This is going to be long as hell, so strap in.

What is Kingdom Hearts χ[chi]?

Kingdom Hearts χ[chi] (referred to as [chi] henceforth) is a free to play browser based game. All you need to play is a yahoo japan account and a stable internet connection. This game take place far far in the past of Kingdom Hearts in “the time of fairy tales”. There are two portions to [chi]: boss battles and missions.

Play Mechanics: Missions

The missions are further subdivided into three areas: story missions, event missions, and weekly missions. The story missions are just what they sound like: a Disney character will tell you “Save me from the heartless that’s attacking” or “Help me find X number of X” and you’ll go do it. It’s just like any other MMO. Completing story missions actively effects the world in a way reminiscent of 358/2 Days: if you unlock a door in Mission 3-5, that door will be forever open in that world and the types and strength of Heartless will increase as you continue. You can take as long as you want to complete story missions. As you progress in story missions, you’ll unlock new worlds and the ability to warp to specific points in the world, saving a significant amount of time traveling.

Weekly missions run from Sunday to Sunday and are basically run of the mill grinding. In fact, you can mostly ignore the weekly missions for story and event missions, because a good number of them overlap. For example, if the story mission is to kill 20 Yellow Operas and the weekly mission is to kill 10 heartless of any type, you’ll complete the weekly mission in the middle of the story mission. The Event missions are much like the other missions except much more esoteric: you have to kill X heartless, or do X damage to raid bosses, or (and this was very odd) you have to talk to your union members. The events tend to run for 2-3 weeks and can completely change the look of [chi]: for Christmas, Daybreak Town was covered in snow and for Valentines, the fountain started spouting chocolate.

For all of the missions not involving the Raid Boss, you’ll be using your AP (action points). You start out with 50 AP and you gain an extra point for every member of your team up to 80. Occasionally a mission reward will be an AP Up item and the current maximum AP is 180 points. Opening a treasure chest consumes 3AP, while picking up an enhancement material takes one. Heartless have a variety of consumption rates; a weak Shadow will just cost 2AP, while one of the level 555 nightmare super heartless cost 30AP. Run out of AP and you either have to wait for it to recharge at 1AP every three minutes or use a potion. A regular potion will restore 10AP and a hi potion to restores it all. You’ll get potions almost constantly as rewards for missions and logins, so you can more or less play as much as you like. For example, I have been playing since August ‘13 and I have 200+ potions. You can also buy 3 potions a day from the Mog Trade for 2 Moogle Coins each.

One of the newer mechanics introduced is the Second Chance ability. If you are fighting a heartless and that heartless knocks you out in battle, you can immediately take the heartless on again with their HP at to whatever you reduced it to and yours fully restored. However, you will have to spend whatever the AP cost was again to attack it. So if you were fighting a level 444 Wizard which costs 15AP to attack and it knocked you out, you would need to spend another 15AP to continue. You can use your potions if you are out of AP and you can also leave the browser window open for a few hours and time regen.

Play Mechanics: Raid Bosses

These are team based fights where you take on some of the major Heartless Bosses from the series, such as Darkside and Trickmaster. The key to these fights is to time it with your allies properly: if you attack within three minutes of your ally’s attack, you’ll get a combo bonus, which is literally your teammate(s) coming out and doing Sonic Rave on the raid boss for extra damage before you start up your own attack. The number of hits is equal to the current combo chain, so if you manage to get it to something ridiculous like 25, you see a nice orgy of keybladed violence unload on the bosses face before you even step in. In addition to the combo bonus, you’ll get a bonus if your keyblade matches the enemies weakness.

Doing attacks uses up BP (battle points). You have a total of 5 BP and the max you can use in an attack is three. Much like the AP, when your BP is gone, you can either wait for it to recharge at the rate of 1BP every 15 minutes or use an ether. An ether restores one point and hi ether restores them all. Alternatively, you can use the BP share (I don’t actually know what it’s called) to restore a union mates BP, which will also restore a point for you as well. You can restore up to five points a day. Like the potions, you’ll constantly be getting ethers as a reward, but I suggest not spending them unless you are fighting a Subspecies during Lux Up Time. Also like the potions, you have the option of buying 3 ethers daily for 2 Moogle Coins a piece.

