3.5/5 ★ – KHFanXIII's review of Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories.

Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories is a game I have a love/hate relationship with. My first time playing the game was shortly after it's release in 2008. I was fairly young at the time, and it was a new KH game that I had never played! One that took place before KH2? I was so pumped! Add to that the fact that I obtained this game not long after finally meeting some friends who were also into the franchise. I played through the entire game with them and loved every second of it! Going forward that influenced my general opinion of the game, and still brings me fond memories of the game to this day. I was of the opinion that it was an underrated game in the franchise, and was a really big fan of the story especially. That began to change in 2013. After the first HD collection was released with this game being included, I was happy to replay the game, but this time on my PS3! Trophies? 720p? A wireless controller? Hell yeah that sounds great! So I began to play the game, shortly after finishing KH1. By that point in time, I had decided that I was going to platinum the games. KH was my favorite game franchise at the time and I thought that I should 100% them as I had never done it before, and also as a kind of badge of honor of my KH fandom. Therein lies the problem. Firstly, let's address what I had to do to platinum the game. Like with most games, most of the trophies aren't that bad. Just finish the game and you get a bunch of them, and even obtaining a lot of the optional ones naturally. However, there are a few particularly nasty trophies that made my experience with the game un-fun. Firstly, Expert Deck Builder. This is a trophy that requires you to edit your deck 500 times. Understandably, this seems like a high number, and it is. However, you may think that it's possible that this may happen naturally over time, or that through multiple playthroughs (we'll return to this in a moment) you'd get it eventually. Well, unfortunately not. First of all, once you get a set up in this game that works, you'll stick to it. Maybe making small edits along the way to swap out certain cards. Any edit that you could possibly make in this game still wouldn't add up to 500 naturally. Secondly, the counter does NOT carry to multiple save files, so this all has to be done on a single save file. This means that you're "grinding" deck editing by repeatedly placing/removing a card in your deck and then backing out one screen so it saves. This takes a very long time and it, unfortunately, isn't the last trophy to do so. The next trophy that I think is bullshit is the Room Creator trophy. In the game, every world has a map showing the number of rooms contained within that particular world. To progress, you use a card to create the type of room you will traverse. As you can imagine, you're not required to create and enter every room in the game, only those along the critical path. Here's the problem though: even if you do decide to create all of those rooms, you still won't have created enough for this trophy. Just like the previous trophy, this too does not carry over to other save files, so this means repeatedly creating rooms over and over and over and over, which is tedious enough by itself, however, that's not the end of it. You'll eventually run out of Room cards so you won't be able to create any more rooms. This will mean you have to grind enemy encounters until you have more Room cards. Luckily they will almost always drop a Room card (more on that in a bit), however since they only drop one at a time, this means a lot of grinding. This trophy took me a long time and it's not even the worst of it. Before getting to the final trophy I despise, I feel it best to mention one of the HD collection's oddest quirks. For both playable games in the collection, difficulty trophies do not stack, meaning to get the trophies for beating the game on Beginner, Standard, or Proud, you have to play through the game one time per difficulty. This is especially tedious in Re:Chain of Memories as there are two separate story modes, each with their own difficulty trophies, meaning you could say I played through the game 6 times in total between both story modes. And now, getting to the final trophy, Card Master Sora. This requires you to complete all Card Collection entries in the Journal. This is probably one you would have seen coming as soon as you found out the game's combat used cards, it still doesn't quite convey the agony I went through though. So, to explain, most cards in the game are pretty easily obtainable. Cards can pop out of random objects you hit, they can be bought, and they can also be found in special treasure rooms you can create with the corresponding Room cards. There are also special treasure rooms that can be created using special "Room of Rewards" cards. These cards start randomly dropping after you get high enough in the Castle, but you can only carry one at a time, so once you obtain one, be sure to use it. Doing all of this will net you nearly every card in