Kingdom Hearts Union χ [Cross]

» see kingdomhearts.com/unionx/us as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The Japanese service ended on 17 June 2021 at ten in the morning. Everywhere else went on 30 June. Square Enix had announced the closure back on 25 February and stopped selling Jewels, the paid currency, the same day.

It launched in Japan on 3 September 2015 under a different name, Kingdom Hearts Unchained χ, and reached North America in April 2016. In March 2017 it was renamed Union χ [Cross] through a version update that left everyone's save data where it was, so despite carrying three different names this was one app the whole time. A second game, Dark Road, was added inside it in June 2020 rather than released separately.

Tetsuya Nomura co-directed it, with music by Yoko Shimomura. Square Enix said in April 2020 that it had passed ten million downloads, a figure it has never broken down any further.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the console games need ~

This is where Union χ stops resembling the other dead gacha games filed on this site. It is a direct prequel to Kingdom Hearts III. Dark Road is the origin story of Xehanort, the series villain, set about sixty-five years before Birth by Sleep.

Square Enix put load-bearing plot into a free phone game. Characters were introduced there and nowhere else. Kotaku reported in September 2026 that these two titles hold the only previous appearances of several characters due to return in Kingdom Hearts IV.

So the mainline story of one of the largest properties Square Enix and Disney share between them now has a gap in it that can only be filled by an application you cannot download. Square Enix delisted the app from both stores in late August 2024 and never put out a statement about it. The official global website stopped answering that October.

~ the date they took back ~

The original notice gave different dates: 30 April 2021 for Japan, 30 May for everyone else. In April Square Enix withdrew both and moved the end later, to 17 June and 30 June. Players got seven extra weeks. Revisions to a shutdown date usually run the other way.

Japanese law then did something the company had no say in. Unused paid Jewels counted as a prepaid payment instrument under the Payment Services Act, so Square Enix had to refund them in actual money, by bank transfer or at a convenience store, with an application window running from 18 June to 15 September 2021.

~ the museum they delisted ~

An offline version arrived the day each region closed. It kept Theater Mode, which held every cutscene, along with the little Classic Kingdom minigames. Everything that needed a server was stripped out, the gacha included. The detail worth sitting with is that Theater Mode was not built for the funeral: it shipped in the April 2017 rename update, four years before it became the only part left standing.

Then Square Enix delisted the offline build too, in August 2024, along with everything else carrying the name. In September 2026 a modder put up an unofficial browser port of the final version, and that is now the most reliable way to watch the story.

Ten million people downloaded this, and I am not among them. Kingdom Hearts began on the PlayStation 2 in 2002. I never owned a PlayStation 2 and neither did anyone I spent time with, because the machines we paid for by the hour were PCs, and what ran on them was Counter-Strike. The franchise went by me completely. I came nearest to it years afterward, reading that a Disney phone game had been carrying plot for a series I never played. What I notice now is the preservation question rather than the story: a company with Disney's lawyers behind it managed to lose its own canon, and a stranger on the internet had to go and get it back.

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