Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories

Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories, the 3D remake of the GBA title Chain of Memories, is a strange, disjointed, complex beast. It continues the story of Sora directly from where the first game left off, but with even more bizarre characters and plotlines, while introducing a new combat system that is as cumbersome and it’s unbalanced.

The story starts with Sora, Donald, and Goofy chasing Pluto for some news on the whereabouts of Mickey and Riku. Eventually, they end up finding a strange castle called Oblivion, where they start to gradually lose their memories as they explore the place in search of their friends.

Kingdom Hearts’ universe seems to be built on the cryptic ambivalence of its most important elements: when he first enters Castle Oblivion, for example, Sora is told that “To find is to lose, and to lose is to find.” This strange warning, despite its initial elusiveness, becomes clear during the climax when the boy must make a difficult decision: Sora’s journey has him clinging to his most beloved memories in the hope that they don’t fade away alongside the rest. Being Sora, though, he never backs away or stops his search for Riku, even though he knows that he’s risking not only his life but also his memories – and with them, his personality.

Chain of Memories’ narrative continues to explore the same themes of the first game, but by looking at them from a new angle. In a climactic scene in Kingdom Hearts, for example, Sora claims that his friends are his power, but here he begins to understand that this “strength” only exists because of his memories of them: it’s their shared experiences that matter, so if he forgets the time he spent with his friends, he has nothing left. That is why they boldly claim that “No matter what happens, you won’t forget your friends”: Sora, Donald, and Goofy must believe that their bond is unassailable. They’ve always been helplessly optimistic, after all.

Things, however, are rarely that simple. Friendships, even those that seem that they will last forever, can one day simply… fade away. Sora learns that the hard way, forgetting not only the places he has visited but even his most beloved friend – and crush, let’s be honest – Kairi. In return, he begins to remember a girl he met in his childhood and who suddenly vanished one day. A girl he made a promise to, but one who he couldn’t remember before coming to Castle Oblivion. The mystery surrounding this girl quickly grows out of proportion and becomes the protagonist’s obsession.

Sora believes he must find this girl no matter what, knowing deep down that his purpose in life is related to her. That makes him so certain of his righteousness that he inevitably becomes unbearable as a person. His struggles in Castle Oblivion show that a little bit of doubt can go a long way in protecting oneself from darkness. After all, it’s precisely because Sora is so certain that he must chase that mysterious girl, being shackled by his memories of her, that is so easy for malicious forces to manipulate him.

The game’s antagonists, who are members of a sinister organization, intend to make Sora their pawn and use him to overthrow their leader. Unfortunately, this is the part where the narrative falters, since the so-called Organization XIII is not fleshed out in any way, shape, or form, being instead surrounded by numerous questions and mysteries. They remain elusive until the end, which is a problem here because it robs their plan – the coup – of context and a sense of urgency. We don’t know what exactly these characters are fighting for, what it’s at stake, the reasons behind the plan to take control of the organization, and even if that is a good thing or not.

And if the previous game’s narrative also faltered when it came to the Disney worlds, Chain of Memories makes no effort to correct that mistake. As in the first Kingdom Hearts, the story set in each world that Sora visits has no impact whatsoever on his journey. To make matters worse, here he revisits almost all of the worlds of the first game again – the “almost“ is because Tarzan’s is absent – meeting their inhabitants as if it was the first time since they don’t remember ever meeting Sora. These worlds are illusions created inside the castle with Sora’s memories, so their events are slightly different retellings of what happened in the first game. The main difference being that the term “heart”  is often replaced by “memory”. In Halloween Town, for example, instead of Oogie stealing a fake heart, he steals a memory potion. It’s all filler, boring and repetitive.

Chain of Memories’s gameplay, on the other hand, is completely different from the first game. Now, everything is structured around cards: they are used in battle and during exploration. Here, Sora doesn’t fight monsters directly on the map anymore but is instead transported to a battle arena. There, the combat happens in real time, and to attack or use magic or even an item we have to select and use the appropriate card. Each one of these cards has a number, which is compared to the card the monsters are using. The biggest card wins and breaks the action of the other. To complicate things, the Zero card can break any card if it’s used after them or be broken by any other card if it’s used first – so timing matters – and we can stack three cards together in a combo to add their numbers and maybe trigger special attacks called “sleights”. The game’s excellent endgame theme has a title that symbolizes everything that this system is not: “Simple and Clean.”

