Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories Review
Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories for the PS2 is a remake of the 2004 Game Boy Advance game. You will have the chance to meet old friends, battle the heartless, and try to unlock your true memories. You'll also get the chance to, in a way, create your own dungeons with the help of a card system that comes into play for unlocking doors and doing battle.
The graphics are really hurting on this game. Its almost as if SquareEnix took a slight step back. I understand that this was originally a GBA game, but SquareEnix usual puts a bit more effort into their ports. The thing that really got me was the cut scenes, they were not SquareEnix quality. The actual level designs and the character designs looked good, there were some interesting wavy lines going on in certain instances, which shouldn't have happened, but overall you definitely knew what level you were in.
The music is what you'd expect from Kingdom Hearts. I personally would have liked the intro song to just play over and over again, but seeing as that doesn't happen I enjoyed the other music too.
The controls will have you spamming the X button for attacking, the triangle button to try to unlock doors, and the circle button to jump. The buttons do have a couple more uses that the ones I just listed, but that's basically what you're going to be using them for.
The gameplay is what bothered me the most. I wanted the experience I had in the original Kingdom Hearts where you run up to a heartless and you try to beat the crap out of him with the assistance of Goofy, Donald, and possibly the hero from the level your currently playing. Sadly that is not alway the case. This time around there is a card system in place. You'll have to play cards to do actions, summon help (for a short amount of time), cast spells, or use items. The concept seems cool at first but really gets old when an enemy who you are not attacking plays a card with a value higher than any you have left in your hand, and even if you're not attacking that enemy all your attacks will disappear and not connect. There is also the ability to do special attacks where you combine the value of your cards to make stronger attacks, and I have to say that I never used it. Yes I would get the crap kicked out of me sometimes, but most of the time when an enemy stacked their cards against me I'd wait and use my 0 value card (which will cancel any number if its played after the numbers are played).
For those hardcore fans, this game is probably for you. For the SquareEnix games, you might want to rent this game first to see if it is what you're looking for. With a slightly different flavor to the series, this game misses for me. I give this game a 6.4 out of 10.