Game Review – Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories

By: MangaGirl

Rating:

Story:	Gameplay:

Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories, is a game that i was excited to play and yet why did it take me months to finish the game? I suppose its because i played KH1 and KH2 before this one, so my expectations were too high. The entire game is basically fighting heartless (its all that you do in each world) to collect cards to fight and cards to open doors, in each world you open three doors so that you can see cut scenes and fight the final boss. You repeat this in each world that you already visited in KH1, there really wasn’t any new worlds, since the point of this game is to delve into Sora’s Memory, as the name of the game basically says.

Sora is looking for Riku and King Mickey, he wants to find them so he can go back home. He ends up in Castle Oblivion a place that has something to do with memories. The castle is ruled by cards. Yep i said cards. Thats the one thing i didn’t like about the game, i know the games are geared for kids, but the whole idea of fighting with cards and opening doors with them just pushed the games into being really childish. It reminds me of those kids shows where kids duel other people, they stand there and creatures come out of cards and everyone is gasping in panic to see what the next card will be next. The villain always has a super undefeatable card that the hero manages to beat magically. Anyways, i Digress.

The cards thing wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t annoying fighting with cards. When you battle you have a deck of cards to use, some are attack cards, item cards, skill cards, and magic cards. The bad thing is if you waste your cards doing sleights (a special attack) all your cards will disappear and you’ll be standing there without any cards and unable to do anything,  but you do have the choice of waiting for Pluto to appear and find you more cards, but you better hope his card number is high, because if his number is low he can be broken by an enemy attack and you’ll get nothing. And yet despite all of that i was still able to finish this game because i really liked the story, it was interesting to see what happened during the one year gap between KH1 and KH2. Namine comes out more in this game and you are able to understand her powers more, and you get to learn a little more about the organization. You also get to learn more about Riku and Axel.

The graphics in this game are great, its a huge improvement to the graphics in the Gameboy version. The music as always is sweet and nostalgic but its getting kind of annoying that they cant come up with new music for the new Kingdom Hearts games, as much as i like the song Sanctuary, do they have to use it for every single game??? Also, for you Mickey Fans out there you’ll get to see a lot more of him in this game, and you get to hear his squeaky voice a lot, i used to love Mickey, but my love has officially been destroyed. One thing i really liked about this game is that when you finish the game there is a 2nd Story Mode. You actually get to play as Riku! You’ll get to see what happened to him after he disappeared behind the door with Mickey in KH1. I’ve always wanted to play as him, unfortunately you can tell they didn’t really care about originality when they decided to piece together a quick little game that features Riku. They actually force you to fight the same exact bosses and you revisit the same worlds that Sora did, i dont get why you had to do this. It was really annoying, but it was worth it because you get to learn so much more about Riku. Anyway, if you are a KH fan then i would recommend playing this game. Otherwise just head over to youtube and watch the cut scenes, you wont be missing much by skipping the game play.

Top: Gameboy Version Bottom: PS2 Version

You have to synthesized doors in each world to see cut scenes and reach the worlds boss.