I recently beat the PlayStation 2 remake of “Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories”. Sora’s story took 27:25, and Riku’s story took 16:04. This game was originally released on the Game Boy Advance, and I thought it was really boring. But, nevertheless, I still bought the remake, and I thought it was a lot more fun. It’s probably mainly because I just don’t like GBA games, but still.
Anyway, in this game, Sora, Donald Duck, and Goofy are searching for King Mickey and Sora’s friend, Riku. They find a mysterious castle where “to find is to lose and to lose is to find”, whatever that means, called Castle Oblivion. As they go further and further into the castle, they start to lose their memories, while Sora starts to remember a girl he knew when he was a little kid. But, why hadn’t he remembered her until now? Also in the castle are some strange people in black clothes from a group called Organization XIII that are led by a man named Marluxia. Now what could they be up to?
This game is played a bit differently than the other “Kingdom Hearts” games. You still fight in real-time, but now you use cards. You choose what cards you want, then as you fight, you scroll through your cards and can use attack cards to attack, magic cards to use things like cure or fire, and item cards for reloading cards. There are also summon cards where a character appears for a short time to help you. My favorite is Cloud (the same Cloud from “Final Fantasy VII”) because his attacks are strong and because he’s Cloud. There’s also Tinkerbell, the Genie from Aladdin, and others. Cards are numbered from 0-9, and the higher the number, the more effective. Plus, if you play a card higher than what your enemy is using, you can break their card and stop their attack. (0’s can break anything or be broken by anything, depending on when you use them.)
Each world in this game is made up of a bunch of rooms. At each door, you use a card that determines what kind of room it is. You can make a save point, or a room with a lot of Heartless, or a room with sleeping Heartless, for example. And each world has various rooms where part of the story happens, as well. Going through a whole bunch of rooms can get a bit redundant, but this game was still more fun than the original.
There is also another story when you beat Sora’s story. This story is called Reverse/Rebirth, and you play as Riku. The game chooses for you which cards you can use, which can be bad or good, depending on what they decide to give you. Riku can’t do as many things as Sora can, but he can go into dark mode where he can use strong sleights (where you combine three cards together for an attack).
One thing I think is worth mentioning is that in this version of the game, you get to fight Organization member Zexion. For a while, he was the only member of the Organization that you never knew what powers he has or what weapon, so I thought it was fun fighting him for the first time and seeing what he can do.
Anyway, to summarize, the remake of “Chain of Memories” was a lot of fun. This game is played much differently from the others because of the cards and the rooms, which can make it both unique in some ways and a little boring in others. Overall, I’m glad I got the remake. Now the game is actually fun to play.
Chain of Ducks
The Duck of Indeed 