jewels you can do well.

I wish this thread has more of a conversation surrounding it lol. Like you bring up a lot of issues with the game and I think people are feeling it and just don't wanna talk about it

 

Yeah, it's a bit old at this point. In fact, there are some things that were fixed up after this thread was made that people've told me. For example: autobattling raid bosses is a thing now. A luxury I didn't get to experience when I was playing, and of course only popped up after I quit.

But it's the story that just sucks me away, I just have this urge to know WHY this has to be significant to KH3... despite there being virtually no plot. It's the backdrop of UX that is more important than the actual plot of UX and that just always rubbed me the wrong way.

At this point I'm more than willing to let others experience the game for me unless something super game-changing happens. And the fact that a "new world" is coming to UX just bothers me more than it really should, because if it ends up a world I REALLY wanted in Kingdom Hearts, I'm still gonna have to pass it up because I just can't even deal with UX anymore.

Plus, everyone knows UX put me in debt for a little while. I'm sure others were worst but it almost makes it feel toxic to want to be sucked into a world of jewels and "stoned avatars" as someone once eloquently put it.