A new addition to the raid bosses is the Guilt system. Whenever you kill a heartless, you release three things: Lux (which I’ll get into later), the Heart (of course) and occasionally Guilt. Guilt is the crystalline essence of the sins a heartless has committed. You can gather it during battles in the field and when it’s time to face a raid boss, unleash it all at once in a massively damaging attack. However, only hunting specific heartless will release guilt, and you won’t know which heartless will drop guilt until you defeat at least one of them. In addition, you can assist your other union members and hunt a guilt target for them for a Moogle Coin. You can assist your union member with their guilt list for a total of five Coins a day. You’ll get one Coins for every five Guilt Heartless on your list you kill. The list of Guilt Heartless changes every few weeks.

Raid Bosses are one of the time limited portions of [chi]. On the prefight page, there’s a timer which reads “Advent Time”. This indicates the amount of time you have before the boss escapes and the attack ends in failure. If the boss does escape, it will lower your chances of fighting the Subspecies variation.

Subspecies are more powerful versions of bosses that only occasionally appear. Fighting them gives a degree of magnitude more Lux and defeating one gives more rewards than the typical victory. Plus, most weekly and event missions have a few tiers that involve defeating a certain level or number of Subspecies bosses. If your team is behind, a few subs during Lux Up time can really turn things around. A recent update added a subspecies counter, which displays the likelihood of the next Raid Boss being a sub displayed as a percentage. Winning causes the chances to increase, losing causes a decrease, and a quick victory causes it to increase more rapidly.

The Raid Bosses are the most directly competitive part of the game, as while you are fighting, there is another union also taking on the same boss at the same time competing to deal more damage than you. Speaking of boss bonuses, there are a number of rewards based on how you play during the fight. If you do more damage than any other character in either union, then you will get the MVP bonus. If your union dealt more damage in general, then all attackers with get the leading union bonus. If you personally dealt the killing blow, you’ll get the finishing attacker bonus. On the Advent screen, there is both numeric representation of the Lux gathered as well as graphic showing which team is in the lead. A recent update also added a ranking system so that the daily matchups were more evenly balanced.

As a side note, this is also where you can talk to your teammates. There frequently are missions where you need to say something for a couple of Moogle coins.

Play Mechanics: Cards and Keyblades

Combat in [chi] is based on preselected cards chosen randomly in threes to perform special attacks. There are two classes of cards: Attack cards and Assist cards. Attack cards are divided further into three types: Speed type, Magic type, and Power type. Each keyblade also has bonuses that apply depending on when each attack is used. For example, the Starlight has a bonus that applies when the first attack executed is a Power move, the second is Magic, or the third is Speed. So if the three random cards pulled are Magic, Magic, Speed in that order, then a damage bonus will be applied to the last two attacks, as they match with the keyblade. The amount of bonus depends on the level of the keyblade as well as which keyblade. You can select up to nine attack cards to put in your deck. Assist cards give a bonus to the amount of lux you gather and effect how much HP you have. You can select up to five assist cards to put in your deck.

Cards can be made more effective in a number of ways. The first and simplest way is to level them up: you can take unwanted cards and fuse them into another to cause said card to gain levels. If it’s an Attack card, the level increase will improve its attack and defense stats, while Assist cards will improve its Lux Drop rate and its HP stats.

The second way to improve your cards is by Limit Cut. Limit Cut is very similar to leveling up as it involves fusing cards into each other; however with a limit cut, you are putting a copy of the exact same card into itself. By doing so, you raise the card’s max level limit. Depending on the rarity, a card can be limit cut three, four, or even five times. Once a card has been limit cut the max number of times for its rarity, then leveling it to maximum with cause it to get a rainbow sheen and become a High Purity card. High Purity cards can later be recycled for a random card of a higher rarity.

The third way to improve your card is via boost. Typically when a card is freshly added to the game, it will come with a boost effect. That particular card will for the next few weeks has its stats multiplied by 1.5. Boosted cards drawn from Raise Draw can have a boost of 3 times.

Of the three improvements listed, there are supplemental cards to assist. To assist with leveling up cards, there is a level one Moogle card. It has no stats, but using it in fusion will cause a much higher level of experience to be gained by your card. The Yen Sid card can be used to limit cut any card of the same rarity, and the Fairy Godmother applies either a 1.5x or 2x boost for a while for any card you use it on.

The last major way to make your cards better is through use of skills. One of the newest additions to the game, skills are still somewhat rare. By attaching skills to your cards, you have a small chance of triggering boosts to your attack or defense, or even following up with a bonus fourth attack or reflecting some damage back to your foe.

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By added multiples of the same version of a skill to a card, you can increase the probability of it triggering in battle.

We’re over 2000 words, so I’ll cut it off here. The next primer will be more about the miscellaneous mechanics of the game, as well as some thoughts about the story.