Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories

[FMW]

The MLA handbook book says that one should put two spaces after a colon, does that apply to video game subtitles too?

 

Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories for the Game Boy Advance is a fantastic little game. It's got great production values, a super duper cool battle system, and (in my opinion) an interesting story. That last one is a bit of a tough sell, I know. Let's jump right in.

 

The graphics for this game are ridiculously good for the hardware. What's more important is that the basic art and character design of the Kingdom Hearts is communicated without compromise. This is one of those games with such good 2D sprite work that they continue to look good despite their age. The soundtrack is 80% old material from Kingdom Hearts, but it's a pretty good soundtrack to begin with and the quality is (again, for the hardware) surprisingly high.

 

It would be fair to complain that this game looks and sounds extremely similar to Kingdom Hearts, and could be considered aesthetically boring because of it. I counter-argue that Kingdom Hearts had strong audio/visuals and they continue to be strong here. It's a truly impressive feat how much of the PS2 atmosphere was recaptured in this game.

 

The battle system in this game is the best thing in it. You'll spend most of your gametime in the battle screen, but in my case I didn't even mind. I sought mob battles out, just because battle is fun. The game is card based... kind of. Moving your character around is real time and is important for dodging enemy attacks and correctly aiming your own. Your offensive actions, however, are dictated by your deck of cards. A frequent downfall of card based combat is that it can be too random when you don't know what will come up next. That doesn't happen here, you set your deck order and it remains consistent. The result of this was a battle system that had the appeal of card battles (high beats low, 0 trumps high, double beats single, triple beats double, etc) without sacrificing the immediacy of real time maneuvering.

 

I'm not going to go into any more detail about the battle system because describing a JRPG battle system in a wall of text is pretty impossible and most people don't want to read it anyway. Suffice it to say that it's card based but also skill based and also real time and also fantastic. Oh yeah, and the bosses are brutal.

 

This game is sort of an odd duck in Kingdom Hearts continuity. I'm not all the way through the franchise yet (working on it!) but the game (kind of) retcons itself out of the timeline in the finale. That's a crying shame, because I actually think this is a pretty good yarn. Both the Disney and non-Disney storytelling has improved over the first game.

 

The Disney stories in this game are pretty well done I feel. The central motif this time around is "memories", so all the classic Disney scenarios have been rewritten to incorporate it in some way. I feel like this is handled MUCH better here than it was in the original Kingdom Hearts where the smarmy "friendship" motif felt more shoehorned in. Now make no mistake, this game is doing the exact same thing with shoving it's own agenda into the Disney stories. I just feel like it does a better job. Perhaps this is because the writers often leave the Disney conflicts untouched and just tie in the "memories" thing in the closing cinematic.

 

The non-Disney part of the story is also improved over the first in this game. See, I don't think Sora is a terribly interesting character. He hasn't been in the first two games at least. He's pretty much a flawless hero who will stop at nothing to do the right thing and save his comrades. He's just a standard "child chosen by destiny" archetype. The magic sword dropped into his hand for no apparent reason and he's off to be a hero.

 

In this game, Sora has not changed in the slightest. He's still sappy, he's still got a one track mind, and he still lacks any moral ambiguity at all. But the writers play on that. This is a game about Sora being manipulated and his good intent subverted. Sora spouting on about how he's going to "help his friends no matter what" for the fifth time suddenly becomes interesting again because you've been watching him slowly forget his real friends and begin prioritizing other characters instead. This is a game that takes the storytelling of Kingdom Hearts (third person omniscient narrative, shallow protagonist) and actually uses them intelligently. I have huge respect for that, and I really did get interested in watching Sora get played. And the best part is that he doesn't figure it out without help. He would have played into the villain's plot perfectly. I have a hunch the writer for this game also felt like Sora was a shallow one-note character in the original, and making that itself into his character flaw was subversive and very clever.

 

Lastly, I'd like to note that the quantity and quality of post-game content completely blew my mind.

[Strangelove]

I loved the GBA version, hated the PS2 version. Im sure youd like it though. I just cant do the card battle thing anymore. It also being in 3D actually makes the game more difficult. Mostly, Im tired as hell of the reused assets. I get that its cheaper and everything, but its not fooling anyone anymore. Birth By Sleep was awesome because it was 95% all new. After that one, im not buying another KH game that uses assets from the past games. Im over it.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

As a former huge Kingdom Hearts fan Chain of Memories does not deserve that wall of text nor does it deserve its own topic. While not a bad game it was 95% filler and clearly a money grab. Story wise it's completely ignorable which is where it really suffers. The gameplay was fine though. It was a nice way to do a KH style battle system with so few buttons.