Better than any 3D Mario game before or after it?

No, not even close.

Wii U-to-literally-right-now-era baby game design?

Yes

A genuine fun game that you can sit and chill with that’s unique enough to exist as a pre-Switch handheld game with secrets that at least appease what I would expect to find in a Mario game?

Yes

Summary: New Super Mario Bros. but what if Nintendo made a sequel that did not make me want to sell it within the first week of me acquiring it

As an individual born in the 21st century who for some reason started coding in C in middle school because for some reason I bought those kind of video game programming tutorial books, you could literally say I took modern hardware for granted back when I was tinkering with trying to make my game ideas in that (at the time seemingly) limited space.

It’s with this that I say wow yeah this game owns especially for the constraints that made it exist, you can not only see the outline of games like Galaga, 1942, etc. but the game is actually somewhat fun and strategic and is only just 7K bytes like, think about that lol

Hmmmmmm

Yeah so let me put a big sticker here on the front this was the first ever Square (Square in general) game I ever played and I vividly remembered being very hyped by it as an 8 year old. Kingdom hearts actually used to kind of be up there for Zelda with me like I’d literally be that one kid who’d be idk saying weird pretend stuff about keys and try and do the Organization XIII hoodie look lmao. So yeah I may be a bit nice with this one idk you be the judge.

I think it’s a bit important to put this right at the front because I’d say this game has been something I’ve found to be very cool for a large portion of my life (even if I did not finish this until today) and finally I sat down and finished this thing a year after I finished KH1 for the first time wow.

Now that I’ve finished CoM, I think I half find it to be something that very easily could’ve been so crazy if it was done differently but also it is a mess in its own ways (some unavoidable really).

For starters: I’ve at least sunk like 5-8 hours into every pre-KH3 KH game and man these handheld games just do the Disney worlds better lmao like the crossover charm does not overstay its welcome when the movie dump consists of 2 minutes of “here’s the deal, here’s how it ties with the main story now go do your thing” like dang the Disney worlds can actually be neat (I do not like Disney). Second and this may change when I finally finish KH2 next (and me getting very deep into 368/2 made me develop this opinion) wow I just like KH in these spinoff games where it’s like “this is a thing that’s happening to this character and they’re trying to exist in the situation” vs mainline games feeling like they gotta push the story every time there’s non-Disney dialogue because big franchise entry. The combination of memories being represented by the cards, some things being reconfigured because memory, our main cast going deeper into literally losing their dang memories (and these are supposed to be a goofy af kid, a duck, and an individual by the name of Goofy), the introduction of Nobodies just align well to the point I’d say this just worked more than KH1 from a writing perspective and as a standalone game even. I’m also gonna roast KH1 here (in a similar fashion to my review of it really) but wow all the worlds looking like rooms makes sense here for once lmao.

Okay so here’s the bad, this game’s existence is ambitious and brings KH’s action rpg combat to the GBA by having this card system instead of awkwardly trying to cram it into the system but you can tell it presses against the limits a lot. For starters deck building is a bit clunky, acquiring new cards is kind of a pain a little bit (this isn’t entirely an issue that made things hard but still just something I felt was awkward), and I think this concept also would’ve been a lot more interesting if like the character you played as didn’t have an already established weapon (that feels like the game really pushes you into anyways). If this sounds like I’m saying this shouldn’t have been a KH game, lol.

I wouldn’t dare say this game is better than KH1 (none of these bosses and the in-game mechanics come close to that game’s second to last final boss tbh) but it does some things way better and I feel like this was more of a good showcase for how the franchise’s concepts can work well when they’re not crammed into the awkward framework of plot->Disney movie recap->plot

Summary: I’ve indeed loved Yu-Gi-Oh for about 75% of my time on this planet