Kingdom Hearts is a special series to me. Not only has it played a key role in molding me into the person I am today, but it’s also been a constant source of comfort for me throughout my life. With that in mind, I decided to go back to six key games from the franchise, some of which I haven’t played in a long time, in a series I call Revisiting Kingdom Hearts to see what I think of them in the year 2024. Have my feelings changed about each game over the years? Am I able to take away anything new from them that I didn’t before? How does any one game compare to the rest of the series? These are the kinds of questions I’ll be asking myself as I work my way through the franchise. In part two of this series, I’ll be focusing on arguably the most divisive game in the franchise, Chain of Memories, and the great amount of respect that I have for it.
Similar to many others in the Kingdom Hearts community, I’m not a big fan of Chain of Memories. It’s my least favorite entry in the series by quite a wide margin if we aren’t counting the mobile games. Although I’ve never finished Chain of Memories, I’ve always enjoyed the story it tells. On top of being our introduction to series antagonists Organization XIII, it put Sora through the wringer emotionally and mentally and was the start of Riku’s redemption arc. My strong dislike for Chain of Memories stems from the card-based system that it’s structured around, but that wasn’t always the case.
When Chain of Memories was first released on the Game Boy Advance in 2004, I was a fan of it and thought the way everything revolved around cards was pretty cool. Making my way through worlds with the map cards at my disposal was fun, and the battle system was a unique solution to the problem of bringing Kingdom Hearts combat to a vastly different handheld platform. I got extremely close to finishing the game but ultimately wasn’t able to, so I read up on the story and was satisfied with ending things there. It was an experience that I tended to look back on fondly in the following years, but everything changed when it came to consoles.
At first, I was excited to play Chain of Memories on a TV with a controller in hand and experience it in the best way possible. As the “game that got away,” I saw it as a chance at redemption for my previous failure and was eager to give it a go. The remake looked great and it was a welcome treat to receive proper cutscenes and voice acting for some of the Organization members. But in the years that passed, my tolerance for the battle system significantly plummeted. Card breaks became the bane of my existence, unrelenting boss battles were a chore to deal with, and I had no patience for smart deck-building or card usage. On both the PS2 and the PS3, I tapped out sooner than on my first attempt, leaving Chain of Memories unfinished, except this time I was walking away from it with a sour taste in my mouth and no interest in playing it again.
So imagine my surprise when this playthrough ended up going much better than either of my prior attempts with the remake! To be clear, I still haven’t finished Chain of Memories, and I don’t think I ever will. But this time around, by making one crucial change to how I played, I found myself appreciating and respecting what it does with its card-based system in a way that I never did before.
Unlike just about every other game in the Kingdom Hearts series, Chain of Memories demands that you carefully think things through before you act. In most other entries, you can largely go through the entirety of their stories without needing to think too hard and only have to take the occasional beat when up against a difficult boss, but that strategy doesn’t fly here. Every single aspect of Chain of Memories forces you to seriously weigh the pros and cons of your decisions, lest you end up regretting them. In other words, you need to properly plan and strategize. This required mentality shift is one that I typically end up clashing with to varying degrees because it runs counter to the traditional Kingdom Hearts experience. For this playthrough though, I tried my best to adopt a new mindset and work with the systems instead of pushing against them.
When it comes to traveling through each of the worlds, it’s easy to adjust my mindset, and in fact, I’d say that I enjoyed it. Picking what rooms I want to create is a simple task on paper, but the extra pressure of needing to meet specific criteria to create them as well as the sheer variety of rooms adds a fun layer of depth. Do I want to have a difficult room with a lot of fights, or do I want a room that’ll give me the upper hand in battles? Or maybe it’ll be best to make a room without enemies so that I can save my game or get new cards for combat, albeit at the expense of gaining more experience and map cards. Creating rooms was something I always liked about Chain of Memories, but I found myself enjoying it more this time because I could appreciate the amount of smart planning that it involved. The back and forth I found myself constantly doing in my head as I took my time working out the best map card to use at any given point was always engaging and just as rewarding.
Building my deck of cards was something that I was heavily invested in when I first played on the GBA but I didn’t have a proper grasp on it. I made multiple decks to switch between, but I never fully thought out how I built them. This time around, I wasn’t so invested in deck building that I had more than one deck, but I did take my time trying to meticulously think through the way I set it up. I paid attention to the pros and cons of each Keyblade when deciding which ones I’d use and where I’d place them. I tried to avoid any premium cards because their one-use tradeoff isn’t worth a deck slot in my opinion. Heartless and villain cards were strongly considered from time to time, and although they probably would’ve been great to use, I opted against them because I felt that the amount of CP they required could be used on cards that better fit my needs.
By taking this thorough and measured approach to deck building, I realized that I have to be intentional with my card selection to find success in Chain of Memories, which allowed me to enjoy the game much more than I did in the past. I know I missed out on great creative opportunities by not fully digging into deck building this playthrough, but now I can fully see the deeper potential that the system holds and appreciate what it offers.
