Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories — Do You Suffer From Long-Term Memory Loss? I Don’t Remember…

So you’ve saved various worlds and stopped the darkness from spreading.  What’s your next move?  Amnesia, of course!  Chain of Memories is best described as a remake of the original game, albeit with some major differences.

The GBA never was as powerful as the PS2, so Chain of Memories obviously couldn’t have the same battle system as the original.  Instead of a straight action system, Chain of Memories had Sora win battles by performing card tricks.  What I mean is, battles were conducted by using cards to attack your enemy.  Cards with a keyblade on them were your attack cards, and cards with various magical pictures on them (a leaf, for example) were your magic spells.  You could have up to 99 cards in a deck, but you were restricted by the numbers present on each card.  The numbers on all the cards in your deck couldn’t add up to more than your current CP total.  Furthermore, your enemies would also use cards in battle at the same time, and higher-numbered cards or card combinations beat lower-numbered cards or card combinations.  The one exception was the zero card.  If one or more cards were played and the total value of the cards was zero, then the enemy’s attack would be broken.  However, anything could break a zero, so the zero card was a double-edged sword.

Cards could also be combined with each other in what were called sleights.  Sleights were more powerful and were harder to break, since two or three cards combined to calculate the total value of a sleight.  They could still be broken by a higher total value or by a zero.  Not only that, but the first card in a sleight was removed from your deck entirely.  Ordinarily, cards you play in battle would sit in a discard pile off-screen until you ran out of cards.  When you no longer had any cards in your deck, you could reload your cards (however, Sora was vulnerable to attack during a reload).  The only cards that didn’t reload were the lead cards from each sleight you performed, which were discarded without adding them to your discard pile.  Certain item cards could reload your entire deck, including cards that had been permanently lost from your deck due to your sleights.  Naturally, those item cards also had numbers and could be vulnerable to breaking.

After battle, experience balls would explode from defeated enemies, as well as occasional goodies.  This was an annoyance I had with both this game and the first game (but neglected to mention in my review): you couldn’t just count on the experience you earned to be automatically added to your total like in most RPGs.  You had to run around and gather it up.  In the first game, enemies would attack when I was trying to gather up my experience and money (called Munny in the series), causing me to lose control of my character for a moment as he was knocked backwards, and I lost whatever I hadn’t gathered up.  If you didn’t gather that stuff up in time, it disappears and you lost out on the fruits of your labour.  It always struck me as a bad idea to make the player work for their prize, then work harder just to collect it.  This game was no different: experience had to be gathered up, but fortunately there was no Munny involved.  Munny was replaced by Moogle Points, or MP.  MP was used to buy cards from moogles, usually in the form of booster packs.  Unwanted cards could be sold back to moogles, too, especially if you needed the MP.

Cards were also used to unlock other parts of the game.  Most of the rooms you needed to enter in the game were created by synthesizing them from map cards, but map cards were dropped randomly from enemies.  Rooms also required certain cards to create them, and if you didn’t have any cards that work?  You were expected to keep battling enemies until you randomly received one that would work.  This wasn’t usually a problem, but occasionally I found that I couldn’t get into a room without a very specific kind of card, and I had to keep fighting in order to get into the room and get on with the game.  I don’t know of very many other games that require the player to collect items randomly dropped from enemies, just to get into the next area and get on with things.  “Cloud, before you can go and see Sephiroth run a sword through the most important girl in your life, you need to collect five Mute Masks and a Loco Weed.  Good luck!”

Chain of Memories introduced a bunch of new characters that didn’t mean much to me.  They were part of an group named Organization XIII, but the group didn’t seem to believe in the phrase “united we stand”, for one half of the group seemed to want to oust control from the other half of the group.  I guess they were doing it just because they were evil and that’s what evil does?  Unfortunately, it seems like that’s the worst that a Kingdom Hearts villain is capable of.

After beating the game, a new mode named Reverse/Rebirth is available to the player and starred Riku as he went through pretty much the same adventure that Sora did.  Unlike the main story with Sora, Riku’s decks were fixed to each world and could not be customized.  It did make Reverse/Rebirth a shorter, faster experience, but it also restricted the player and kept them from being able to experiment with the distribution of Riku’s cards.

Considering this was a remake of the first Kingdom Hearts game, the music in the game was pretty much recycled from the original, including the theme song from the first game, which played during the end credits.  If you’re tired of listening to certain tracks from the original, I would suggest listening to something else or just turning the sound down on your GBA while you play this game.  The graphics were typical for an RPG on the GBA, especially games like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.  There was one major exception: certain cut scenes made use of some pretty amazing video compression software, and as a result, they looked like they could’ve been PS2 cutscenes rather than GBA cutscenes.  Naturally, they couldn’t fit very many of them onto the cartridge, but what they did fit looked simply amazing on the GBA.

Ultimately, this game felt like an extra, unnecessary side story that can be skipped over entirely in favour of Kingdom Hearts II.  The game didn’t really add anything new that Kingdom Hearts II didn’t cover, and every world that showed up in Chain of Memories had already shown up in the original game.  The Deep Jungle from Tarzan wasn’t included in Chain of Memories, and so I assume Sora permanently forgot about Tarzan and Jane and Sabor and Clayton?

Anyway, Chain of Memories began a pattern where Kingdom Hearts games on Sony systems feel like full Kingdom Hearts games, and those on a Nintendo console feel like mere episodes, just side stories that don’t seem to m
atter.  If you’re just getting into the Kingdom Hearts series, I would suggest playing the first game and then going right to the next numbered game and skipping over this one entirely.