Ta bom, boa tentativa em me fazer deixar de gostar de Kingdom Hearts, mas não foi dessa vez

Chain of Memories pra mim foi um susto, iniciei no jogo já sabendo do sistema de carta mas não sabia que ele ia ser tão chatinho de pegar o jeito, e isso me deixou um pouco chateado no início porque de fato eu não tava gostando do que o jogo tava me apresentando em questão de gameplay, só que com o tempo eu fui pegando afeto pela história, fui pegando o jeito que o jogo funciona e ai já viu né.. meu coração foi conquistado mais uma vez.

A história disso aqui cara é.. eu não consigo nem botar em palavras, ela vai ficando melhor cada vez que você joga, e quando você sente aquela vontade de dar uma pausa, acontece alguma coisa na história que te aguça a continuar jogando. E é claro que aqui tem os laços emocionais lindo de ver com os personagens, tem muita coisa que vai te fazer chorar também e tem os toques perfeito da franquia.

Eu recomendo DEMAIS jogarem Chain of Memories apesar de eu não ter gostado de sua gameplay, sua dificuldade contra os bosses é sim injusta e muitas das vezes irrita mais do que deveria, mas com o tempo você vai se adaptando e manjando mais da criação de deck, a única dica que posso te dar pra fazer sua gameplay ficar melhor nesse aqui é não achar que ele é um spam de ataque que nem é nos outros, nesse aqui tu tem que pensar e montar suas habilidades então jogue com cautela

I actually kind of like the card battling system and how it mixes strategy and real-time combat. Things like deciding to use cards for direct attacks or combo them to make something stronger, or holding onto certain cards to counter the enemy but in exchange not having as many slots in your hand for stuff you'll actually use was pretty fun. Trying to put together decks to match different situations was also neat, even if it's pretty easy to make something broken and Riku's story removes the deckbuilding aspect entirely. The kind of dungeon crawler-y aspect of building out each area as you go was also something I found enjoyable, even if it reused a lot of room layouts and the worlds were basically all just ripped from KH1.

While the story is somewhat good, the game mostly feels like a mobile game ported to consoles except they forgot to remove P2W so enemy cards take 2 hours to get unless you use RNG manipulation. At first I didn't see anything too bad about the game until it slowy started to feel worse because of repetition, I don't even think the gameplay itself is bad, it just feels repetitive after 3 hours doing the same shit, (and can easily be broken by OP Sleights) since the game expects you to fight every enemy in every single room you create, or else you get 2/3 of your health drained because a boss combos you and gives you 1 milesecond to dodge or use a card. I said that the story is somewhat good because a lot of it is Kingdom Hearts 1 again but less because you revisit those worlds like Sonic Generations except it's their second game, it is good when it isn't that. There is no reason not the break the game when it's so repetitive and it would take 4x longer to farm, and while non-KH1 bosses aren't half bad, it is very frustrating to get 2/3 of your health sucked by 1 boss combo that sometimes isn't even their sleight, but the Final Bosses were... Surprisinly fun? At least with max health. Good story, tedious gameplay + part 1.5 of "Donald is useless because I suck"

Wow, is this an unpleasant game to play. So the game LOOKS great. Coming from KH1 remix, basically all of the same assets have been used, with some "smoothed over" cutscenes still from the PS2 remaster. However, basically everything else about this game is garbage. The card combat is clunky and abrasive, even scrub enemies can break your cards pretty easily (don't even get me started on Org XIII bosses...), and the story is pretty dumb. I put the time in to finish the first storyline, but I can't say I enjoyed myself. Maybe I'll play the second storyline and see if it changes my feelings at all, but I'd recommend just catching the story bits from this one in a video wrap-up.

Edit: Went back and played the Riku storyline, and it was good enough to raise the overall rating of this game, but not by much. The story was less than half the length of Sora's, with some good explanatory story bits instead of just "Oh noes my memories!". The pre-determined decks for every world took a lot of the tedious work of deck-building out, but could really suck if you were in a world with a bad deck (Wonder Land). The gameplay overall felt much faster and more dynamic, and reloading your cards with a simple button press instead of holding the button really kept the combat moving. Dueling sucked, to the point I just avoided it entirely, and the final boss was cheap, so it wasn't all roses. I would still recommend just catching the story bits in a video, but the Riku storyline is at least worth playing.

The story was fine, no real complaints for what it is outside of the Disney worlds. By the latter half I was just rushing through each area and using roulette cards if I was ever gated because there’s really nothing to these worlds. The combat becomes bearable once you get the good sleights but it never felt satisfying. The final boss was actually really good but also made me sad that it was the only time the game got creative with its mechanics. It’s relatively short by genre standards which is a relief but thats not a very reassuring upside now is it. I can see why some people skip this one, I’m glad I didn’t because it would have driven me nuts not experiencing the games story firsthand but I certainly don’t blame others for not bothering.

Update:Riku’s campaign I found better from a gameplay perspective along with having a good story but I almost wish they shrunk down the scope of the map even more because it’s monotonous going through the rooms yet again. It’s shorter and the added boss fights were fantastic but that’s about it.

I could rant about this game for a long time if I wanted to, but I'll just keep it brief here.

