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Fool Reviews Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories
"A Chain of Memories I'm Hoping To Forget":
No gameplay logs this time, this will just be a standard review.
This game though, huh. I had always known that Chain of Memories was a major low point for this franchise, I had seen many other reviews of it, even a playthrough by the Super Gaming Bros. (actually how I first experienced the first three games in the series thinking back). I remember always hearing how bad it was, how the card mechanic was so uncomfortable to deal with and how it was basically a retread of a game that had already been retreading a fuckton of Disney Classics. What I have come to realize over the past four days of grinding this game out is that this game is the equivalent of the phrase "Go fuck yourself Elmo", but not in a humorous way unfortunately.
Firstly, let's talk about the plot, we'll go in order of playability so let's start with Sora's. Sora's campaign, at least the main story, is relatively harmless in all honesty. That could just be me becoming numb through both the experience of this game and the last one, but the whole fighting the mysterious organization deal was fine. It gives us new characters of which only two are really entertaining, those being Larxene and of course, Axel. No amount of miserable experience will ever make me hate Quinton Flynn's performance of Axel. He nails this character so hard and whenever he's on screen I feel a genuine sense of elation that was missing for a majority of this game.
But back to the organization, a majority of them are bland in both Sora and Riku's stories, Marluxia being the most disappointing. This man is the main antagonist of Sora's story yet he really only has much of a presence at the beginning and end. He initially seems like he'd be full of personality what given his rose petal teleportation stuff, but ultimately he just amounts to a very dull and uninteresting character with one of the worst boss fights I've ever played in a video game. We'll come back to that later. As for the others, Vexen and Zexion are ok, and Lexaeus is... borderline not even a character I'm not going to lie.
Sora's story has you go through the Disney Worlds from KH1 again, this time with a theme of "memory" some of the time. I say "some" because there are worlds where the memory theme just isn't brought up remotely and they just feel completely out of place. The game starts off interesting by having the Final Fantasy characters of Traverse Town actually remembering Sora and recognizing that they are a part of his mind, but this neat concept is immediately dropped after Traverse Town... Why?
I get that Sora loses his memory the higher up he goes, but come the fuck on, it was only the first floor. Are you seriously going to tell me that he remembers absolutely nothing about the Disney Worlds after only 1 floor of memories lost?
Regardless as he, Donald, Goofy, and Jiminy Cricket who is for once genuinely important in this series, ascend the treacherous castle, they keep losing more and more memories, however Sora starts remembering things, things that he didn't remember before. That's when we get the whole Namine plot, which is... I don't really know how to feel about it honestly. In one way it's an interesting concept, but in another and adding the Riku Replica to this, it just comes off as convoluted.
Oh, did I say "Replica" too soon? Yeah, a replica of Riku shows up during Sora's story to spout crazy shit about how he'll protect Namine while attacking Sora and the gang and all that jazz. Eventually he remembers he's not real, but we'll get back to that later too.
So eventually after climbing the whole damn thing, Sora kills Larxene, almost kills Vexen before Axel finishes the job to uncover a traitor plot by Marluxia and Larxene who are planning to usurp the Organization, and finally kills Axel and Marluxia, except not really on the first one. Namine reveals why she did this because "the lonely", and then offers to restore all of Sora's memories in exchange for forgetting everything about Castle Oblivion and her.
It's not as straight-forward as the first game, but it does sometimes entertain me more. It's mostly thanks to the improvement in acting, KH1 has points where it is very stilted performance wise, but here most of the characters sound like they actually give a shit about what they're saying, regardless of how ridiculous the things coming out of their mouths are. Sora's story though, I kind of tuned out eventually. After a while the whole memory shit kind of gets annoying, especially with him lashing out at the other characters. I wouldn't exactly call Sora' story engaging. There's a lot of stuff happening but the only time my eyes are glued to the screen are when Axel and Larxene take the stage and that's because they're just so fun to watch.
Onto Riku's story, which I would say is more interesting but it's kind of a typical "accepting the darkness within" story. Riku awakens in the void and hears the voice of Ansem compelling him. He takes the card given to him and arrives in what appears to be Hollow Bastion, and from there he goes through Castle Oblivion learning how to deal with his inner darkness while facing organization members, the Replica (before and after it gets its memories fucked) and finally Ansem. Eventually he realizes that the Ansem who got him into the castle in the first place isn't actually Ansem but rather a man named DiZ, voiced by the late Christopher Lee who fucking kills it for this character. I looooooooooove his voice so god damn much. Eventually Riku accepts both light and darkness and takes the road to dawn, going with King Mickey to... I guess help Sora in some way? I'll find out in the next game.
