Brief, no story spoilers.

My most recent playthrough of Kingdom Hearts (Re:)Chain of Memories was on the PC port via EGS. Any version of the game, but especially PC or an 8th/9th generation console version (except for Switch) will be the best way to play Re:Chain of Memories. As far as I know, the PC version is stable, unlike the unfortunate fate of the sequel. The 1.5/2.5 versions add bonus content to this game if you watch the 358/2 days cutscene movie built into the game, which I wouldn't recommend for first time players.

With all that being said, I most highly recommend that, for your first time, you ignore all of the above information, and instead play the original GBA version, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, in whatever way you fancy. Why?

To put it simply, Chain of Memories felt that it was tailor made for that 2D format, and the direct translation of the gameplay to 3D introduced a lot of awkwardness to the game, it often feels like it is also slowed down to accommodate for these changes in a way I don't necessarily like. Re:Chain of Memories, as a result of this, feels like it lasts a lot longer than it should, and in turn pads out a game that will likely get stale a bit before you reach the end. While a lot of the bonus content in Re:Chain are cool, they really feel like they only spice it up if you have already played the original game, which makes Re:Chain more suited to replaying after the first time, in my opinion.

With that being said, this game is quite significant in the story, and as many will remind a new kingdom hearts player, there is no such thing as a spin-off! One of the aspects that is the most obvious improvement over the GBA version is having much better cutscenes, since the Playstation 2 is obviously much more capable of storing video than the Gameboy Advance. It may be worth watching the cutscenes of this game in tandem with, or after, playing the GBA version. Alternatively, since you should be playing this in the eventual goal of playing Kingdom Hearts 2, it is worth watching the cutscenes alone if you don't enjoy the game.

One last thing, I will not spoil it, but Re:Chain of Memories ends with a bonus cutscene that I feel would be better suited to be ignored and/or skipped until after playing Kingdom Hearts 2.

Overall, Re:Chain of Memories is a middling remake of an okay game. I personally like the systems that these games have, but I feel that the brevity of the GBA original makes it worth playing more for a first time Kingdom Hearts player.

Made a potentially ill-conceived choice that I’d go and play through all the Kingdom Hearts games, this time including the ones that I previously skipped out on for one reason or another, and while KH1 ended up being a game that became a masterpiece in my mind, playing Re:Chain of Memories did not leave me with similar feelings. To put it simply, this game is deranged, and also a total mess, taking the framework of a GBA game with more similarities to a beat ‘em up than anything else, and trying to implement the core card-based mechanics of the game into KH1’s combat engine. This leads to the game in a constant state of feeling entirely at odds with itself, trying to mash two systems that had vastly different dynamics associated with them into one package at the cost of both sides of this coin being severely hampered. Fortunately, despite how awkward everything is, there are some interesting ideas to go alongside all the quirks, both narratively and in the combat itself, that serve to occasionally make this a weird, but interesting game, rather than consistently being a bore.

At its core, I’m very much not a fan of the card system and its implementation in either of the campaigns here. To have an attack be successful, you need to use a card with a higher number than your enemy, and then they need to not respond with a higher number than yours, otherwise your attack will be rendered ineffective. While the deckbuilding element is meant to encourage a more strategic approach to combat, due to the way most enemies function, this ultimately contributes to a system that makes standard KH1 combat feel worse and more annoying in most cases. Encountering wave after wave of heartless as you make your way through the labyrinths quickly becomes tedious, with the constant chance of enemies breaking your attack and wasting your time as a result being a slight, but increasingly frustrating thing to encounter with each fight. Triangle spamming to use sleights will resolve some of this issue, by almost always leaving you with a number high enough that enemies can never break through since it’s a combination of 3 card values and basic enemies don’t have the 0 cards that guarantee a card break. However, this doesn’t get around the fact that aerial combat is awful regardless, with a lot of special attacks being unable to hit airborne enemies. This causes Re:Chain of memories to have the worst aerial combat in the series bar none due to how drastically your options get reduced, further contributing to the fodder heartless fights being a slog to get through.