The card system sucks and is either boring if you know how to play or frustrating if you don't, the story is mostly pointless and the retelling of the disney worlds really isn't that interesting. Music is pretty good but that's par for the course with KH.

Overall I just don't think I'll ever come back to this game, it was way too grindy and plodding for my liking.

it was a pleasant surprise to replay this game and actually really enjoy my time with it. having played this on PS2 and in the PS3 collection, both my playthroughs were marred with boredom and tedium. and while the tedium was still present at times, something about this game as a deckbuilder really clicked for me. making a deck around specific strategies and sleights is fun to me now in a way that i couldn't appreciate as a teenager and younger adult. it got to a point where i was running two different decks (one for mobs, one for bosses) that utilized entirely different strategies. and managing both felt fun and engaging to me in a way that elevated my experience with the game.

the problems are, of course, still there. i can verbalize in better detail what this game desperately needs: QOL and convenience features. as fun as dice-rolling in moogle shops can be, the game deeeeesperately needs a way to get specific cards. maybe have a card recycler where you toss away three junk cards to get a slightly better one (i.e. chip traders in mmbn)? or add a system where you can specifically say "hey i want this card at this value" and the game will let you buy it with moogle points (with an obvious upcharge to keep the system balanced). or shit, i dunno, add a system where you can change the value of an existing card for a price. just. . . this game needs something to streamline the creation process a bit better. the deckbuilding and editing process is one of the strongest points of the game, but actually getting to that point is tedious. you're holding me back from really digging into your gameplay loop, recom, and that is such a shame.

and map cards are just. . . there's a lot of potential there, but, as basically anyone who's played the game will tell you, there will eventually be a point in your playthrough where you need to grind for a specific map card (or multiple), and it will be very tedious agony because the game will sit you in time-out until you do it. i don't mind grinding at all in this game, but i hate when any video game forces me to grind. it's such a paradigm shift from "i'm playing this game and progressing my build" to "oh christ this game's making me do homework". i think this game could've benefited from reworking either how map cards work or increase the limit on them. 99 map cards is just too low of a cap considering you'll want several for specific situations, and the cap feels arbitrary in that fake difficulty kind of way.

ultimately, the biggest shame about this game is that we're never getting a sequel. "what the fuck? yes we did, the series is still ongoing" okay sure, kingdom hearts II was a sequel in the story, but i'm talking about the gameplay formula established here. the series never revisits this card-based gameplay ever again, and it's a huge disappointment considering this would likely be one of those shaky first entries to a series that could build on itself and improve in all the ways i've just mentioned. i already like what is here in spite of the god awful story (vexen and larxene need sora to accomplish their plan, which is why they actively antagonize and try to kill him) and the recycled assets. i just also see a sequel that could've taken this concept further and made it so much better. it reminds me of how pokemon games will establish new and interesting gameplay mechanics in each entry and then ditch them instead of building on them. i like variety, but i also crave refinement! give me more of something that worked in a better capacity! feed meeeeee.

ah well. i have a lot of problems with this game, but for the majority of my playtime, i really enjoyed myself here. i can't necessarily recommend it even though there's a good system trapped in a labyrinth of bad plot and tedious game mechanics, nor do i begrudge anyone who gets filtered by that. i think i've just come around from seeing this system as simply "novel" and instead have come to appreciate the complexity and depth to it. it's edged me in that "fuck, i really wanna play another deckbuilder" kind of way, for better and for worse.

I'm gonna be real with you folks.

I really don't like this game. The only thing elevating it is building the group of antagonists that will haunt you for pretty much the rest of the series.

I kind of hate what they have done to the gameplay. The first game played pretty much like your typical real-time RPG combat system, but this game just went offboard so hard.
You see, this game originally came out for the GBA and had a turn-based combat system that suited the hardware limitations quite nicely - it made sense.
But for the Remake they wanted to keep the turn-based card system - while putting you in a 3D-Arena where you actually have to run up to the enemies, select your cards to attack, hope the enemy doesn't block or counter your attack WHILE dodging other incoming stuff. It's unnecessary convoluted and complicated.

The story is also kind of weird, Sora, Donald and Goofy find themselfs in a weird place called Castle Oblivion, which erases Sora's memories. The main antagonists, Organisation XIII want to keep Sora busy and plant false memories in his mind. So they send Sora to literally all the same locations you visited in Kingdom Hearts I and you will meet pretty much all the same characters in the same order.

And after you have beat this full length story you unlock ANOTHER story.

For me, this was just a very big letdown, I've played it for a couple of hours before dropping it. I know you can build an OP deck for Sora just after a few hours and pretty much spam Triangle, but right now I don't have the mental capacity to go back to this game.

Not giving this a rating since I only played for a few hours. This game's combat is just weirdly unsatisfying, mainly I find that getting card breaks feels not fun, and actively makes me not want to learn the gameplay, along with making this already convoluted and weird combat even weirder in how combat is paced, having odd bursts of using cards instead of just more flowy combat that I felt when I played KH1.
I love deckbuilding, and from my short time playing and making some decks, KH:ReCOM still hits that mark in making fun preperations and decks. In general, this game has interesting concepts, but it just hurts to play, albeit it might just be me unwilling to rewrite my muscle memory after playing KH1. I'll just watch cutscenes and move on to KH2, don't think I'll revisit this game.