So yeah, the story overall is inoffensive, but the dialogue is oozing with trite nonsense. The amount of times the word "darkness" and "memories", shit the amount of times they name drop the title alone is too fucking much, sometimes these things are within the same fucking sentence. I fucking hate how repetitive the dialogue can be at points, regardless of acting. After a while it all kind of melds into a cacophony of half-baked Shakespearean bullshit and I want it to end.
Also, the Disney shit is completely inconsequential in this game. I honestly don't even know why they were included to tell you the truth.
Now onto the part of this game that makes it worse than KH1 in every fucking way: The Gameplay. The Card mechanic is bullshit. Having to charge up for cards is bullshit, needing points to build a deck is bullshit, boss fights where everything feels luck based is bullshit. In this game, you use cards to break opponent cards, but they can also break your cards. You can use sleights which are special moves where you spend 3 cards and then permanently lose the first one from your deck. The only genuinely good sleight being Lethal Frame because it freezes time and allows you to absolutely decimate opponents who don't break it in time. However, it is also completely useless on large opponents because their hitboxes and shit are so fucking weird. The worst of it has to be the Ursala boss fight, she doesn't even let you hit her main hitbox until you've taken out all four of her tentacles. This process can take an eternity, and honestly most boss fights in this game do. You lose cards too quickly, especially when you use 3 at a time, and the charge up period leaves you completely vulnerable (unless you have the Air Soldier enemy card and even then that only works for 3 reloads) and gets longer with each subsequent reload. During regular encounters this isn't much of a hassle, but during boss fights you start to realize how much slower and more boring this game is.
Don't play this game on Standard Mode, please. This game is already so fucking luck based alone that playing it on Standard or Higher is nothing short of self-torture on your behalf.
I played Sora's story in Standard and I wish I hadn't. The game just becomes an absolute misery to go through by endgame, even with grinding. Eventually it just came to luck that I beat Marluxia's third phase, and after that I wished everything was done.
I played Riku's story in Beginner Mode because I couldn't give a fuck, and I will say, as a speedrunning game I could see Chain of Memories being somewhat interesting. I basically just avoided regular encounters after my second world because I just wanted the game to end and still came out around Level 35, only 15 levels lower than my playthrough with Sora, and within only a quarter of the time.
Riku definitely has flashier combos than Sora, and can activate Dark Mode by breaking enough enemy cards. In fact, Riku can do a lot of cool shit, the problem is that like the rest of the game, it's based on fucking luck. It's such a shame too, this is Riku's first playable debut and it's really depressing that it had to be this game.
Overall it's like, this game is objectively so much worse than KH1 as a whole, to the point where it made me bump that game up a point because it legitimately wasn't as loaded with luck based bullshit as this.
You know a game is bad when every single achievement unlock for it is marked as a Rare Achievement on the Xbox Version. Nobody wants to play this game, because a nobody can't be somebody, and somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me, I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed. She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb in the shape of an "L" on her forehead.
Well.
The years start coming and they don't stop coming, fed to the rules and I hit the ground running. Didn't make sense not to live for fun, your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb. So much to do so much to see, so what's wrong with taking the back streets? You'll never know if you don't go
You'll never shine if you don't glow
Hey now, you're an all-star, get your game on, go play
Hey now, you're a rock star, get the show on, get paid
And all that glitters is gold
Only shooting stars break the mold
It's a cool place and they say it gets colder
You're bundled up now, wait 'til you get older
But the meteor men beg to differ
Judging by the hole in the satellite picture
The ice we skate is getting pretty thin
The water's getting warm so you might as well swim
My world's on fire, how about yours?
That's the way I like it and I'll never get bored
Hey now, you're an all-star, get your game on, go play
Hey now, you're a rock star, get the show on, get paid
All that glitters is gold
Only shooting stars break the mold
Hey now, you're an all-star, get your game on, go play
Hey now, you're a rock star, get the show, on get paid
And all that glitters is gold
Only shooting stars
Somebody once asked could I spare some change for gas?
I need to get myself away from this place
I said, "Yup" what a concept
I could use a little fuel myself
And we could all use a little change
Well, the years start coming and they don't stop coming
Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running
Didn't make sense not to live for fun
Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb
So much to do, so much to see
So what's wrong with taking the back streets?
You'll never know if you don't go (go!)
You'll never shine if you don't glow
Hey now, you're an all-star, get your game on, go play
Hey now, you're a rock star, get the show on, get paid
And all that glitters is gold
Only shooting stars break the mold
And all that glitters is gold
Only shooting stars break the mold.
Yeah I just made you read All Star's Lyrics in this review. Why? Because fuck this game. If you have to experience this game... just watch some cutscenes, you aren't missing much with anything else.
Go fuck yourself Elmo.