It’s also fun taking this meticulous approach when leveling up. You have to choose between either increasing your health, increasing your deck capacity, or learning a new sleight. Since you can only pick one, you have to think about what matters to you more and how it’ll affect you going forward. I would typically rotate between each choice as I gained new levels, but after a certain point, I stopped worrying about sleights since I didn’t use them and was constantly torn between getting more health or more CP for my deck. With each new level, I would take an extended moment to think about what I needed immediately and what I needed for the future. The weight behind this choice made the mental back-and-forth just as enjoyable as the one I’d do when picking map cards or building my deck.
As fun as these elements are, the one area where I continue to clash with the more methodical approach that Chain of Memories asks of you is in combat. Like I said before, approaching combat more casually isn’t going to work here. You have to actively think about a variety of things during fights. What enemies are you fighting and what are the values of their cards? How often will you have to do a full deck restore? How will you use the friend cards that appear during battle? There’s also the factor of sleights that needs to be considered since the first card used in a sleight can’t be used again for the rest of a fight. It’s a lot to consider and although I’m not the biggest fan of these elements of combat, I do have times when I enjoy managing them.
The battle system is wildly different from traditional Kingdom Hearts combat, but it tries to channel its essence here and in the moments where it clicks, combat can be fun. Getting through fights easily and efficiently using my cards against tough groups of enemies can bring about a sense of pride and satisfaction that’s akin to how I’d feel when taking on groups of enemies in the first game. In these moments, I’d feel like I had a solid grasp of combat and could take on anything thrown at me. My biggest issue, and what brings the whole combat system crumbling down for me, is card breaks.
Card breaks are the worst because there’s nothing more frustrating than going to do an attack only to have it instantly canceled out by an opponent’s card since every move counts in Chain of Memories. A canceled attack is one less hit you’re able to get off. A canceled heal is the difference between life and death. Making sleights out of your cards increases your chances of them being used, but even they can still be canceled out with a simple zero card, putting three of your cards to waste in one fell swoop. Once you’re out of cards you have to restore your deck, and the amount of time it takes to do this increases with each restore which leaves you vulnerable for an extended period, so you don’t want any cards to be wasted.
This becomes even more of a problem during boss fights since not only do they have their quirks to make them more challenging, but they also tend to have stronger cards than normal Heartless and larger decks to pull from, so their attacks are liable to break your cards with much more frequency. This is especially true during boss fights in the halls of Castle Oblivion as Riku and the different Organization members don’t hold back in their respective fights. They’re constantly throwing out attacks and making sleights in a seemingly endless manner, making it difficult to get in hits of your own. The strategy that I ended up adopting during these fights was to only attack when I had the chance to perform a card break, and then try to burn through sleights when they were close to death to finish them with ease. It was a sound strategy for the most part, but it resulted in fights that were painfully frustrating and tedious to get through.
Although this is mainly an issue for me in the boss fights, it gets to the root of my problem with combat in Chain of Memories. No matter how patient I am in fights, no matter how clever I feel when I methodically take out enemies and make sleights in creative ways, at its core the card-based battle system is just not fun to me. I want to be able to do whatever move I want when I want, and not be held back by the limits of my deck or a system that punishes me because an enemy used a card with the same value as mine. I don’t want to be forced to take things slower in most fights to progress through the story. The battle system is just a nuisance that constantly gets in the way of me enjoying the game to the fullest, and any moments of enjoyment that I get from combat simply aren’t worth the frustration that it brings.
It’s a shame that I feel this way about the combat in Chain of Memories because I honestly don’t believe it’s a bad system and I understand why people enjoy it. It’s just the only thing keeping me from ever seeing the story through to completion. When not retreading Disney worlds, it tells one of the better stories in the series. Sora faces one of his hardest struggles as he’s manipulated by the Organization and forgets the people he holds dear to him. Meanwhile, Riku battles with his inner darkness as he tries to atone for what he did in the first game. The central theme of memories and never truly forgetting the people and things that matter to us most is also something that resonates with me today in ways that it never could have before. The narrative has some truly great stuff here, but it’s unfortunately held captive by a battle system that works for others, just not for me.
Chain of Memories might be my least favorite Kingdom Hearts game because of its combat, but upon reflection, it’s the game that I respect the most. In my opinion, it’s the biggest risk the series has taken to date. Even if it’s not quite my cup of tea, I commend the team at Square Enix for daring to be bold and shuffle the deck by creating something unique with the card system for a completely different platform, all while trying to retain the essence of the Kingdom Hearts experience. Similar to how the series began, they had a creative vision in mind for a game that blends two disparate ideas and produced something that, on paper, shouldn’t work. Chain of Memories might be a mixed bag of an experience but it’s truly one of a kind.
TheComfySpot 