KHUX Update

Today I have some updated impressions of Kingdom Hearts Unchain X, referred to hereafter as KHUX, (pronounce that any way you like). Though I’ve not finished the game, I do think I now have a good feeling for it as a whole and can make a fair valuation. Also, KHUX doesn’t really have an end, as new missions and events are added to it regularly. My earlier impressions of the game, which were published last month, can be read here. While KHUX is a fairly good game, many of my updated impressions on it are negative. I was willing to give KHUX a pass on its shortcomings in the early days of my playing it, but the more time I put into it the more its flaws stand out.

My character wears a jetpack and quotes MC Hammer

As of the time of publishing I am on story mission 335, but the story itself has not progressed significantly since the publishing of my previous writing piece on this game. You travel back and forth across a small number of Disney worlds battling back the Heartless, but only a few things of importance have happened so far. Maybe I have misplaced expectations for what I should get story-wise out of a mobile game, but I’m unsatisfied with how little story I’ve gotten. Kingdom Hearts games are known for their narrative, convoluted as it may be, so to see a game with the Kingdom Hearts name attached to it delivering such a shallow story is all the more disappointing.

I'm getting somewhere... I think

Because there’s so little story, the 335 main missions I’ve played so far have been mostly me playing the same small maps over and over again, but with slightly altered objectives. KHUX is generally fun, but nowhere nearly fun enough to justify the sheer amount of grinding the game forces on you. If it felt like the grinding was getting me somewhere within a reasonable amount of time I would be willing to overlook this problem, but given the paper-thin story I already mentioned, I instead seem to be getting nowhere fast.

Some of the medals I currently have

KHUX also doesn’t do the best job of explaining how everything in the game works. While much of the game is simple and east to understand, there are a number of important things the game either tells you rather late or not at all. Before playing KHUX I would suggest quickly reading through a guide so that you don’t make any dumb, irreversible mistakes, like selling a Cid medal because you weren’t sure what it was for.

Hades' schemes shock everyone but Hercules, who has fallen asleep

The last thing I want to discuss with regards to KHUX, and this is going to be the main focus of this post, is its free-to-play nature. Being free-to-play is not an inherently a bad thing, and I personally have nothing against free-to-play games, but as I’ve had time to think over how KHUX works I understand more and more how the game is designed to incentivize the player to pay money for it. Everything in KHUX is centered around jewels, the primary currency of the game. You earn a slow but steady supply of jewels as you play the main story missions of the game, but many of the game systems of KHUX are structured in such away as to deplete your stock of jewels and encourage you to buy more using real money. The most obvious example of this is with the medals you attach to your Keyblade to increase its power and give your character various special attacks. While you can just work with the various medals you acquire over the course of playing missions, the best medals in the game come from purchasing medal packs, which normally cost 1,000 jewels or more. Another method of depleting your jewels is with the AP system. Each mission you play costs a certain amount of AP, and after playing multiple missions in a row you’ll run out of it. You recharge AP at the rate of one point every three minutes, a rate slow enough that a player’s impatience can easily get the best of him, and if you don’t want to wait you can spend 100 jewels to fully recharge your AP. Similarly, in most missions in KHUX losing all your health is not an automatic game-over, but instead you have the choice of either returning to the mission select screen, and thus lose anything you had already gained in the mission, or you can drop 100 jewels to fully restore your character’s health bar and special attack gauge and keep going with the mission. The way KHUX preys on player impatience, though, might best be exemplified in the game’s special missions. These special missions are be played to earn important things like Evolve Medals and Keyblade strengthening materials, but each special mission is only available on a certain day of the week. You can wait for that day to come, or you can spend some real money and unlock all of the special missions for a full week. In today’s society of short patience and even shorter attention spans, I could see a decent number of players opting for the faster options in KHUX by paying rather than waiting.

Some of the medal packs you can buy

Having said all that, I completely understand why KHUX is structured the way it is. The people who made the game need a way to get paid for their work and in KHUX they’ve created a clever method of extracting funds from players. If anything, I have to commend them for their shrewdness and understanding of human psychology.

Spending 100 jewels once is not big deal, but repeated purchases quickly add up

Despite the somewhat insidious nature of its free-to-play design, I would still recommend KHUX to any fans of the Kingdom Hearts series. While the game does try its best to get you to spend real money on it, if you’re patient you can still play it and enjoy it, all without paying a cent. I personally have spent a grand total of $0.00 on KHUX, keeping to my commitment of not spending any money on mobile games. With my upcoming move next week I am hoping to get back into the groove or regularly playing and writing about console games, so this will likely be my last post on KHUX, but I may still play it from time to time.

