Made a potentially ill-conceived choice that I’d go and play through all the Kingdom Hearts games, this time including the ones that I previously skipped out on for one reason or another, and while KH1 ended up being a game that became a masterpiece in my mind, playing Re:Chain of Memories did not leave me with similar feelings. To put it simply, this game is deranged, and also a total mess, taking the framework of a GBA game with more similarities to a beat ‘em up than anything else, and trying to implement the core card-based mechanics of the game into KH1’s combat engine. This leads to the game in a constant state of feeling entirely at odds with itself, trying to mash two systems that had vastly different dynamics associated with them into one package at the cost of both sides of this coin being severely hampered. Fortunately, despite how awkward everything is, there are some interesting ideas to go alongside all the quirks, both narratively and in the combat itself, that serve to occasionally make this a weird, but interesting game, rather than consistently being a bore.

At its core, I’m very much not a fan of the card system and its implementation in either of the campaigns here. To have an attack be successful, you need to use a card with a higher number than your enemy, and then they need to not respond with a higher number than yours, otherwise your attack will be rendered ineffective. While the deckbuilding element is meant to encourage a more strategic approach to combat, due to the way most enemies function, this ultimately contributes to a system that makes standard KH1 combat feel worse and more annoying in most cases. Encountering wave after wave of heartless as you make your way through the labyrinths quickly becomes tedious, with the constant chance of enemies breaking your attack and wasting your time as a result being a slight, but increasingly frustrating thing to encounter with each fight. Triangle spamming to use sleights will resolve some of this issue, by almost always leaving you with a number high enough that enemies can never break through since it’s a combination of 3 card values and basic enemies don’t have the 0 cards that guarantee a card break. However, this doesn’t get around the fact that aerial combat is awful regardless, with a lot of special attacks being unable to hit airborne enemies. This causes Re:Chain of memories to have the worst aerial combat in the series bar none due to how drastically your options get reduced, further contributing to the fodder heartless fights being a slog to get through.

The boss fights fix certain problems with this setup but introduce and highlight their own set of issues. The vast majority of the bosses have access to 0 cards, letting them break through your attack regardless of how strong it is, which forces the player to more carefully pick and choose their moments so they don’t waster their strongest attacks. Any humanoid boss also has access to their own set of sleights, further increasing the chance of your attacks being interrupted, along with introducing some extremely devastating attacks. The issues with this framework surface in 2 main ways, both being equally annoying. Since the player is able to nullify enemy attacks with the right cards, a lot of attacks in the game straight up are not designed with the idea of being able to dodge them in mind. This detracts from the sense of variety that a lot of bosses could have, since learning patterns and dodging is not something that ever happens really, it’s just that you need to nullify the attack to stop it from happening in the first place, leading to most bosses being dealt with in the exact same way. This issue is compounded with the extremely binary outcome of most of these fights, either you steamroll them and don’t let them ever hit you, or you get demolished without the slightest modicum of hope. If you build your deck to just have a bunch of powerful sleights, it’s extremely easy to stunlock the bosses despite the mechanics that were put in place specifically to try preventing this, and it’s mainly caused by there being no revenge values of any sort, so there’s no way for them to retaliate if you keep spamming them with attacks that momentarily stun them. The one exception to this that I found is the final boss, which is honestly really good and is one of the only times that I felt like the card system was being used to its full potential.

The one positive about this is that it’s honestly pretty fun to break the game with an overpowered deck, and there are a lot of way to do this, whether it’s with sonic blade, lethal frame, ars arcanum, or even level 3 magic spells, there’ll never be a shortage of different ways to obliterate the game balance to suit any given situation, and it’s satisfying to build around facilitating such situations, just an unfortunate fact that it comes at the cost of doing almost anything else throughout the game. Riku’s story tackles a lot of my complaints by making the player use prebuilt decks and not giving them access to a bunch of overpowered abilities that are easy to trigger, but then it goes and introduces its own flaws instead. Bosses can no longer be utterly steamrolled in the same braindead manner, but the duel mechanics which let you use a strong attack if you use the same value card as an enemy gives you an almost equally easy and dominant strategy. The fights still end up being a bit trickier and more even, but the core issue of things being built around nullifying attacks instead of learning how to properly deal with them is still present, and the regular heartless fights are made even more tedious by not being given options to destroy everything on screen within a couple of seconds, making the journey a massive grind.

Overall, Chain of Memories is just an utter mess of a game that will either be deeply frustrating, or comically easy without anything in between, which I think is a shame, since in theory, a lot of these mechanics could be really interesting, bizarre, but interesting, it’s just unfortunate that the game almost never utilises them in a manner to bring anything interesting out of it. I still don’t really dislike the game either though, the narrative is cool enough and I got enough enjoyment out of figuring out a bunch of different ways to break stuff, but it just goes on forever with so much padding in between the cool stuff. A fascinating experiment, but not much more for me, I don’t see myself wanting to return to this one again.

thought i'd like this more. sacrifices the much-needed (albeit sometimes unfair) difficulty of previous games in favor of making sora hilariously overpowered. while the power trip is fun enough at first, the charm quickly wears off when you realize you can beat the whole game by mashing the x button. what really makes this such a slog is the story, with constant, never-ending cutscenes overstuffed with tedious exposition and laughably robotic voice acting. the game is impressive in terms of visuals and sound design, though I almost prefer the charm of the primitive PS2 graphics for this kind of thing as there's sometimes so much action and so many particle effects onscreen that its often hard to discern what's happening. the music is also great, though the most memorable tracks are all borrowed from previous games. and speaking as someone who plays these games for the disney worlds, I really disliked the choice to base all the worlds (except hercules and winnie the pooh I guess) on properties from the previous decade. the frozen world is especially bad with its incredibly awkward retelling of the movie's plot, down to the unintentionally hilarious let it go recreation. that's not to mention that the level design in the this world, and generally the rest of the game, is pretty boring. I think I am done with this series now.