the game, and if it was just that, it wouldn't be that bad. The worst part would be dealing with the Room of Rewards and even that isn't horrible, but I have yet to discuss the final type of cards that makes this task horrible: Enemy cards. Every single enemy in the game has a corresponding enemy card in the game. Bosses automatically give you them upon beating them in battle, but the random encounters in the game are a whole story in and of themselves. To obtain an enemy card for a random enemy, you have to defeat them in battle. However, the odds they will drop one are incredibly low, most of the time they will only drop Room cards. You could spend hours defeating this same enemy over and over again and not get anything. Imagine spending hours upon hours repeatedly grinding enemies over and over again for a single card, that's the reality of this trophy. Oh, it's not just that though, to get that particular enemy card you're after, they have to be the LAST enemy that is defeated in battle. This means you can't use some of the more helpful, screen-clearing abilities you learn in the game to speed up the process which means manually defeating enemies, one by one, until only the variety you're after appear in battle. Now if this wasn't so tedious in and of itself, you also have to worry about Room cards. Some enemies only spawn in a particular type of Room (or on a particular world), so if you're out of the specific Room card of the room the enemy spawns in, you have to go grind enemy encounters hoping they will randomly drop the Room card you need. This took me weeks. Every day putting hours and hours into this game JUST for this trophy. Now fast forward to the future and it's 2017. Square Enix release the Kingdom Hearts HD I.5 + II.5 ReMIX, which had nearly every KH game all together on one disc for PS4! Awesome! EXCEPT THAT MEANT I HAD TO DO ALL OF THIS AGAIN (except for the difficulty trophies, which thankfully stack this time) You may think that I didn't have to 100% it and that it shouldn't hamper my experience of the game in a more casual sense, and you're right in that respect, however, I have played Re:Chain of Memories in total, including both story modes, 10 times, and fully completed it twice. You really get to know a game after playing it so many times, and I have some problems. Firstly, I don't like the way the story is paced in Sora's story. Every story bit in this game happens in between the worlds. The Disney worlds in this game are literally filler. Nothing that happens in them matters (aside from Traverse Town and the final few worlds) as they are just projections based on Sora's memories and everyone you meet in them aren't real. Nothing that happens in them is ever brought up in the "main" plot due to the ability to choose which Disney worlds you play when, meaning the cutscenes that happen on a certain "floor" can only make vague references to worlds (such as referring to "the people we met"). I also don't really care much for Sora's story in general beyond the pacing. It feels like the definition of an in-between game and any development Sora goes through in the game doesn't matter. It is neat that we get introduced to some characters that will show up in the next game, but it feels totally skippable and can be summed up with "Sora lost his memories, then had to sleep to get them back again" and you're not really losing very much detail. Also, this is a small gripe, but despite taking place directly after KH1, Sora's voice is unnaturally deep, due to Haley Joel Osment's voice having already changed, making this bizarre combo of KH1 Sora's body, with KH2 Sora's voice (which bizarrely enough isn't the last time we will see this). Riku's story fairs much better as it feels very integral to his character development and everything Riku learns in this game sticks as his memories are left intact. Honestly, his story is the best part of the game. Something else I take issue with is the voiced cutscenes of this game. Most KH games have the English actors record the dialogue, trying to match the lip flaps-ish, with Square then going back to make the lip flaps match exactly what is being said. Re:CoM is different in the fact that every voiced cutscene in the game is pre-rendered, and not in-engine like most KH games. This means that the lip flaps are permanently matched the Japanese as it's just a pre-rendered video, and the English version suffers for this, as the lips flaps do not match very well at all. This also makes the game look worse in future HD collections as the jaggies of these pre-rendered cutscenes stick out all the more. The combat in this game also begins to get a bit boring after a while. You eventually reach a point where every enemy encounter is either Mega Flare'd or Lethal Frame'd. Even attempting a self-imposed challenge by not using the overpowered abilities, the combat just isn't as engaging or interesting to me as the main series. All in all, while I initially was quite fond of Re:CoM and still think it's an okay game, repeated playthroughs have made its flaws all the more apparent, and not a game I feel like revisiting often.