Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories

What were they thinking?
Kingdom Hearts was released, then Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories on the GBA, and then Kingdom Hearts 2. Probably not a lot of players at the time thought this game would be that important, so they skipped it, and got very confused after booting up KH2 for the first time. So, Square Enix responded by creating this remake for the PS2.
But, well, it shouldn't need to exist. Obviously it can be thought off as a spin-off, having a radically different gameplay and being based on Sora's memories means all the worlds are recycled from KH1. But, no no! The game introduces a lot of elements crucial to the KH saga: Namine, Organization, DiZ, Riku Replica, Twilight Town, but all of this happens between the "Worlds", in Castle Oblivion. So you end up playing through a "world", where you go through a generated labyrinth, enter three story rooms, listen to the world's story which is KH1 story, but altered to include references to memories, or memory loss, so no one cares about that. Then you fight some enemies, and then you fight the boss, and THEN you get a tiny bit of the actual important KH story, realized in the form of a conversation with an Organization member, or Riku Replica, or just Sora, Donald and Goofy talking about losing their memory. Sometimes you fight another boss. Repeat 14 times and there you have it. That's the whole game.The problem is, this worked a lot better on the GBA. Seeing the dialogue, I couldn't help thinking somehow this would all seem a lot better when spoken by 2D pixel characters than 3D voiced models. The GBA platform is also more forgiving for this repeatable gameplay. What I'm trying to say is that the story... well... it didn't NEED to be that important. Fans would be content with a non-canon spinoff, or just a retelling of KH1 story, but no, you need to play it to understand the whole thing! Sorry!

OK, enough about the story and all that mess, what about the gameplay? I've said it's repeatable, and yes, the worlds themselves aren't different from each other at all. It's all the same generated rooms, but with different skins. It's somewhat interesting that you use cards to decide about the type of the next room, but you don't really have a lot of opportunities to do something fun with it. Need to grind? Use a card that generates an enemy room, with some advantage to you. Don't wanna fight? Use a card that creates a moogle room or a reward room. The only exception is 100 Acre Woods which is a minigame collection (all new minigames!). The card-based battle system is interesting at the first glance, You collect cards with numerical value, bigger number beats lower, but 0 beats anything. You can combo your cards into "sleights" for more powerful attacks, but the first card will be lost for the remainder of the battle. There are also enemy cards which grant you buffs. You soon learn how to abuse the system - an Organization member is preparing an all-powerful sleight which would deal a lot of damage to you? Have a 0 ready, have Jafar card active, and then strike with a powerful sleight yourself, use a potion/elixir to restore your cards, and there you have it.

Oh, and having beat this game, which you know now that its story was very important to the whole KH saga, you'll notice that you can start a new game as Riku... now this surely must be some non-canon post-game content? Wrong, again! The Riku story is arguably even more important, and you need to play through it. Fortunately, the gameplay is quite different this time, and the stories of the worlds are gone - it's just fights. I enjoyed Riku's mode a lot more than Sora's. There are no sleights and no deck-building (the deck is pre-built), but there's duel mode (break all opponent's cards under a time limit), and Dark mode (Riku transforms into Dark mode and becomes more powerful, and can use the same slights Riku Replica used in Sora's story).

Well, overall, I can't really recommend or not recommend this game, because if you're a KH fan you need to play it anyway (yeah, ultimately it's better than just reading the wiki or watching the vids on YouTube. You have to feel it, and go through it.), and if you're not you definitely have no reason to play it. Or maybe you're a card combat connoisseur? Then go for it!

Chain of Memories is a game that is essential to the Kingdom Hearts franchise, yet most people didn't play it because it was released on Gameboy and it sort of slipped under the radar. So when KH II released many were confused about what happened to Sora and who Roxas was, plus the entire Organization. So a number of years later they decided to throw the fans a bone and give us a 3D PS2 remake of the game which I ended up playing when it came in the HD collection years later. Its pretty much a faithful remake of the original chain of memories with better graphics. The gameplay is crap, mainly because its about managing cards and stacking cards to have overpowered combos to spam, and that's the whole game. Plus the entire random factor and creating new rooms is really repetitive. This game just gets so repetitive especially near the end when the levels get longer, its annoying going through each room and fighting enemies and then fighting the obligatory boss, it gets so old so fast and with the annoying card gameplay mechanics it isn't fun enough to justify all the combat. I mean at best this game is only worth playing once for the story, and even in that case I prefer the original Chain of Memories on Gameboy because it just felt more natural on a handheld, this game feels weird on a main console. The story itself is pretty convoluted at points too and mainly acts to bridge the first and second games, but it really feels like a thing Square did to confuse the fans and add unnecessary back story to a game series that didn't need all these games and story to complicate a universe that is more simple than Square would like to admit.