Maybe I will some day! But for now, I didn’t. I’m pretty confident in assuming it’s the better version of the game, and I wish I’d played it. It’s tough to know for sure without having played the original Chain of Memories, but everything looks like it clicks together way better there. By the midgame I’d completely given up on summons because they just didn’t cover enough area to be useful. But in Chain of Memories, every attack you miss is a card that you wasted, so the wide open spaces can lead to some really frustrating situations. You can just sort of hammer on the X button and it all works out in the end. It’s pretty easy to miss attacks in Kingdom Hearts as well, but it matters a lot less there. And that means that it’s a lot easier to miss with your attacks. In other words, there’s a lot more empty space in Re:Chain of Memories. Bosses are still big relative to Sora, but they’re not big relative to the arena. The controls feel almost exactly like Kingdom Hearts, except that pressing the attack button costs you a card. In contrast, Re:CoM has large, open combat arenas, with a full range of movement in all three dimensions. There’s lots of horizontal space to move around in, but not much vertical, and many of the bosses take up a significant portion of the space. If you look at footage of the GBA game, you’ll see that the combat arenas are really small. Unfortunately, the remake also alters some things about the gameplay in a way that I think hurts the experience. If that was the only problem, then I wouldn’t really care that much. Setting that aside, Re:Chain of Memories is totally passable from a visual standpoint, but it just doesn’t wow me like the sprite art of the original. It’s not a big deal, but it is noticeable, especially after KH1 was so crisp-looking. The cutscenes are kinda blurry, with lots of jagged edges on character models. Although, weirdly, the HD version of this game doesn’t look quite as nice. Most of it is built out of recycled assets from Kingdom Hearts, and they pretty much look as good here as they did there. In comparison, Re:Chain of Memories looks… you know. Let’s Get the Version Talk Out of the Way I’m pretty sure that in the last week I have personally held all of these opinions at some point or another. Now that I’ve finished both campaigns in Re:Chain of Memories, I completely understand where this huge spread of opinions comes from. “ Chain of Memories is a singularly unique action-strategy game that delivers a style of action that no other game has, before or since.”.“ CoM has some cool ideas but it doesn’t come together well.”.“ Chain of Memories is great but Re:Chain of Memories is terrible, you should play the GBA version.”. “That’s the best game in the series just watch the cutscenes.”.“Oh god that game sucks just watch the cutscenes.”.I was cautiously optimistic about giving it a shot.īefore starting my run of Re:Chain of Memories about ten days ago, I heard just about every opinion on it that it’s possible to have about a thing: Deckbuilders rule.īecause I like these kinds of games so much, I thought there was a real chance that Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories would be my favorite Kingdom Hearts game, at least from a mechanical perspective. They take my favorite part of TCGs and build entire games around them. I wanna be a Kaiba but I’m really more of a Joey.įor all those reasons, a type of game I’ve gravitated towards heavily over the past decade is deckbuilders, which make designing and building your deck a core part of the gameplay. And then it turns out that they’re all smarter than you and have built way better decks and now you feel sad. Then, if you actually want to use your deck, you gotta find other people who’ve also put in that level of investment. And in most cases, once you’ve planned the deck out, actually getting the cards you need for it will cost you an arm and a leg. I love sitting down and slowly trawling through long card lists to try and design a deck from the ground up, but it takes a long time. Maybe I should write something about Yu-Gi-Oh! some time.Īnyway, trading card games are really fun! They also represent a gigantic investment of time and money. The newest one was Link Monsters, which seem complicated at first but I think they’re actually a really clever way to reign in some of the game’s notorious power creep, and… I was a huge fan of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG when it was new, and I still like to check the game out every time they introduce some wacky new mechanic that totally upends the strategy and metagame. You can read what I wrote about Kingdom Hearts Final Mix here. This is part two of a series that I’ve… apparently committed myself to doing, where I play through every Kingdom Hearts game for the first time and write up all my thoughts about them.
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