Embracing the (Video) Faults

I haven’t been capturing gameplay clips on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One games for very long, but I’ve already learned what I think is an important lesson for an amateur game writer such as myself. When I first started recording gameplay, I tried to get footage of me playing the game perfectly. If I screwed up in some way, I would stop recording, reload the last checkpoint, and try again and again until I did everything flawlessly. What I realized is that I was stressing myself out attempting to do something that wasn’t necessary. While I don’t publish clips of me playing a game particularly badly, if the gameplay footage properly showcases what I’m trying to highlight then it doesn’t matter if it also shows me making a mistake or two along the way. For example, in my post on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare there’s a video showing the singleplayer mission in Lagos, and while nearly all of it is played without a hitch, at one point I’m aiming at snipers on a balcony but for whatever reason I pushed the melee button instead of the fire button, so instead of shooting the enemy you see me punch the air. Yes, it was a mistake, but it didn’t detract from the particular section of the game I was trying to show. If anything, it gave me a chance to make fun of myself, and if you watch the clip carefully you can see an annotation I added in at the moment I push the melee button. I’ve slowly learned to embrace these minor and inconsequential faults, not in the sense that I’m actively seeking to commit mistakes while playing, but in recognizing them for what they are and not making a mountain out of a molehill.

Moving Again

On August 1st I’ll be moving again, though this next residence comes with a one year lease, so it will be more permanent that what I’ve got now. The room is good, the house is good, but I’m not a fan of the location. However, it’s the only place that is willing to offer me a lease, so I don’t really have any choice. One year in exile, coming right up.

DNC Leaks

The DNC Leaks are simultaneously a big story and not a story at all. They’re a big story in that the leaks suggest that the Democratic National Party, which is supposed to be neutral during the primary campaign, tried to illicitly engineer the Democratic primary campaign to get Hillary Clinton the nomination. They’re not a story at all because the corruption of the American political system should be a surprise no one.

Background Checks

I’ve gone through several background checks in the past for things like employment and housing, but I had never actually seen any of my reports until yesterday. I was applying for a place live and as part of the application the landlord wanted to run a background check on me through TransUnion’s SmartMove program. After filling out the online form I submitted it and later in the day the landlord got the report and called me about it. As expected, my credit history was flawless and I had no evictions or collections on record. My criminal record, however, contained one item. To my surprise and dismay, it showed me as having a criminal citation this past March in Orange County, California. Seeing as how I was never in Orange County at all this year, I was extremely confused as to why my report listed this.

Earlier today I called the TransUnion customer support line and requested to dispute the item in the criminal history. The customer service rep I spoke with informed me that the citation was a traffic-related offense, and I informed them that I was not in California during the month of March (or February, or January). The dispute has officially been sent to TransUnion’s investigative department and they now have 30 calendar days to look into this. When they have concluded their research I’ll get a letter in the mail with the results of the inquiry. I’m not particularly keen on having someone else’s crimes being associated with me, so that thing better get wiped from my record.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back - Kingdom Hearts 2

Things have been hectic in my life lately, but a bit over a week ago I had some down time and I decided to dust off the old PlayStation 2 and put in one of my favorite games from that era, Kingdom Hearts 2. My PlayStation 2, having not seen action in many years, took awhile to start reading the disc, but once it recognized it I was back in the game. It still played just like I remembered it, and after a little while my itch for the game had been scratched, but it also got me thinking about the differences between the original Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2. While Kingdom Hearts 2 fixed a number of the issues from the original Kingdom Hearts and improved on the overall formula of the Kingdom Hearts games, it also created a small number of new problems. It was two steps forward, one step back. For me, there are three main areas where the game stumbled.

The first was the overly long introductory sequence. The original Kingdom Hearts had you playing as protagonist Sora, but the opening hours of Kingdom Hearts 2 switch things up and you instead play as new character Roxas. That you’re playing as a different character is itself not a problem, but what goes wrong in Kingdom Hearts 2 is that the time you spend playing as Roxas doesn’t have enough meaningful material to justify its length. Roxas’ story is broken into six days, but everything important that happens in those six days could have been more effectively told in four days, maybe even less. When you finish playing as Roxas it is a relief, not because Roxas himself is a bad character, but because the opening of Kingdom Hearts 2 can feel sort of like getting hazed. It’s as if the game is testing you to see if you’ve got the patience to endure the first two hours or so before the game starts to shine.

The second place where Kingdom Hearts 2 faltered, at least for me, was with the Reaction Commands, which were certain moments during combat where you had the chance to counter an enemy’s action by pressing the triangle button. Reaction Commands could only be done when the game prompted you to do so and you had less than a second to push the button. Sometimes the Reaction Commands were fitting, and other times they weren’t, and this inconsistency led me to eventually dislike them. For example, there is a Reaction Command for a certain boss fight that allows you to dodge while in mid-air, and this is an instance where the Reaction Commands work well, as you would normally have minimal control while off the ground. There are other times however, where Reaction Commands are just substitutes for normal game mechanics, such as blocking, and in those cases it would have been better to just have the player use the block command (or whatever) rather than a Reaction Command.

