Main game: Functionally serviceable but really fucking dogshit by the end. Marluxia phase 2 had me by the balls and i had a blast but i dont think it really teaches you how to play it right until Larxene and no boss really comes back to challenge you like her. It was pretty fun to break by the end

Reverse Rebirth: Incredible addition to Riku's arc. His gimmick is great and plays with the strengths of the combat while offering a unique challenge that Sora never has to face. The shorter levels makes the campaign tighter and the bosses are actually challenging and interesting. Worth it for it alone.

PLATAFORMA: PC | EMULADOR PS2

ZERADO EM: 13/04/2024
HORAS: 35:46
DIFICULDADE: DIFÍCIL

CAMPANHA SORA E RIKU
SINCERAMENTE EM ALGUNS MOMENTOS ESSE JOGO FOI UMA VERDADEIRA TORTURA, O JOGO PARECE QUE VAI SER DIVERTIDO E ATÉ CURTO EM SEU COMEÇO, MAS LOGO SE TORNA MUITO REPETITIVO E MASSANTE PRINCIPALMENTE AO ZERA-LO DUAS VEZES COM O RIKU E SORA, PASSAR PELOS MESMOS MUNDOS DO PRIMEIRO JOGO COM ABSOLUTAMENTE NADA QUE ACRESCENTE NA HISTÓRIA NESSES MUNDOS, INFELIZMENTE SE ELE TIVESSE A GAMEPLAY DO PRIMEIRO JOGO ESSE FATOR CONSEGUIRIA SE TORNAR IRRELEVANTE PENA QUE NÃO FOI O CASO…
EU QUERIA TER GOSTADO DESSE JOGO…

SUA HISTÓRIA É LINDA E BEM ENVOLVENTE, A ÚNICA COISA QUE ME FEZ ME PRENDER NESSE JOGO PARA FALAR A VERDADE, TANTO SORA QUANTO RIKU SEUS NÚCLEOS CONSEGUE NOS FIXAR E QUERER VER MAIS DESSA HISTORIA PENA Q O FATOR GAMEPLAY E DIVERSÃO NÃO ENTRA NESSE QUESITO… SUAS BATALHAS FINAIS COMPLETAMENTE DESBALANCEADAS FAZEM QUALQUER UM PIRAR PARA PASSAR APESAR DE ATÉ QUE TIVE UMA BOA SENSAÇÃO APÓS SUPERAR OS MESMOS, PORÉM NÃO ACHO Q É UM PONTO POSITIVO JÁ QUE MUITO DELES SÃO ROUBADOS ATÉ PARA DIFICULDADE MAIS ALTA.
ME DIVERTI EM ALGUNS MOMENTOS, MAS VERDADEIRAMENTE NÃO ACHO Q VALE A PENA JOGA-LO SÓ POR POUCOS MOMENTOS E SUA HISTÓRIA ATUALMENTE.

NOTA: 4.1 x 10

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.