Chain of Addiction

As lucian_albrecht and my fellow players in his game can attest, I am currently addicted to a new game - this time on the GameBoy Advance - Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories.


Kingdom Hearts is an excellent PS2 action-RPG featuring characters and concepts culled from a wide mix of Disney films and Final Fantasy games. It sounds very odd, but actually its just great - even for someone like me who really doesn't have much time for Disney at all. I suppose if you hate Disney *and* Final Fantasy it may not be the game for you, but otherwise I *strongly* recommend you check it out.

Anyway the GBA game is basically Kingdom Hearts 1.5 - bridging the gap between the PS2 original and the forthcoming sequel. The story follows on directly from the end of Kingdom Hearts and thus contains immediate spoilers - although if you're not planning on playing the original its probably a decent way of getting up to speed in time to play the sequel.

Rather than try to directly translate the mechanics of a home-console action-RPG onto the GBA the mechanics of Chain of Memories instead have a more tactical spin involving collecting cards and combining them into decks which are then used in battle. Again this initially sounds rather odd, but once you get the hang of it its cool, interesting and has some reasonable tactical depth.

Essentially the battles remain real-time affairs rather than being turn based, but each attack or spell you use is represented by a card in your deck - you can flip quickly through your deck to find the card you need, combine multiple cards into special-move-triggering combos, or you can just button-mash your way through it in order.

There's a lot of complexity here; once you use every card in your deck you have to stand still and 'reload' it which makes you vulnerable - and certain cards (notably those used to start a combo/special) can't be reloaded meaning that your deck tends to shrink little by little in long fights, also some cards trump others, etc. etc.

In summary the combat is fast-paced but tactical with quite a bit of depth in the deck-building side of things as well. Its also nice that although fights do involve going to a 'battle screen' they aren't random and can be seen and avoided on the 'field map'.

The card theme actually runs through the whole game, with an interesting mechanic where cards are used to generate each room you move into - another odd little idea that works really well. These mechanics, like the combat, have been tailored to suit a portable console - with plenty of chance to save and gameplay and plot naturally falling into nice 'bite sized' chunks.

The game has a reasonably strong story, of particular interest to anyone who played the original or who plans to play the sequel and though it does recycle a *lot* of the original game in terms of characters, locations and even sound-samples this isn't necessarily a flaw - since its nice to see those things again in most cases and actually helps to make it feel like part of the same franchise rather than a random spin-off.


I've yet to complete the game, so my opinions may change as it goes on - but so far I'd say this is an excellent little game - innovative in many ways, a lot of fun and making strong use of a strong franchise - quite possibly the best GBA game I've played yet. 9/10.

If you like Japanese CRPGs or Disney at all - hell even if you don't like either but you're looking for something good to play on the PS2 or GBA - you really owe it to yourself to check out this franchise. If you let yourself be put off by the odd-sounding premise then you are really cheating yourself out of some of the best games of this console generation.