Check out that video, because it’s actually pretty good, if I do say so myself.

There’s probably a very good reason why Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories is often forgotten about in the franchise, and it’s not just because of the magical powers of a witch who has control over everyone’s memories. It may partly be down to originally releasing on the Gameboy Advance, a bold move for a game whose previous title was on Playstation 2, and then the Playstation 2 re-release being part of Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix+ in Japan or the stand alone release in North America, 2 whole years after the release of Kingdom Hearts II. Europe didn’t even see this game in its PS2 graphics until 2013 with the Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix release on Playstation 3, and at that point did anyone other than the most die hard keyblade wielders care? Probably not. The main point is that Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories is kind of bad.

Re: Chain of Memories takes place almost immediately following the events of the original Kingdom Hearts. Shortly after Sora exploded a man in the shape of a battleship, he and his Disney boys are nonchalantly walking through a field when they stumble upon Pluto, the dog. Chasing after him in the pursuit of answers on King Mickey’s location, they find a giant creepy castle in the swirling void of nothingness and decide that it’s a good idea to go in and investigate. Upon entering they’re informed that while in The Castle Oblivion they’ll slowly lose all of their memories, as well as be subjected to card based combat. Instead of immediately turning around and leaving, Sora decides that climbing the castle is a sound idea, and so begins the waking nightmare that is Chain of Memories.

The main draw for Chain of Memories is the aforementioned card based combat which sounds interesting on paper but immediately becomes frustrating in practice. All of your attacks are replaced with cards. Your magic, your summons, your items and even just your basic attacks. All cards. Even your party members. Cards. The levels? Also cards. Did I mention that it’s all cards. It’s literally a house of cards, except the cards are made out of even smaller cards. Your combat cards all have a random number from 0 to 9 which denotes their card power. Not their attack power, that’s very different. Your card power’s card power is used in the vague top trumps style combat system. Higher numbers cancel out lower numbers and lower numbers can’t do anything to a higher number. If you’re doing a move with a painfully long animation that has a power of 9, then your foes are unable to attack until they beat that 9 with their own cards. Any cards they throw at you simply fall to the floor. Meanwhile, if an enemy is doing a long winded attack of equally high number you can combine your cards into a “Sleight” to have a card power of their total value.

This is all very important because the main course of combat you’ll be engaging in is not one of hitting monsters with your big sword, but instead of making sure you CAN swing your key sword in the first place. As Sora you’ll be constructing your deck out of the various cards you pick up along the way and you’ll have to find the perfect balance between powerful keyblade cards and those with high enough numbers that allow you to actually attack and not be constantly interrupted by the attack of Heartless, bosses or the dreaded Organization XIII, and they will. They’ll interrupt you constantly, both physically and narratively. At its heart, the card based combat is definitely interesting. Working out how to prepare your deck so that certain combos play out naturally and other cards are in convenient locations becomes something that you’ll constantly be tinkering with. The points limit on your deck, each card has a points value based on how valuable or strong it is, limits you from stuffing your deck full of the strongest cards possible and trying to squeeze in that one strong melee attack might see you having to drop some others from your deck. Trying to pre-organise your deck into sleight order is generally the key to victory, but at the same time the first card used in a sleight isn’t brought back when you “reload” your deck, to replenish the cards you’ve been using, so those sleights may not work out on the next rotation in the same battle.

This is generally an interesting puzzle and toy to play with and work out, but at the same time it suffers from being really annoying and not at all fluid. The constant interruptions to your combat and combos wont leave you thinking “Ah yes, I see how I can now change this layout, hmm yes” and instead have you just gripping your controller in white knuckled frustration as the whole thing feels purposefully obtuse and like it’s just designed to get in your way at every opportunity. Which is normally the moment when players learn of the sleight “Sonic Blade” which becomes your go to solution for almost every single problem. A simple deck built around triplets of cards that combine into the Sonic Blade sleight can see all combat devolve into the simple process of smashing the triangle button as fast as the game will allow. It honestly defeats almost every single boss and monster, although the general enemies would be easier dealt with via some kind of large area of effect sleight and the actual level bosses become their own painful demons.

As you traverse the Hotel Oblivion – of which it’s not a very lovely place – you’ll relive most of your fond memories from the original Kingdom Hearts as each floor takes the shape of one of the worlds from the previous game, except Deep Jungle. Deep Jungle was rubbish, there were also legal difficulties. The only issue being that the already rather light story of each world has now been condensed even further into three pieces. A beginning, a middle and an end, surprisingly. Halloween Town becomes a simple story of turning up, going to the lab and then fighting Boogie; three simple segments. On the one hand, you should probably already know the stories of these worlds as not only are they well established Disney films, these WERE in the first game, so do you really need to replay the exact same story again? Yes, apparently. The actual exploration of these worlds, though, becomes more of a card generated maze of rooms. You’ll use “Map Cards” to generate a room of a certain type and in doing so eventually reach the required story rooms. These map cards provide a variety of effects such as a room full of stronger monsters, a room where all your cards have +1 card power or a room that’s just a save point, and many more, so each journey through the levels and worlds are relatively different. The actual maze of the rooms are the exact same (one world will always look like a big letter T, for example) but what those rooms contain is up to you and what you’ve got in your map card storage. There’s yet more numerical wonders happening with these rooms and map cards but what cards you use will rarely change how your day pans out as it’ll still mostly involve hitting heartless with a big key… made out of cards?