The third and final issue with Kingdom Hearts 2 was its overall difficulty. The normal difficulty setting for Kingdom Hearts 2 was too easy, and from what I understand, this was a result of people complaining that the normal difficulty of the original Kingdom Hearts was too hard. Personally, I thought the normal difficulty of the first Kingdom Hearts was just fine, and I’m the type of person who doesn’t like hard games, so I was disappointed to find myself blowing through most of the game without too much effort. Kingdom Hearts 2’s hard difficulty, called Proud Mode, should have been the normal difficulty setting, and then Proud Mode should have been a true hard difficulty setting for those that wanted to challenge themselves.

The 2008 Housing Bubble

At the suggestion of a friend of mine, I watched the movie The Big Short on Netflix. The movie is about the guys who bet against the housing bubble that burst in 2008 and made a massive amount of money on the American economic collapse that ensued. It was a good movie, and it brought to mind my own memories of the housing bubble from when I was younger and how I had an inkling of what was coming.

I grew up in San Diego. My parents had been renters for a long time, but in 1999 they bought a house and we moved in. The house was priced at right about $200,000. In 2004, my parents had the house evaluated, and it was valued at around $400,000. During the summer of 2007 I was back at home and my parents informed me that a house up the street from us that was a little smaller than our house was being listed at $700,000. Even as young man who still had much to learn about the world, I recognized the surge in housing prices for the insanity that it was. Home prices were vastly exceeding workers’ income, and there was no reasonable way to explain how people were getting loans to purchase these properties. On the evening news I distinctly remember one broadcast where the news anchor was talking about how various sectors of the American economy were faltering, but that the housing sector was still booming and thus propping all the others up. If unemployment was rising and people were losing income, shouldn’t housing also cool off, since more people shouldn’t be able to afford buying homes? In one of my college classes that year there was a group project and my group decided to do a report on the now-infamous Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and I remember how much difficulty we had in explaining them to our class. We were dumb college students, but we recognized that something wasn’t right about CDOs, though we had no idea just how badly they would destroy the American economy.

Looking back at it now, I can see that I had many of the puzzle pieces that pointed to the 2008 economic collapse, but I didn’t put them all together. If I was truly prescient, I would have tried to find some way to make money off of what was going to happen, similar to the guys in The Big Short, though as a poor college student I didn’t exactly have the resources one needs to reap a big profit off of such insight.

No One Else Is Writing Your Story

I recently had something of a revelation with regards to the 2016 Writing Project. It’s a rather obvious revelation, one that should have come long ago, but for whatever reason didn’t hit me until just now. What I realized is that the 2016 Writing Project is the one truly unique thing I’m that working on at the moment. I was thinking over the various writings that I’ve done in the past and am doing now, and which of them stand out the most. While it is true that the way I write about something, like video games, may be distinct from the way other people write about it, the fact is that I’m not alone in most of the writing that I do. The 2016 Writing Project, however, is not being done by lots of other people. I think this strangely overlooked fact really sank in when I asked myself the following series of questions:

Q: How many people are writing about video games?
A: Tons of people.

Q: How many people are writing about life experiences?
A: Tons of people.

Q: How many people are writing about the random thoughts that come to their mind?
A: Tons of people.

Q: How many people are writing the story I have imagined?
A: Just me.

Blog Labels

I’ve made another small adjustment to this blog that you might have noticed. At the bottom of posts you’ll see that I am now adding labels in order to group posts into categories. A new gadget also now exists in the right side of the blog that lists the categories I’ve created so far in descending order of frequency. Going forward, all posts will have labels when appropriate. I also went back and added labels to posts from the last few days. This new addition probably won’t mean much for most of you readers, but maybe it will be helpful for some.

Mini-NES

Last week Nintendo announced that they would be releasing a miniature version of the old Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) this November. This Mini-NES will come with thirty NES games preinstalled, including a number of NES classics such as The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Castlevania, Tecmo Bowl, and Final Fantasy. The Mini-NES will also come with a controller that looks like just an original NES controller.

For me this is a big announcement, and I’m strongly considering buying this Mini-NES, though, as always, it will likely be some time after it launches that I’d purchase it. I didn’t have a gaming console growing up, and though I got a few scattered chances to play NES games when I visited friends’ houses, I can’t say that I have a heritage with that era of gaming. This Mini-NES would give me the chance to go back and experience some of the games that are so foundational to today’s video games. If and when I eventually purchase the Mini-NES, I’ll be sure to do a series of posts on the games that I play on it.