A Sleight Detour
The early 2000’s was one of the most interesting times in JRPG design. Fresh off the JRPG boom of the Playstation era, studios were now capitalizing on the appeal of the genre by experimenting with new types of combat systems. It was a wildly inventive era, pushing Action and Turn Based JRPGs to new extremes as the technology existed in a sweet spot between “enough power to do cool things” and “enough limitations to empower creativity.”
One oddity from this era is the rise of JRPG systems based on Card Games. For a time, some developers, seemingly inspired by the growing market of tabletop collectible card games, were trying to see if that kind of mechanic would work. If it’s an item, a piece of equipment, or a spell, you can expect it would be put in a card to be used in deck building.
Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories, and its PS2 remake re:Chain of Memories (which is the version I played for this series crawl), is strange even within this context. Card battlers tended to be turn based, but re:CoM maintains some of the action elements of Kingdom Hearts.
And boy howdy is it a strange game.
I think I like it?
Let’s get the story out of the way first, since Re:CoM is where the true story of Kingdom Hearts actually begins.
While the main theme from the first title, Friendship, remains in effect (and will continue to be in effect throughout the series), this iteration filters that concept through the idea of Memories. And oh man is this exactly the kind of weird shit I love.
See, Chain of Memories doesn’t treat memory as a film reel or camera or anything like that. Environments pulled from Sora’s memory (a convenient way to get another games worth of Kingdom Hearts worlds without needing to make new assets) are twisting labyrinths and can constantly be reshaped by special cards, which accurately depicts memory as “stories we tell ourselves.” That concept begins to take form in the story as well, as Sora’s memories of Kairi begin to be replaced by memories of Naminé .
It’s emotionally charged stuff, and ends up developing not only Naminé as a character to care about, but also accents just how important of a trait Empathy is for Sora. Even when he’s told what has been happening to him, and would be reasonably expected to be upset at being deceived, he still finds room in his heart for Naminé.
Is it any surprise then that this is the first time I found myself truly loving the story of a Kingdom Hearts title?
It’s a simple but powerful side story, a slight diversion experimenting with seeing what can be added to this world and playing with how it works, while also doing double duty of setting up Kingdom Hearts II and explaining why Sora is starting at level one (rather than just, you know, starting him at level one with no explanation like other serialized JRPGs of the era were doing. (Looking at you, Xenosaga.)) It even takes a few villains from Kingdom Hearts II and establishes itself as firmly canon, rather than a simple diversion as it might appear.
Let’s just get this out of the way: this is an idiotic way to tell a serialized story.
Serialized JRPGs were another trend of the early 2000s, but of that era only Kingdom Hearts and Legend of Heroes: Trails really survived. Multimedia projects like .hack and properties envisioned as multipart epics like Xenosaga either lost steam or were forced to reduce the scope of the project. Legend of Heroes: Trails survived by maintaining a relatively low budget for development, resembling a PS1 era JRPG with higher quality textures, so that it could focus on worldbuilding and scope.
Kingdom Hearts, meanwhile, survived the era by dividing its focus between Handhelds and Consoles, with Chain of Memories establishing that handheld titles would be for telling smaller, but no less important, stories than the more blockbuster-esque main console titles. It was an experiment in storytelling that would lead to five titles being released across four separate handhelds.
Is it any surprise Kingdom Hearts looks daunting to tackle now?
While continually releasing smaller Kingdom Hearts titles on handhelds kept the series alive and enabled Kingdom Hearts III to maintain its nature as a product of an earlier era, releasing titles on separate devices isolates fans. It’s fortunate that this weird experiment can now be experienced on a single platform, but recognize that I understand completely if you think Kingdom Hearts is a confusing mess.
But that reputation made me expect something far more complex from Chain of Memories than what I got, a relatively simple story introducing a few characters that I ended up really liking.
On the flipside of having a simple story, the combat system in Chain of Memories is one of the most nonsensical messes in the series. The combination of action elements such as dodging and blocking meshes oddly with the addition of the card system, creating what I would describe as a (stick with me here):
Real Time Action Turn Based Strategy Card Battle JRPG.
The turn based elements come from the way cards work. Each card has a value. When a card is played, only cards that are of higher value or a 0 may be played in opposition. While being able to cancel enemy attacks like this is fun, bosses make this a chore with their sleights.
A sleight is a combination of three cards. The first card used in the sleight is removed from your deck, while the other two are discarded. The first card can only be recovered if you use item cards (which thankfully regenerate in your deck after battle.)
That last element is important, because bosses use sleights all the time and don’t seem to run out of cards on their own. Breaking sleights requires using either a 0 or a larger sleight of your own. Using a 0 is risky, since your opponent can just smash it right after you use it, but large sleights thin your deck out incredibly fast.
Figuring out exactly how Chain of Memories wanted me to handle it was one of the biggest challenges of this series crawl, and I still don’t know if I really found the right way to deal with it. And regrettably, until I decide to do another series crawl, I don’t think I’ll be up for tackling this game again because of the frustrations I had with this combat system to figure more out.
Still, there was some enjoyment to be had here and there, and even if I probably wouldn’t call it my favorite title in the lineup, I appreciate that this odd experiment exists.
❤ Touhi
Touhi Touko's Blog 