Kingdom Hearts Mobile

» see square-enix.co.jp/mobile/kh as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Kingdom Hearts Mobile was announced alongside Kingdom Hearts coded and launched a month after it, on 15 December 2008, on NTT DoCoMo handsets in Japan. It was not a game in the way the rest of the series is a game, and it is not part of the main storyline. It was an online community service: a flat 2D space called the Avatar Kingdom where you walked a customized avatar around and did things with other people's avatars.

The architecture was a set of rooms. An Event Hall held the group activities and a Point Bank tracked the points and munny you had earned, while most of the rest of the map was shops selling outfits, ringtones and wallpapers off the back of them. Your own corner was the V Net Room, a profile where you could mail other avatars. Mini-games were scattered through the whole thing, from a Spider Solitaire variant to a rhythm game.

Square Enix shut the service down on 30 April 2013. It had run for four years and four months and had never been available anywhere except Japan, on any carrier except DoCoMo.

~ the case file ~

~ the avatar kingdom ~

The clever bit was the link to coded. Clearing an episode of Kingdom Hearts coded unlocked outfits and backgrounds for your Mobile avatar, so the single-player game fed the social one. Everything else you wanted came from the store, bought with munny, which you got by playing. That loop is standard in mobile games now. It was put together here in 2008, out of parts that had to fit through a feature phone connection.

Avatars of Sora and Kairi standing around in a 2D hub do not look like much next to what the series was doing on consoles. But a persistent world where a Disney and Square Enix audience could meet and compare scores was a real thing to have on a phone two years before Japan's social gaming boom properly arrived.

~ tied to one carrier ~

Being a DoCoMo service was the whole business and the whole problem. In 2008 that was the right bet: i-mode had trained an entire country to pay small amounts for mobile content through their phone bill, and Square Enix had been selling into it for years. Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII had already proved there was money in a serious title on a Japanese feature phone.

Then the iPhone arrived in Japan and the whole scaffolding came out from under it. A service built for DoCoMo's browser and DoCoMo's billing could not simply be moved. By 2013 the handsets it had been written for were being retired by the people who owned them, and Square Enix was building for smartphones instead.

~ the day it died ~

There was no drama on 30 April 2013. A Japanese mobile service announced a closure date and ran to it. The avatars and whatever munny anyone had left went with it, because none of it existed anywhere except on Square Enix's servers.

Japan's keitai internet was running a parallel civilization to the one I was on. In 2008 I was finishing university on TTNet broadband with MSN open, and a phone was for calling people. The idea that an entire country had been buying ringtones and outfits through the carrier's bill for most of a decade only became visible to the rest of us later, mostly as an explanation for why Japanese mobile gaming looked the way it did when it finally reached the App Store.

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