"A Chain of Memories I'm Hoping To Forget":
No gameplay logs this time, this will just be a standard review.
This game though, huh. I had always known that Chain of Memories was a major low point for this franchise, I had seen many other reviews of it, even a playthrough by the Super Gaming Bros. (actually how I first experienced the first three games in the series thinking back). I remember always hearing how bad it was, how the card mechanic was so uncomfortable to deal with and how it was basically a retread of a game that had already been retreading a fuckton of Disney Classics. What I have come to realize over the past four days of grinding this game out is that this game is the equivalent of the phrase "Go fuck yourself Elmo", but not in a humorous way unfortunately.
Firstly, let's talk about the plot, we'll go in order of playability so let's start with Sora's. Sora's campaign, at least the main story, is relatively harmless in all honesty. That could just be me becoming numb through both the experience of this game and the last one, but the whole fighting the mysterious organization deal was fine. It gives us new characters of which only two are really entertaining, those being Larxene and of course, Axel. No amount of miserable experience will ever make me hate Quinton Flynn's performance of Axel. He nails this character so hard and whenever he's on screen I feel a genuine sense of elation that was missing for a majority of this game.
But back to the organization, a majority of them are bland in both Sora and Riku's stories, Marluxia being the most disappointing. This man is the main antagonist of Sora's story yet he really only has much of a presence at the beginning and end. He initially seems like he'd be full of personality what given his rose petal teleportation stuff, but ultimately he just amounts to a very dull and uninteresting character with one of the worst boss fights I've ever played in a video game. We'll come back to that later. As for the others, Vexen and Zexion are ok, and Lexaeus is... borderline not even a character I'm not going to lie.
Sora's story has you go through the Disney Worlds from KH1 again, this time with a theme of "memory" some of the time. I say "some" because there are worlds where the memory theme just isn't brought up remotely and they just feel completely out of place. The game starts off interesting by having the Final Fantasy characters of Traverse Town actually remembering Sora and recognizing that they are a part of his mind, but this neat concept is immediately dropped after Traverse Town... Why?
I get that Sora loses his memory the higher up he goes, but come the fuck on, it was only the first floor. Are you seriously going to tell me that he remembers absolutely nothing about the Disney Worlds after only 1 floor of memories lost?
Regardless as he, Donald, Goofy, and Jiminy Cricket who is for once genuinely important in this series, ascend the treacherous castle, they keep losing more and more memories, however Sora starts remembering things, things that he didn't remember before. That's when we get the whole Namine plot, which is... I don't really know how to feel about it honestly. In one way it's an interesting concept, but in another and adding the Riku Replica to this, it just comes off as convoluted.
Oh, did I say "Replica" too soon? Yeah, a replica of Riku shows up during Sora's story to spout crazy shit about how he'll protect Namine while attacking Sora and the gang and all that jazz. Eventually he remembers he's not real, but we'll get back to that later too.
So eventually after climbing the whole damn thing, Sora kills Larxene, almost kills Vexen before Axel finishes the job to uncover a traitor plot by Marluxia and Larxene who are planning to usurp the Organization, and finally kills Axel and Marluxia, except not really on the first one. Namine reveals why she did this because "the lonely", and then offers to restore all of Sora's memories in exchange for forgetting everything about Castle Oblivion and her.
It's not as straight-forward as the first game, but it does sometimes entertain me more. It's mostly thanks to the improvement in acting, KH1 has points where it is very stilted performance wise, but here most of the characters sound like they actually give a shit about what they're saying, regardless of how ridiculous the things coming out of their mouths are. Sora's story though, I kind of tuned out eventually. After a while the whole memory shit kind of gets annoying, especially with him lashing out at the other characters. I wouldn't exactly call Sora' story engaging. There's a lot of stuff happening but the only time my eyes are glued to the screen are when Axel and Larxene take the stage and that's because they're just so fun to watch.
Onto Riku's story, which I would say is more interesting but it's kind of a typical "accepting the darkness within" story. Riku awakens in the void and hears the voice of Ansem compelling him. He takes the card given to him and arrives in what appears to be Hollow Bastion, and from there he goes through Castle Oblivion learning how to deal with his inner darkness while facing organization members, the Replica (before and after it gets its memories fucked) and finally Ansem. Eventually he realizes that the Ansem who got him into the castle in the first place isn't actually Ansem but rather a man named DiZ, voiced by the late Christopher Lee who fucking kills it for this character. I looooooooooove his voice so god damn much. Eventually Riku accepts both light and darkness and takes the road to dawn, going with King Mickey to... I guess help Sora in some way? I'll find out in the next game.