The boss fights fix certain problems with this setup but introduce and highlight their own set of issues. The vast majority of the bosses have access to 0 cards, letting them break through your attack regardless of how strong it is, which forces the player to more carefully pick and choose their moments so they don’t waster their strongest attacks. Any humanoid boss also has access to their own set of sleights, further increasing the chance of your attacks being interrupted, along with introducing some extremely devastating attacks. The issues with this framework surface in 2 main ways, both being equally annoying. Since the player is able to nullify enemy attacks with the right cards, a lot of attacks in the game straight up are not designed with the idea of being able to dodge them in mind. This detracts from the sense of variety that a lot of bosses could have, since learning patterns and dodging is not something that ever happens really, it’s just that you need to nullify the attack to stop it from happening in the first place, leading to most bosses being dealt with in the exact same way. This issue is compounded with the extremely binary outcome of most of these fights, either you steamroll them and don’t let them ever hit you, or you get demolished without the slightest modicum of hope. If you build your deck to just have a bunch of powerful sleights, it’s extremely easy to stunlock the bosses despite the mechanics that were put in place specifically to try preventing this, and it’s mainly caused by there being no revenge values of any sort, so there’s no way for them to retaliate if you keep spamming them with attacks that momentarily stun them. The one exception to this that I found is the final boss, which is honestly really good and is one of the only times that I felt like the card system was being used to its full potential.

The one positive about this is that it’s honestly pretty fun to break the game with an overpowered deck, and there are a lot of way to do this, whether it’s with sonic blade, lethal frame, ars arcanum, or even level 3 magic spells, there’ll never be a shortage of different ways to obliterate the game balance to suit any given situation, and it’s satisfying to build around facilitating such situations, just an unfortunate fact that it comes at the cost of doing almost anything else throughout the game. Riku’s story tackles a lot of my complaints by making the player use prebuilt decks and not giving them access to a bunch of overpowered abilities that are easy to trigger, but then it goes and introduces its own flaws instead. Bosses can no longer be utterly steamrolled in the same braindead manner, but the duel mechanics which let you use a strong attack if you use the same value card as an enemy gives you an almost equally easy and dominant strategy. The fights still end up being a bit trickier and more even, but the core issue of things being built around nullifying attacks instead of learning how to properly deal with them is still present, and the regular heartless fights are made even more tedious by not being given options to destroy everything on screen within a couple of seconds, making the journey a massive grind.

Overall, Chain of Memories is just an utter mess of a game that will either be deeply frustrating, or comically easy without anything in between, which I think is a shame, since in theory, a lot of these mechanics could be really interesting, bizarre, but interesting, it’s just unfortunate that the game almost never utilises them in a manner to bring anything interesting out of it. I still don’t really dislike the game either though, the narrative is cool enough and I got enough enjoyment out of figuring out a bunch of different ways to break stuff, but it just goes on forever with so much padding in between the cool stuff. A fascinating experiment, but not much more for me, I don’t see myself wanting to return to this one again.

The story is genuinely great, but god I absolutely hate playing it. Take all the worst aspects of dungeon crawlers and deckbuilders and force them to work together with the already rough real-time-action-rpg combat from the first game. Absolute dogshit time running around in the emptiest labyrinths you've ever seen, fighting the same guys and spamming the same sleights. It's a nothing game. As a cutscene comp on youtube though? Damn, this game goes hard. Probably would be a lot more fun on the gba if I could force myself to play it

I finished the PS3 HD Remix version (which is essentially the same exact game but with HD while still running at 30fps) and tried also the PS2 by pure curiosity and out of spite.

The remake of the original Chain of Memories isn't well seen, being an action card game that translated well on the GBA gameplay while the PS2 version put the KH 2 engine (you can notice it by the menus, definitely feels closer to that than KH 1).

