Kingdom hearts re:Chain Of Memories picks up right where kingdom hearts 1 left off. It bridges the gap between Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2. However, do you need this game to understand whats happening in KH2? Sort of but not really. Kingdom heart re:com has Sora, Donald and Goofy enter castle Oblivion searching for king Mickey and Riku. What they find are mysterious members of a certain organization who are attempting to turn Sora into their puppet. How do they intend to do this? Well, the intersting thing about castle oblivion is that as you ascend the castle you slowly start to lose your memory. The orginization uses this to their advantage by replacing the memories that Sora is loosing with a false set or chain of memories. Now their is a lot more to this plot and this is a very basic synopsis but I don't want to give everything away.
Gameplay wise the game is radically different then kingdom hearts 1 in that all combat takes place using cards. That's right I said cards. KH re:com is a real time card game. You see everything in castle oblivion is card based from the worlds you go to to how you attack. This is also how they exlplain you losing all of your abilities at the beggining of the game. The game early on informs you that as soon as yo entered the castle you lost all abilities and powers that you gained from the first game and that you'll have to earn the cards that give you you're abilities. There are two different main types of cards the first is you're baattle deck while the second are the world cards. How it works is that when you attack an enemy you're taken to a seperate battle screen where you use a deck that you have built to attack, use magic, and summon friends to help you. Suprisingly the combat system is actually somewhat deep with certain cards like 0 trumping other cards if used at certain times. While other cards if paired together into sleights allow you to unleash powerfull attacks such as arcs arcanum and sonic blade to name a few. To progress through the game you have to use map or world cards at doors in order to advance. You win these cards in battle against heartless and they allow you to chose what kind of room you want to enter into next. What I mean by this is that if you use the tranquil darkness card at the entrance to the next room you will enter into a room where their are weaker heartless or if you use almighty darkness you will enter into a room where there are stronger than normal heartless. There are many different types of world cards that do many different things and this allows you to have a sort of build your own dungeon type of layout. Unfortunately most of the rooms look the same so in the end the only thing you really effect are the enemies. One type of card that I haven't mentioned yet are the enemy type cards. These cards drop when you beat enemies in battle. They can help you in battle but really you only need them to complete Jimminey's journal. That's right jimminey's journal is back from KH1 with a vengence. You see in order to complete Jimminey's journal you have to collect all of the enemy cards but these cards only have about a 2% - 14% drop rate meaning that this is a very grind heavy game for completionists.
One thing that has always been great with kingdom hearts are the bosses and that is definitely true here. Most of the bosses have a good amount of build up allowing you to get a good grip on their personalities and making them more than just a random boss encounter which is quite satisfying. For the most part the bosses never get repetitive except for one boss. This boss you fight a grand total of SIX times throughout the game if you play both campaigns. Each time he gets a little bit harder to beat and it really starts to wear on you're last nerve. Other than this one boss though all of the bosses throughout the game, especially the final bosses, are fantastic.
Finally when you finish the game you unlock the reverse/rebirth campaign in which you play as Riku and start in the basement of the castle. This campaign is much shorter but not to short than the original campaign. Riku's gameplay is also different than Sora's and its not just a superficial difference. He's much faster and has completely different abilites than Sora.
Overall the first campaign clocked in at about 20-30 hours while Riku's campaign clocked in at about 7 hours so you will be getting your monies worth when it comes to this game. If you just want to play this game for the campaigns you won't have much trouble and it won't get very grind heavy. However, if you are a completionist this game will get very grind heavy when you attempt to 100% jimminey's journal.
In conclusion this game has a deep card combat system that is fun for the first 10 hours but get really repetitive as the game goes on. However this is probably one of the better card based combat systems out there. Unfortunately the worlds that you visit all have the same basic set up with only cosmetic changes. If you're a KH or card based combat fan get this game. For the rest of you take a look but this isn't a must own