So yeah, the story overall is inoffensive, but the dialogue is oozing with trite nonsense. The amount of times the word "darkness" and "memories", shit the amount of times they name drop the title alone is too fucking much, sometimes these things are within the same fucking sentence. I fucking hate how repetitive the dialogue can be at points, regardless of acting. After a while it all kind of melds into a cacophony of half-baked Shakespearean bullshit and I want it to end.
Also, the Disney shit is completely inconsequential in this game. I honestly don't even know why they were included to tell you the truth.
Now onto the part of this game that makes it worse than KH1 in every fucking way: The Gameplay. The Card mechanic is bullshit. Having to charge up for cards is bullshit, needing points to build a deck is bullshit, boss fights where everything feels luck based is bullshit. In this game, you use cards to break opponent cards, but they can also break your cards. You can use sleights which are special moves where you spend 3 cards and then permanently lose the first one from your deck. The only genuinely good sleight being Lethal Frame because it freezes time and allows you to absolutely decimate opponents who don't break it in time. However, it is also completely useless on large opponents because their hitboxes and shit are so fucking weird. The worst of it has to be the Ursala boss fight, she doesn't even let you hit her main hitbox until you've taken out all four of her tentacles. This process can take an eternity, and honestly most boss fights in this game do. You lose cards too quickly, especially when you use 3 at a time, and the charge up period leaves you completely vulnerable (unless you have the Air Soldier enemy card and even then that only works for 3 reloads) and gets longer with each subsequent reload. During regular encounters this isn't much of a hassle, but during boss fights you start to realize how much slower and more boring this game is.
Don't play this game on Standard Mode, please. This game is already so fucking luck based alone that playing it on Standard or Higher is nothing short of self-torture on your behalf.
I played Sora's story in Standard and I wish I hadn't. The game just becomes an absolute misery to go through by endgame, even with grinding. Eventually it just came to luck that I beat Marluxia's third phase, and after that I wished everything was done.
I played Riku's story in Beginner Mode because I couldn't give a fuck, and I will say, as a speedrunning game I could see Chain of Memories being somewhat interesting. I basically just avoided regular encounters after my second world because I just wanted the game to end and still came out around Level 35, only 15 levels lower than my playthrough with Sora, and within only a quarter of the time.
Riku definitely has flashier combos than Sora, and can activate Dark Mode by breaking enough enemy cards. In fact, Riku can do a lot of cool shit, the problem is that like the rest of the game, it's based on fucking luck. It's such a shame too, this is Riku's first playable debut and it's really depressing that it had to be this game.
Overall it's like, this game is objectively so much worse than KH1 as a whole, to the point where it made me bump that game up a point because it legitimately wasn't as loaded with luck based bullshit as this.
You know a game is bad when every single achievement unlock for it is marked as a Rare Achievement on the Xbox Version. Nobody wants to play this game, because a nobody can't be somebody, and somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me, I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed. She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb in the shape of an "L" on her forehead.
Well.
The years start coming and they don't stop coming, fed to the rules and I hit the ground running. Didn't make sense not to live for fun, your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb. So much to do so much to see, so what's wrong with taking the back streets? You'll never know if you don't go
You'll never shine if you don't glow
Hey now, you're an all-star, get your game on, go play
Hey now, you're a rock star, get the show on, get paid
And all that glitters is gold
Only shooting stars break the mold
It's a cool place and they say it gets colder
You're bundled up now, wait 'til you get older
But the meteor men beg to differ
Judging by the hole in the satellite picture
The ice we skate is getting pretty thin
The water's getting warm so you might as well swim
My world's on fire, how about yours?
That's the way I like it and I'll never get bored
Hey now, you're an all-star, get your game on, go play
Hey now, you're a rock star, get the show on, get paid
All that glitters is gold
Only shooting stars break the mold
Hey now, you're an all-star, get your game on, go play
Hey now, you're a rock star, get the show, on get paid
And all that glitters is gold
Only shooting stars
Somebody once asked could I spare some change for gas?
I need to get myself away from this place
I said, "Yup" what a concept
I could use a little fuel myself
And we could all use a little change
Well, the years start coming and they don't stop coming
Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running
Didn't make sense not to live for fun
Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb
So much to do, so much to see
So what's wrong with taking the back streets?
You'll never know if you don't go (go!)
You'll never shine if you don't glow
Hey now, you're an all-star, get your game on, go play
Hey now, you're a rock star, get the show on, get paid
And all that glitters is gold
Only shooting stars break the mold
And all that glitters is gold
Only shooting stars break the mold.
Yeah I just made you read All Star's Lyrics in this review. Why? Because fuck this game. If you have to experience this game... just watch some cutscenes, you aren't missing much with anything else.
Go fuck yourself Elmo.