This said: this is an overhated game. It plays fine once familiarize with the system and it plays fine in the 3D environment. I get why the 2D one worked much better (both for combat and exploration, especially the latter being so much isometrical), but this still translated pretty well. Some fights were really fun, but I'll admit that without a proper deck and preparation the majority of the Organization XIII fights will inevitably kick your butt.
Skip the story of this one or watching it on YouTube instead of thinking to play on beginner instead if a sin.

I really wanted to enjoy this game and gave it several chances throughout my short time playing it but it really didn’t click well with me.

Taking the already decent combat from KH1 and grinding the entire flow of it to a halt with several mechanics you need to micromanage was horrible to try and play. The card mechanics could have been a cool idea as Square Enix have done good card games before but having to juggle what cards your opponents use, sifting through 20 plus cards just to get to the right ones and worry about the spacing of you and your opponents attacks in real time was to much layered on at once.

The combat just feels very restrictive and doesn’t flow well at all. The game also doesn’t do itself any favours since you can choose which world you want to go to first. This may end up meaning you pick one that you are way too under levelled for and end up needing to either reload a save because the boss has jumped up to 3 health bars or grind it out for several hours, both of which I wasn’t willing to do.

It’s not like I picked a late game world considering I based it off what worlds you go to in KH1 first so I chose Wonderland. Speaking of the Disney worlds near all of their story’s in this game are rehashed plot lines from KH1 with the addition of characters going “damn I don’t remember you but you’re called Sora” and that’s about it.

There was potential to have a cool setting with the Disney worlds becoming distorted and merging in their presentation to represent Soras memories being changed but the Disney worlds ended up not serving much purpose and only the Kingdom Hearts original worlds mattered in this game.

I have to preface that because I really couldn’t enjoy this gameplay I did watch all the cutscenes for the game as I am aware it is crucial to know these details for KH2 and a story summary didn’t really cut it.

This game gets any rating at all because of its story. It’s a really strong set up towards KH2 and all the new characters they introduced are extremely interesting and unique. Organisation XIII is a great group of villains so far and was what this series needed after KH1. As much as the Disney worlds are and feel like fun side adventures for the characters to go on the main crux of what makes these games interesting so far is the main cast and story that they have going on so an introduction to a primary villain group is welcome.

After trying to play this game I can see why it’s so polarising but if you really can’t stand its gameplay like me then I highly recommend watching the cutscenes, they only amount to 3 hours so it’s a much better use of your time than trying to slog through this game for 25.

4/10

This game may be Canon, but my enjoyment of it sure isn't

Story's cool though.

5/10 :/

This game is one of the most tedious and annoying games I have ever played. It managed to make playing cards the most unfun thing to do on planet earth. This game asks too much of someone's attention and patience for one of the worst real time actions card game gimmicks I've ever had the displeasure of playing. All of its content is just reused assets and story beats from KH1 but Sora says "erm I don't remember this guys this is so freaking weird!?" I don't think any of the new content is worth actually playing the game for when I can just watch the cutscenes on YouTube since 75% of this games' story is needless and repetitive filler.
There is nothing worthwhile that I get for finishing this game except an achievement on my PSN profile.
Moving on to Kingdom Hearts 2 and never looking back.

The card-based combat gimmick is a fun way to branch off from the first game, and create a new experience while utilizing all of the familiar elements from KH1. However, many of the fights, especially the bosses, culminated in bouts of either running away to reload cards only to get a few hits off before repeating the process a dozen times, or spamming Sonic Blade until I won. Neither ended up being particularly enjoyable. Which is unfortunate because that is where the originality ends, and the vast majority of the experience is a loose rehash of KH1's plot, with its own complicated plot contrivances added into the mix, which I'm led to believe is essential for understanding future titles. If I ever do a series replay, I may opt for a 8 hour cutscene on Youtube than be forced to deal with the frustrating feeling of a card break when trying to call upon the muscle memory learned in any other game