Kingdom Hearts Re Chain of Memories Review

Finishing Kingdom Hearts left me with this overwhelming feeling of anticipation. I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. The ending of Kingdom Hearts leaves our trio scattered. Kairi is back on Destiny Islands, Riku and King Mickey are trapped in the Realm of Darkness, and Sora alongside Donald and Goofy are chasing after Pluto thinking he knows where King Mickey is. Not exactly the neatly wrapped up ending I was expecting. So I put the next game in, Re Chain of Memories.

The story kicks off right where we left it. Sora, Donald, and Goofy are trying to find the King and Riku so they can find a way home together. Instead they stumble across Castle Oblivion, a mysterious building with gleaming white interiors and even weirder magic. Upon entering they are greeted by a man in a familiar black cloak. The stranger tells Sora that “in Castle Oblivion, to find is to lose and to lose is to find”. Confused, Sora and the gang must then travel floor to floor revisiting the worlds of the first game in hopes of finding some answers. After completing the story you unlock a second playthrough as Riku. This story is taking place at the same time as Sora’s but Riku starts in the basement. Making his way up to the ground floor, Riku is tormented by the piece of Ansem that resides in him, forever pushing him towards the Darkness.

While I did enjoy the story, this game is let down by it’s gameplay. The combat is done using a deck of playing cards so it was a massive learning curve coming from the first game. I almost didn’t play it but I got the basics down and that was enough for me to beat the story. Riku’s story was easier in this regard because you are given a deck of cards at the beginning of each floor and you couldn’t change it. Having to constantly upgrade your deck isn’t the problem, it’s actually quite fun. Pairing it with the room system made it annoying.

For starters the way each floor would work is just bad. When arriving on a new floor you are given a blank template and you can make any room you want as long as you have the card for it. Each door would have a requirement for which cards could be used to create a room but if you don’t have any eligible ones, you better get to grinding. Also some rooms would be filled with enemies, normal practice for video games. However if you lost any of the battles you would be taken back to the start of the room and the enemies would reset. Even if you had already beaten all but one battle, they all come back. Lastly I really didn’t like the placement of save spots. If you wanted to save your progress or just heal up, you would either have to backtrack all the way back to the previous floor or waste one of your available rooms to turn into a save room.

I did enjoy this game for the most part. Complaints aside Re Chain of Memories is the perfect in between before playing Kingdom Hearts 2. It was definitely the story that kept me invested in this one but after completing this one I am in no rush to play this almost awful game again.