Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. Legacy Archives

Disney and Square tap an unusual studio to bring Kingdom Hearts free-to-play to PCs

By
Add as a preferred source on Google

Kingdom Hearts 3D Dream Drop Distance
The 2010s is shaping up to be a momentous decade for Disney as the company’s media empire balloons to include even more pop culture icons of the 20th century. Disney made waves last decade when it acquired Pixar and Jim Henson’s Muppets, but both purchases were nowhere near as momentous as when it bought comic book house Marvel or Star Wars maker Lucasfilm. Yet even as Disney’s pop culture reach has broadened in recent years, its strangest partnership endures: After ten years, the Kingdom Hearts series that combines Disney and Square Enix characters is still going strong. Now the series is jumping to PC thanks to a studio with an idiosyncratic history.

Kingdom Hearts X[chi] continues the series’ penchant for bizarre titles but breaks with its roots on portable and home game consoles. X[chi] is actually a free-to-play PC game that lets players move through a story and fight each other with collectible cards, a battle system that recalls the decade-old Game Boy Advance entry in the series, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories.

Recommended Videos

Disney’s Kingdom Hearts partner Square-Enix isn’t developing X[chi] itself. The game is actually made by Japanese studio Success Corporation. Success has never released a hit game, but it has made some notably strange and fun titles. Its resume includes PlayStation 2 role-playing game Metal Saga, the classic arcade shooter series Cotton, and the early Xbox 360 strategy game Operation Darkness. Operation Darkness’s plot, involving a team of werewolves working with the US military to fight the Nazis in World War II, is even weirder than Kingdom Hearts’ sprawling narrative.

It’s no surprise in light of Square-Enix’s recent earnings report that the company and Disney are releasing a free-to-play PC game in the series. The company reported a $61 million loss for the first nine months of the fiscal year ending in March 2013, and the primary reason is slow console game sales. Browser games like Kingdom Hearts X[chi] are, according to the company, helping to mitigate those losses.

As of March 2013, it will be seven years since the last new game in the Kingdom Hearts series was developed for a home console. If X[chi] is successful, there may be no room for console Kingdom Hearts in the modern Disney and Square-Enix partnership.

Source: Siliconera

Anthony John Agnello
Anthony John Agnello
Former Contributing Editor
Anthony John Agnello is a writer living in New York. He works as the Community Manager of Joystiq.com and his writing has…
Topics
One of my favorite exploration games is coming to iPhone. Even an iPhone 11 can run it
No Man’s Sky might be the game that finally makes me take iPhone gaming seriously
no man's sky

There are games I play to finish, and there are games I play simply because I want to disappear somewhere else for a while, and No Man’s Sky comes in this second category. Despite its disastrous launch, Hello Games' continued support turned the game around, making it one of gaming's biggest comebacks.

Now, ten years of updates have turned Hello Games' space sandbox into one of my favorite games for pure exploration and depth. Soon, this enormous universe is going to live on something as mundane as the phone in your pocket. Hello Games is bringing No Man’s Sky to iPhone and iPad on October 28, and the hardware requirements are surprisingly forgiving. You'll need an iPhone 11 or newer, or a third-generation iPad Air or newer.

Read more
A PS5 homebrew update gives old PS2 discs a reason to leave the shelf
The new disc feature requires a jailbroken console, and testing is still limited
Advertisement, Poster, Machine

Old PS2 discs can now launch games on a jailbroken PS5 through a new homebrew feature. Developer Sword has added disc autoplay to PS5SX2, a PS2 emulator that copies an inserted game to storage before running it on the newer console.

The feature arrived in version 2.01 as a beta. At release, disc autoplay had been tested on just one original-model PS5. There’s a working starting point here, but results across other setups remain uncertain.

Read more
Google’s older Pixels may have just become far better retro gaming machines
Google Pixel 11 Pro Review Zenless Zone Zero

I've spent enough time trying to turn Android phones into game consoles to know that raw horsepower only gets you so far. On the Red Magic 11S Pro, I've tested console emulation alongside Android games and eventually pushed things much further by getting the PC version of Ghost of Tsushima running locally through GameHub.

While all of this was possible thanks to powerful Snapdragon hardware, there's another reason Qualcomm-equipped Android devices have traditionally been particularly attractive to emulator enthusiasts. Adreno, the GPU that powers these devices, have access to custom graphics drivers such as Turnip. So phones using ARM's Mali GPUs haven't had the same advantage. But now, ARMSX2 2.8.3 is finally changing that.

Read more