Kingdom Hearts χ[chi]

» see kingdomhearts.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Square Enix switched off Kingdom Hearts χ[chi] at 14:00 on 1 September 2016. The game's own goodbye, which took the place of the start button on its homepage, counted the run at three years. It had opened on Yahoo! Games on 18 July 2013, after ten days of open beta whose save data was carried straight into the live service. The termination notice gave no reason for any of it, only an apology and a line about the story reaching its close.

It was the first browser game in the series, and the first Kingdom Hearts you did not pay for up front. You built a deck of nine attack cards and five assist cards around a keyblade, then fought for a currency called Lux. Every player belonged to one of five Unions, which competed on how much Lux their members gathered in a day, and the thirty-player teams inside those Unions were reshuffled every Monday. It ran on Flash Player 11.7. The official requirements named Windows Vista and Windows 7, and tablets were not supported.

Square Enix published exactly one number about its audience. On 12 September 2013, two months in, Famitsu reported registrations past two hundred thousand, announced alongside the level cap going from 100 to 200. Nothing followed it. Not at any of its three anniversaries, and not on the last day.

The game has two names and they do not travel together. In Japan it was キングダム ハーツ キー, Kingdom Hearts Key, because that is how the Greek letter in the logo is read there. Everywhere else it is χ[chi], which is how the same character is read in English. The logo Square Enix published in February 2013 carries both at once, the bracketed [chi] sitting directly above the Japanese for Key. Only one of those readings belonged to anyone who could actually log in: the game ran on Yahoo! Games and later on three more Japanese portals, and that was its entire territory. The rest of us inherited a pronunciation and not a game.

~ the dossier ~

~ the story ended first ~

The announcement on 7 April 2016 put the narrative ahead of the service. What Square Enix published was that the story of Kingdom Hearts χ[chi] would be reaching its end by early September, with the exact date and hour to be named later. The same day, the mobile successor Unchained χ opened in North America.

They did make sure the ending was reachable. From 18 August the game handed out a story support card that cost nothing to play and multiplied attack and defense sevenfold, with field experience pushed to ten times normal. The last chapter of the main story shipped on 25 August, a week later than planned, and Square Enix apologized for the delay by paying out fourteen copies of a Fairy Godmother card. A bonus short episode went out on the 29th. The servers stopped three days after that.

~ the week after ~

Nothing of the game itself survived. There is no offline build and no port. It was Flash talking to a server, and once the server stopped there was nothing left to run it against.

What could move moved sideways into the phone game. Unchained χ had launched in Japan on 3 September 2015, so for all but two days of a year the two of them ran at the same time, and players who linked their accounts could carry their avatars over. Everything that made you a player stayed behind, every level and every card.

The cards got their own exit and it closed early. You sold your best ones for special coins and spent the coins on a board inside Unchained χ, and the deadline for that was 13:59 on 1 September, one minute before the servers went down. The avatars ran the other way around. They did not become usable in the phone game until 8 September, a week after the game they came from had stopped existing.

~ the thursday slot ~

Square Enix stopped the billing system on 1 August at 14:00, one month before the end to the hour. Charge money already bought stayed spendable until the last day, which is to say there was no refund, only a thirty-day window to spend down whatever was in your account.

The game's own site advertised regular maintenance every Thursday between 13:00 and 16:00. The first of September 2016 was a Thursday and 14:00 sits in the middle of that window. The notice described the ending in those terms too: メンテナンスにて新規登録停止およびサービス終了, new registrations halted and service ended, named in the same breath as the weekly upkeep.

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