Chain of Memories has always been the black sheep of the Kingdom Hearts series, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t understand why. The GBA-exclusive deck builder that rehashes all of the first game’s Disney stories, while going off in a wild new direction filled with unfamiliar characters, isn’t exactly the follow-up to Kingdom Hearts people were expecting.
All these years later, many fans still regard it as a frustrating slog better off forgetting about. People who played it once as a kid and never gave it a second chance are wont to recommend newcomers outright skip it, but I couldn’t disagree more. Not only is Chain of Memories a critically important Kingdom Hearts experience, it’s also one of the most fascinating and woefully misunderstood games ever made.
It’s Not For Everyone, But That Doesn’t Make It Bad.
Whether or not you enjoy Chain of Memories gameplay is a matter of taste, but either way, you should be able to appreciate what a creative risk Tetsuya Nomura took with that game. To follow up a traditional action RPG with a handheld deckbuilding game – one with a more complex and mature story that sets the table for the future of the entire series – is an incredibly bold choice. Subsequent Kingdom Hearts games were experimental in their own ways, but never so dramatically as Chain of Memories. This is what makes it divisive, but also what makes it so genius.
Chain of Memories often gets labeled the ‘card game’, but dismissing it as something insubstantial as though it was just meant to cash in on Pokemon hype does a real disservice to what CoM really is. In truth, it isn’t all that different from most action RPGs, the difference is that instead of equipping your character with armor, weapons, and spells, all of the customization and character building is represented by cards.
Note: The remake, Re: Chain of Memories, is a lot more palatable for some because it’s in 3D like the main games. That’s the version you’ll find in modern collections, and while it’s a different experience in a lot of ways, it’s a good enough representation of the original.
It’s an elegant approach to role-playing that gives you the freedom and flexibility to craft your character to match your playstyle and react to the specific challenges of each fight, which is something Kingdom Hearts has never managed to recapture. A traditional deck-builder, even a hybrid RPG deck-builder like Marvel’s Midnight Suns, would have you shuffle your deck and draw cards at random. But because Chain of Memories allows you to sequence your deck and build combos that you can consistently perform in each battle, it’s almost not accurate to call it a card game at all.
Everything Good About Card Games Without All Baggage
The brilliance of Chain of Memories is that it offers all of the wonderful complexity and creativity of a card game, along with the thrill of building a collection, without the frustration of variance or the problematic monetization. Chain of Memories gives back as much as you put in. It rewards careful and strategic planning with incredibly bombastic results that make you feel both smart and powerful. I know it’s not for everyone, but if you invest the time to learn the system, Chain of Memories is the most rewarding Kingdom Hearts to master.
Chain of Memories also represents the moment when Kingdom Hearts’ story was simultaneously at its most complex and coherent. While a lot of the later storylines can sometimes feel like Nomura was making it up as he went along, Chain of Memories had such a strong and purposeful theme. The title itself is the perfect representation of how cohesive and well-designed the game is. Each tile you explore as you rebuild Sora’s mind is a literal link in the chain of memories, but through the Organization members, we also discovered the metaphysical meaning of the chain of memories, to which Namine can add and remove links.
Then there’s the link between Sora and Riku, who begin their journeys on opposite ends of the castle on very different journeys, yet remain connected to and reliant upon one another to escape – another metaphor for the chain of memories. Kingdom Hearts is guilty of getting far too high-concept at times, but all the layers to Chain of Memories sync up to tell a fascinating story about memory, identity, and redemption.
I credit Chain of Memories for my lifelong passion for card games. I fell in love with the way it gave me every tool I could need and the freedom to find my own success. Card games allow you to express yourself and your creativity in a way few other games can, and Chain of Memories perfectly captures that quality while keeping the identity of Kingdom Hearts intact. Nobody is brave enough to make a game like Chain of Memories anymore. Some might say that’s for the best, but I say this misunderstood masterpiece is worth another look.
