Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories

Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories for the PS2 is definitely worth checking out, especially if you haven't yet played the GBA original.

An impressive remake that improves the presentation of the original GBA version by leaps and bounds while simultaneously streamlining the battle system.

Even though it's not a wholly fresh experience, Kingdom Hearts: Re:Chain of Memories is definitely worth a try, especially if you didn't play the original GBA release.

The card battle system isn't exactly fresh considering it was similar on the GBA, but for new players it will be a challenge they must experience.

Seriously, though -- for Kingdom Hearts fans who missed out on COM the first time, this is definitely the best way to play it. While the new stuff is small (a few so-so minigames in Hundred Acre Wood, additional voice acting from the Sixth Sense kid, etc.), my memory of Chain of Memories hasn't changed: It's a pleasant little title that reminds me how much I want Kingdom Hearts 3.

The card battling system works, although not as well as it did on the GBA. Sadly, this re-imagining has come a bit too late for a series ready for its PS3 debut.

Rebuilding it using the PS2 game's engine just makes it a much more obvious retread. [Jan 2009, p.83]

Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories is a remake **** Advance game with the Kingdom Hearts 1 graphics. The game has a card based battle system where you collect and equip them to build a deck and use it during battles. It's a bridge game to tell the events between Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 and intruduces new characters and gives more insight to them. The Disney worlds are sadly just a rehash of Kingdom Hearts 1 and the Level Design is due to being a Gameboy Advance Game, very limited. I still enjoyed the Story Cutscenes and messing around with my deck and trying new combos. If you don't like the systems I would recommend to watch the cutscenes on youtube before playing Kingdom Hearts 2. All in all I enjoyed the game a lot.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

No matter how pro you consider yourself, if you never played this or the OG GBA game, PICK AN EASY DIFFICULTY THIS GAME IS HARD WHEN FIRST TIME, I'M WARNING YOU As for the game itself, this is an attempt to blend GBA CoM's card combat with the first KH's 3D etc etc The attempt is not very good since it makes you both do the first KH's combat AND pay attention to the cards. This makes the combat much harder and slower since in GBA version everything was simplified and combat was far more fast paced. And this is also why this game is, unlike GBA CoM, totally not newcomer friendly and is in fact the hardest game in the series.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

It's a shame that Re:Chain of Memories suffers a lot from being a Kingdom Hearts game. Given the nature of it's card based fighting style and introduction of Organization 13, it just doesn't seem like it be apart of the Kingdom Hearts series, yet here we are some 9 odd games later, and while the card games are gone, the organization plays the biggest role in Kingdom Hearts, and honestly is probably the coolest thing about the series, which is weird considering it was just supposed to be Disney + Final **** for it's card game system, gosh would I have loved to seen this in a new IP or something, but instead it kinda just mucks up what Kingdom Hearts combat was setting up over and 2 picked up the slack on. There is a lot of interesting combos of mixing certain numbers together to get a combo special or stacking a bunch of magics together, along with some neat deck building motifs, but sadly the majority of combat falls flat in favor of Lethal Frame. Lethal Frame is just a busted move that it literally is a boss killer for everything, but the final boss. It's honestly ridiculous just how broken this combo is, and the fact you can gain it so early really makes you wonder why they even bothered with any sort of deck building when you just stack a bunch of Lethal Frames together and win that way. It really was like the build that remade Chain of Memories saw the combat and inside of making it a really neat idea with how cards works and what not, just decided to give us a busted move and call it a day. Sadly the truth of Chain of Memories combat was just sort of hollow, like the rest of this game.Seriously how they managed to retell the same story with a lot of the worlds from the 1st game is just sad and uninteresting, and not endearing the way the clerks cartoon had their clip special on the 2nd episode. Everything new in this game is super interesting, neat, and downright rocks, but getting to all those cool boss battles you destroy with lethal frame take work, and it's through a bunch of generic rooms reenacting the last game bit by bit that drags a lot of the games potential. On top of that, there is even a second story to play with and while it's not as long, it at least hits more of an interesting factor by cutting out all the boring bits and just getting to the bosses with little to no dialogue in the main worlds, sad **** I mad they made this remake, and did nothing to enhance the original combat or story? Yes.