Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Hard to describe"

Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories is a direct sequel to the one of the most popular games on the PS2 Kingdom Hearts. While the idea of Square Enix meeting Disney is stupid... It still is, but it's a guilty pleasure for me. Chain of Memories? rnNot so much.... The story opens up with Sora, Donald and Goofy following Pluto in Castle Oblivion. A man in a cloak informs Sora that the higher up he goes in the castle, he will get his true memories back, but he will lose others. Sora later seems to remember that he used to hang out with Naminé back at Destiny Island. The three also think that the King and Riku might be here so they set off in another adventure. This is before the entire series became a mess in my opinion and what you get is a decent mystery. It's also an excuse to reuse other worlds, but it's a GBA game so it's excusable. The gameplay is a bit different from what you might expect. Every action may it be an attack, summon or item is a card (including your enemies actions!). Every card has a number and you can block any card as long as its below your cards number. If your card has the number zero it can block any card as long as your enemy has played a card. If not then any card can block it. If you run out of cards you have to pray to the cards which takes up some time, making you vulnerable to hits, because you can't move.I actually like this aspect for the game, especially for the GBA, but it can get really monotemous after a while. Every Kingdom Hearts game has that problem, but I think this is the worst one. You see, every card needs card points and you only get a limited number of this. To raise it, you need to level up so if you want to include some specific cards, prepare to grind over and over until you have. It gets even worse when you use the same cards in the same order over and over. There are special moves so you'd think there's some variety, but to activate you need to combine three cards and when you do so you lost the first card and never comes back until the end of the battle. It may be usefull for short battles, but they're random! How do you know how long they're going to take? But I do find an interesting mechanic especially when I see bosses combine cards and see them reload. The biggest change in Kingdom Hearts are the overworlds. Every world from Kingdom Hearts returns in this one with the exception of Deep Jungle which got the axe due to liscensing issues. Something I have to note is that worlds are really short. Even with grinding, I could blaze through 5 worlds in less then two hours. This isn't really a flaw in my eyes, because I like my handheld games to be short as opposed to so long it takes a year to complete. There are no new worlds to explore, but I think that actually might a positive, because it would be massively disseapointing to see your most anticipated world in this game and see how it's nothing but blocks. Yes, they're blocky. Blocky to the point that it's not very appealing to look at. Sometimes it works like with Agrabah, because the buildings are made up of blocks, everyhing else is just bad. You also no longer fight enemies in the overworld, when you touch an enemy, you're brought in battle world with random spawning heartless. I should say that the backgrounds on these parts are nice. What I really do like about the graphics is the sprite quality. To me, it has a certain charm that none of the 3D games have ever managed to capture. The Music is mostly the same from Kingdom Hearts, except because of the conversion to the GBA some tracks sound like crap Traverse Towns theme otherwise it just sounds ok at best. Inferior, but tolerable. So is Chain of Memories a bad game? No, they tried something different and technically it works, but I can't recommend this to everyone. It's in no way a masterpiece, but it's decent adventure. Fans of Kingdom Hearts will get the most out of it, so try it out. You might enjoy it.