Despite owning a Game Boy Advance in my youth and being a big enough fan of Kingdom Hearts to play games like 358/2 Days and Birth By Sleep, Chain of Memories always eluded me. In time, I filled myself in on the general strokes of the lore. Why not just play the game? Well, the card battling gimmick didn't exactly repulse me, but it did make the game seem particularly spin-offy.
All that to say that this was my first exposure to the gameplay of CoM. It started off rocky. It got downright frustrating. It landed somewhere between compelling and life-draining. But just as Final Mix managed to quicksand me back into the KH fandom, CoM is sticking with me and making me want to do another playthrough as Sora to see if I can optimize the game for myself.
The big-profile KH reviewers like KingK frequently point out that Sonic Blade, among other sleights, "break" the game and reduce the boss fights to spam fest. Luckily, even though I'd been told this halfway through my playthrough, I simply chose not to do that. The result was multiple deaths at the hands of Repliku, Larxene, Axel, and Vexen (strangely enough, Marluxia never managed to kill me with my proper Boss Deck) - but I could feel myself getting better with magic, zero cards, and partner sleights. I allowed myself the option to explore the rest of what the game had to offer and that made all the difference.
Where I did wish the developers had done something specifically for Re:COM was address the monotony of the map traversal. Once you're at a high enough level and have a deck built, the incentive to pick fights on the thirteenth floor vanishes like a Namine memory. I can't speak for what this was like in a GBA-era handheld, but for an at-home experience, it started to feel rather punishing. Not because fighting Heartless was hard, but because no matter how good you got, the card system meant that the fights lasted longer than, say, grind sessions in Hollow Bastion in Final Mix. There are mechanics in the game that seem quirky rather than integrated. Simply adding more variety to what the door cards actually do in regards to your final confrontations would have gone a long way.
It's a game I would have quit if it weren't for my investment in the characters. It's hard to say how much of this is the meta text or simply the knowledge of future events. But I was surprised by how moved I was by Namine's story and her interactions with the characters. It was a character I'd only known about, but it's truly something else to experience the journey, making later moments in the Kingdom Hearts story carry a lot more significance.
All that to say that this was my first exposure to the gameplay of CoM. It started off rocky. It got downright frustrating. It landed somewhere between compelling and life-draining. But just as Final Mix managed to quicksand me back into the KH fandom, CoM is sticking with me and making me want to do another playthrough as Sora to see if I can optimize the game for myself.
The big-profile KH reviewers like KingK frequently point out that Sonic Blade, among other sleights, "break" the game and reduce the boss fights to spam fest. Luckily, even though I'd been told this halfway through my playthrough, I simply chose not to do that. The result was multiple deaths at the hands of Repliku, Larxene, Axel, and Vexen (strangely enough, Marluxia never managed to kill me with my proper Boss Deck) - but I could feel myself getting better with magic, zero cards, and partner sleights. I allowed myself the option to explore the rest of what the game had to offer and that made all the difference.
Where I did wish the developers had done something specifically for Re:COM was address the monotony of the map traversal. Once you're at a high enough level and have a deck built, the incentive to pick fights on the thirteenth floor vanishes like a Namine memory. I can't speak for what this was like in a GBA-era handheld, but for an at-home experience, it started to feel rather punishing. Not because fighting Heartless was hard, but because no matter how good you got, the card system meant that the fights lasted longer than, say, grind sessions in Hollow Bastion in Final Mix. There are mechanics in the game that seem quirky rather than integrated. Simply adding more variety to what the door cards actually do in regards to your final confrontations would have gone a long way.
It's a game I would have quit if it weren't for my investment in the characters. It's hard to say how much of this is the meta text or simply the knowledge of future events. But I was surprised by how moved I was by Namine's story and her interactions with the characters. It was a character I'd only known about, but it's truly something else to experience the journey, making later moments in the Kingdom Hearts story carry a lot more significance.