During normal battles, players can forget about cards altogether and just spam the attack button and they’ll be triumphant nonetheless. Those fights are easy and quick affairs. The problem is the boss battles late in the game, which mark a gigantic difficulty spike compared to their respective worlds. To start, during boss battles, we must not only choose the correct card but also be in constant movement in the arena, dodging attacks while keeping an eye on the enemy cards: in Re:Chain of Memories, multitasking is a great skill to have. And since bosses attack relentlessly, we must also have come to these battles with our deck completely organized in sleights: after all, if we stop to select the cards mid-fight the game-over screen will certainly appear in a few instants. And to make matters worse, the first time we fight a boss, we usually don’t come with the deck prepared for the battle because we don’t know beforehand which magical attacks are effective against them and which are not.

And the difficulty doesn’t stop there, since each boss is very different from the other in a lot of irritating ways. For example, there is a boss called Larxene. She has a specific thunder attack that is very complicated to dodge because the camera angle doesn’t help, so we have to break it with a higher combo or with a zero. If we can’t do that in time, not only do we take nearly one-third of our health in damage but also become stunned, vulnerable to her next attack. In an infuriating detail, even if we use a card in the combo that revives Sora, Larxene has an attack that doesn’t stop with Sora’s death, so we’ll die again during the same attack without any chance of escaping her grasp.

This is an everything-or-nothing combat system. We are either wiping the floor with our enemies or losing in a matter of seconds. Besides that, in normal battles, we can’t see the next card in the enemy’s deck – probably because the screen would have become cluttered –, which means that we can’t prepare a strategy, so spamming attacks is even more encouraged.

The exploration is also governed by cards. Each world has a set of rooms separated by doors and each door can only be opened with a card or group of cards acquired in battles. For example, a door may require a +seven red card to be unlocked, which means that we can use red cards numbered seven to nine. The cards are divided by color, number, and type, as they dictate what that room will contain (if a place with strong enemies, for example, or a save point). This design, however interesting, has a glaring flaw: the cards received after battles are random. In other words, if the room we want to enter needs a zero green card and we don’t have it, we’ll need to grind through countless enemies until the game decides to reward us with it. And this can happen often. There is a roulette room that facilitates the process, but it’s still a cumbersome system that requires a lot of our time. The lesson here is a simple one: tying RNG with main story progression is never, never a good idea.

Another problem is that the rooms are very similar to each other in shape and size – even between worlds, which only offer a pallet swap –, so the environments become very repetitive and uninspired after a while. “It’s just me or all the rooms are starting to look the same?” Sora asks one time, and we’re unable to comfort the boy by saying that no, it’s most certainly not just him.

The game doesn’t end with Sora, however, as it also has a very small campaign centered around Riku. His story is much simpler than Sora’s but better in certain aspects. Unlike Sora, for example, Riku has a clear character arc, in which he must deal with his past and fight the darkness that lies inside him. In the beginning, for example, a mysterious voice keeps teasing him about the choices he’s made: “Behind you, you left family, friends, home – everything – all in pursuit of darkness.” Riku’s journey is one of self-discovery and acceptance. He starts to fight his dark side but also to understand that human beings are not entirely good or evil, but ambivalent creatures, with a bit of both inside them. In a way, Riku is a much more complex character than Sora, not only because of his shifting narrative role – in one scene he’s the antagonist, but, in another, he’s a friend –, but also for being painted in grayer shades than his rival.

It’s a pity, then, that the Disney worlds are even more underutilized in his campaign than they are in Sora’s: they don’t have a plot whatsoever and we go quickly to the boss battle without any context – what doesn’t even make much sense, since Riku never fought those characters, it was Sora who did. But his campaign at least has some differences in gameplay to make things feel a bit fresh: we can’t customize our deck anymore, having instead to deal with premade ones, which are different in each world; and we can activate “darkness mode” during battles by breaking enough enemy cards, which makes Riku’s attacks quicker and stronger (and is the only way to use sleights).

Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories, then, not only has a strange title but also a strange narrative and a strange combat system. It may be deeply flawed, but it’s also ambitious, complex, and at times very moving. In other words, it’s Kingdom Hearts.

March 14, 2025.