Despite my undying love for , I’ve never gotten along with the mobile games. Union X and Dark Road have some highs (like the Wreck-It Ralph world), but their stories are overly complicated and held up by mind-numbingly boring gameplay that just consists of nothing but swi🎶ping medals and watching numbers go up.

You’d think that would put me off , but the latest mobile outing’s focus on a combat system that emulates the mainline games (combined with how starved I am for any Keyblade content) means that I’ve been counting down the days 🎃until this week’s closed beta finally arrived.

While I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played so far - particularly when it comes to combat, the best the mobile version has ever had - the Missing Link Closed Beta is incredibly basic 🅰right now. It consists of a prologue, a few combat challenges and quests, and some limited customisation.

The main thing you can do in Missing Link is explore the Astral Plane, which is basically Kingdom Hearts’ version of our own world, complete with the same map. I’m sure that Kingdom Hearts 4 will make this a plot point, but for now, it’sও just the game’s way of pulling a Pokemon Go and letting you explore, fight Heartless, and collect Disney characters by walking around in the real world.

Here’s the kicker, though, and something that makes Mi🐎ssing Link an exciting alternative to - you can actually turn off the GPS mode and roam around the world to your heart’s content without ever leaving your house, so🐻mething PoGo has actively fought against in its desire to keep regional Pokemon special and desirable.

Beyond just being more Kingdom Hearts content for me to obsess over, this roaming ability was the most exciting thing about Missing Link and something I dove straight into after starting the closed beta. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near as easy as the trailers m🍌ade it out to be, and so far seems practically impossible unless you’re willing to spend a little bit of money or a lot of your own time.

Whe🥀n I first entered the Astral Plane and found my Keyblade wielder standing outside a building that somewha🐈t resembles where I live in Cardiff, I took the GPS function off and started running around my town.

As neat as it was to see the chippy down the road flooded with Heartless and my local corner shop apparently taken over by Snow White, I quickly realised that taking🧸 part in combat encounters, using any of the health-restoring stops, and basically doing anything bu𒁃t running around uses up AP, a currency that is restored by taking part in the GPS mode, which slowly gives you more points.

At first, this didn’t seem like a big issue as the amount of AP I was spending was minimal, and could be restored easily by doing some challenges or jus♐t going for 👍a quick walk. Things get bad if you decide to zoom out on the map and explore anywhere outside of where you live though, as the cost to teleport is obscene, let alone the AP required to interact with anything.

Let’s break it down with some math. While using the roaming mode in my local area, taking part in a fight costs around 20 AP, which is pocket change when you havℱe around 700 AP to begin with. Teleporting into Cardiff town, a ten-minute train ride for me in real-time and maybe an hour of walking if I’m not being lazy, also costs 20 AP. Again, pocket change.

Locations that are relatively close to you is where the charity ends, however. I though🎉t it’d be fun to try and explore Brixham, my old hometown in Devon that is around four hours drive away, but I was quickly told that I needed double my maximum AP to even have the chance to look around and not interact with anything. I’d have better luck just jumping on Google Maps than grinding the AP out.

For an even more extreme example, I tried to head on over to Glasgow as the map claimed that a big treasure chest was there wai📖ting for me. That 310-mile gap would have cost me 4,899 AP, an obscene amount of currency that I’m not even sure I can achieve for a location that isn’t really even that far away from me. I certainly haven’t gotten close to that after playing a few hours of the Closed Beta, which points to these high costs being a not-so-subtle shove towards microtransactions.

I tried some locations that were even further away on the map, like Mt Fuji, which cost 96,000 AP, the Cheops Pyramid in Egypt, ♏which would run me back 80,000 AP, and the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah, which would have cost 76🅷,000. I guess it’s not that different from Pokemon Go after all.

As you’d expect from a free-to-play mobile game (and especially a free-to-play Kingdom Hearts mobile game), AP can be♑ purchased with Jewels in the Item Shop for a currently unknown real-world cost, with 1,000 AP costing 100 Jewels. Time will tell how egregious that is, but it’s a shame that Missing Link’s big leg-up over Pokemon Go and other similar games is poteꩲntially going to be shackled by monetisation or massive amounts of grinding.

It doesn't help that Jewels are mainly used for trying to get rare pulls from the item shop, which is what most players are going to spend them on. Even if Missing Link is as generous with giving out the currency as Uniox X and Dark Road were for anniversaries and special events (some events even gave out around 10,000 Jewels at a time), most players are simply going to spend them on trying to get a rare Goofy figure, rather than travel the world.

It's worth noting that Missing Link is still in its closed beta, which means that the high cost of AP and its restrictions on travel could be reduced for the full game's release. Right now, though, it's looking like only the most dedicated AP hoarders are ever going to get outside of the area that they live in. That's a real shame, because being able to free-roam is what could set Missing Link apart from the rest of the competition.