Aside from the generic Disney stories being replayed for no one’s entertainment, the general story of Chain of Memories takes place between each floor. This primarily revolves around Sora slowly losing his memories with a frightening pace and then regaining them as he remembers his good friend Naminé. Things get all too confusing at times, almost purposefully so, as characters are replaced in Sora’s head and then unreplaced all while fighting Riku, except it’s not Riku it’s an exact replica of Riku because things weren’t already confusing enough. The mysterious members of Organization XIII turn up from time to time to get hit by several iterances of Sonic Blade, but also to talk in vaguely ominous ways about memories, heart and darkness. A lot of the time it’s seemingly done with the direct purpose to confuse Sora and his hazy memories, but some of the time it also ends up just confusing the player as well, who doesn’t suffer from magic based memory loss. Because of this deep dive into a rather sticky story, the whole story turns into this near beige wave that you spend several hours simply passing through, with your Sonic Blade. It’s almost impressive how much non-story there manages to be in game with at least 13 floors worth of story cutscenes and fights. Even Sora manages to boil the whole thing down to as simple a concept as “The Organization are bad, must destroy, worry about who is fake and who is real later”. As a big fan of Kingdom Hearts I kind of wanted to be blown away by hidden chapters of a story I’d never seen, and instead came out a little bored. The Organization lack much in terms of personality or purpose other than that they’re all trying to back stab each other.

Also Riku is in the game as a second story. His gameplay is arguably a lot worse and ends up being a finely distilled concoction of that white knuckle anger. Riku has pre-built decks, and each world has a different deck. These are pre-built to the point where even the order the cards turn up in can’t be changed. An interesting puzzle, you might think, as you’re now limited in what you can do so you have to try and work out each deck’s strengths and weaknesses. Which would be great if the entire deck weren’t just simple attack cards with different numbers. Some floors will see your card power never reach higher than 5, others will have the cards in such a sporadic order that it’s nearly impossible to get off a decent combo without being interrupted. It almost becomes unfun to experience. The unique mechanics with Riku are that he’s all dark and brooding, so if you cancel enough enemy cards with your superior cards (normally achieved by simply mashing the attack button) you’ll enter “D-Mode” which now means Riku has access to sleights and his combos play out differently. Three sleights, to be exact, and they’re all a bit rubbish. Otherwise, if you and a foe use the exact same card power leveled card you enter A DUEL! “It’s time to duel” you’ll yell, excited for the prospect of some kind of Yu-Gi-Oh fantasy finally playing out. It’s a disappointing process of the enemy presenting a card and you have to beat it. They present up to 7 cards and you’ve got to beat them all within the time limit, then you do a big move that will probably miss half of the attacks. It’s basically just mashing the attack button some more, except that some floors just don’t play out well as the foes keeps presenting 9s and you’ve only a limited number of cards that can deal with it and they’re all so far away from one another.

Riku’s story is also incredibly light, and even more so than Sora’s. You still run through every single world, but seeing as Riku has no memories of an adventure he was never on you just get to the end and fight the boss, and then the level ends. There’s not even any talking. Once again it falls upon the interactions between each floor to fill in the story deficit and if you ever wanted several hours of characters shouting “darkness!” at one another, then have I got a story for you. For whatever reason Organization XIII (who also hang out in the basement of the Castle Oblivion) want to turn Riku bad by making him submit to darkness. I don’t know why. It’s just an evil thing to do, I guess. Their main plan is to have Riku fight fake Riku over and over again in what becomes a tedious repeated boss fight, and then eventually fight their own members because … darkness.

Re: Chain of Memories isn’t exactly bad, it’s just not good. I’d want to say that the card based combat hasn’t aged well since its release, but I don’t think it was even received well in the first place. It’s the game that launches vaguely into the expanded and ever confusing story that has become the Kingdom Hearts franchise but does so in a way that adds almost nothing to the entire experience. Having never played the game before I didn’t realise how the brief introduction at the start of Kingdom Hearts II provides all the information you could ever need on what happened between each game. The updated graphics make the whole thing a lot easier to discern than the original pixel graphics of the GBA version does, but it’s presentation is needlessly muddy and repetitive. Combat becomes a chore at a surprising rate and almost all of this game is combat, seeing as the stories have been boiled down to what can only be a legal minimum amount of story. The card based combat starts off as a genuinely interesting component, it’s confusing as heck, but it’s at least an interesting system to work around, but that doesn’t last long and is only diminished more as interest in story dwindles into nothingness on the 300th utterance of heart, darkness or memory. At least it’s not the worst Kingdom Hearts game, that’s probably Re:Coded.