It’s hard to get a grasp on the storyline in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, because I haven’t played Kingdom Hearts. It’s intended to bridge the gap between Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2, but doesn’t do much to bring the player up to speed. Instead, most of the story in the game is focused on Sora retrieving his memories, and finding his friend Riku who I’m assuming was a character in the original game. You meet up with a lot of familiar faces from both the Final Fantasy and Disney universes, but in terms of motivation I felt none; instead my playing was intently focused on Chain of Memories’ card-based battle system.

The premise behind Chain of Memories is that you are trying to recover lost memories, taken away by the shadowy figure seen in the opening cutscene. The path to your objective lies in the ominous looking Castle Oblivion, a place where nothing is what it seems, and everything revolves around cards. Each room in the castle, your party members, and every one of your special abilities is represented by a card. I was fascinated by this concept, because the way the rooms are generated is simply using one of the many cards you find on your journey. My mind tried to comprehend the infinite replayability this game would have.

Castle Oblivion is set up as a series of levels, going up. Before each level, you have the option of using one of your “World” cards based on Disney’s films such as Alice in Wonderland, Aladdin or Hercules. Square even included Halloween Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas, which was a lot of fun to play. After you’ve established what will be contained in your current level of the castle, you now have the ability to create the actual rooms of the level. When you reach a doorway, you will use one of your “Map” cards to create the room beyond it. This method is used until you’ve created an entire floor. The story is picked up with a series of special map cards, with the doors you will use them on being pretty obvious. You will get more “story” map cards after completing each story room, and because the location of each of these special rooms is random, it keeps players from skipping through the level prematurely. This would probably be a stupid tactic anyway given what usually waits for you at the end of each level.

A casual review from a friend told me how great the original Kingdom Hearts was at creating unique worlds based on each of Disney’s beloved films. However, while each world in Chain of Memories is clearly inspired by the source material, they look more like a series of tiles with randomized doorways. The castle feels like a patchwork; there is no real flow to each level. The concept seemed sound in theory, but I suppose the unpredictable method by which game content is created is at fault. It would be next to impossible to create a seamless game world when the player is left to make decisions about its arrangement. I can forgive the level design’s transgressions when the card system is really intended for combat.

When you start the game, you are given a rudimentary deck containing a few melee moves and a healing spell. You also start with a set number of “Card Points” (read: mana) that put a limit on how many cards in your deck you can have and the potency of each. You can add the cards of spells or passive abilities to your deck gained from killing enemies. You also earn special attacks after killing the game’s many “boss” characters, like Hades from Hercules or Jafar from Aladdin. Again, this seemed like a great concept in theory, but when it came time to actually use this system in fast paced combat it became more irritating than novelty.

Like Tales of Symphonia, you see wandering monsters on each map that can be avoided if necessary. Battles consist of Sora or the opposing monster using cards to perform attacks. Cards with higher value will win of course, but a zero card can cause what is called a “Card Break”. Card Breaks are important to combat, because as the name implies, they nullify (”break”) the attack or series of attacks your opponent was performing and allow you to move in with a spell or powerful combination. After a certain number of cards have been played, you must “shuffle” your deck, which leaves you vulnerable. Depending on how many cards you’ve put in your deck, you will start to lose cards after each shuffle, though they are restored once combat is finished. Once you’ve slain all the enemies on screen, who sometimes even respawn a few times, you are awarded with a map card.

Now if combat had been turn based this probably would have been a lot easier, though presumably less of a challenge. When you start fighting the more powerful enemies and boss characters, however, you’ll find your deck just doesn’t stack up. As a result, combat in Chain of Memories becomes less interesting and more about loading your deck with zero cards, healing spells and high-numbered melee attacks. Real time combat just doesn’t suit this method of play, because it allows no flexibility to flip through your deck to find the right cards or card combinations when you’re faced with multiple enemies at once. In the more difficult boss battles you may even run out of cards (yes, this does happen).

Another point that made this system frustrating is the way it handled party members. From the beginning of the game, Donald Duck and Goofy are your companions. Though they don’t wander the game world with you, they’re delegated to cards in your deck. The same goes for people you meet along the way, such as Aladdin or Jack Skellington, each bringing a special attack into the fray. But these cards aren’t intrinsically part of your deck, you have to earn them. See, while all the action is going on around you, the cards representing your party members are dropped randomly onto the battlefield. And they don’t stick around forever, either – you have to chase after them. Moreover, taking a page right out of my “I Hate Experience Orbs” book with Fable and Advance Guardian Heroes, Chain of Memories makes you run after those as well. Oh, the humanity.

Once you proceed to a new level in Castle Oblivion, the entire preceding level is “erased” and will have to be “built” again with new cards. I guess this is good for people that want to build up their character with experience. Even though the rooms don’t differ that much, there’s no shortage of enemy encounters. The game does its best to push things forward, though, and I think that players intent on building a high-powered deck, or more than one deck, would gain a lot from going back through the castle and replaying areas.

Once you finish the game, you have the option of replaying as Riku, the friend you’re looking for during the game. You also unlock a vs. mode that you can link up and challenge friends to card battles with, and I guess see who’s deck is stacked with the most zero cards.

I don’t like Disney cartoons. I find them repetitive and uninteresting. Young outcast searches for their place in the world, finds love and/or true friendship, insert Oscar-nominated song, etc. Give me more cartoons like Secret of Nimh and I’d be happy. Anyway, the point is that I wasn’t dry-heaving while playing this game; it was actually very amusing to interact with all the characters and Disney-inspired worlds for a while. But the entire game is centralized around Sora’s memories. Are the characters real? Are they imagined? Why is Sora forced to do battle with the Heartless again, meeting up with old friends from Final Fantasy that don’t even remember that they fought together before? I couldn’t help but feel Chain of Memories was meant to be filler; Kingdom Hearts 2 has already been delayed and from the developer’s standpoint perhaps they didn’t want this GBA title to mess with the storyline. So instead of providing an interesting story to offset the imbalanced combat, you have a game that basically lays a trap door under your feet, giving the story the option of completely turning on you with “Whoops! It was all a dream…”. I hate that. The card concept in Chain of Memories feels like the beginning of a new lineage of games to use this feature, and as such I can give it some credit. But considered as an RPG it feels only half-realized, and in the end, falls short of an unreserved recommendation.

like memories they have disappeared