The Horrible Persistence of Chain of Memories

Sep. 10 7:49 PM by Lynxara

It is rare that I see something in the news so shocking, surprising, and perhaps infuriating that I end up painfully snorting coffee. Regardless, checking out 1up's GameStop Summit rumors this morning did just that. It still burns.

Now, everyone knows Square-Enix is still hard at work flogging the Kingdom Hearts franchise for all it's worth. The PSP gets the fairly promising Birth by Sleep, allegedly on the Crisis Core engine; the DS is getting the somewhat troubling 358/2 Days. It's rumored from several semi-credible sources that Kingdom Hearts III is going to get announced as a PS3 exclusive at the upcoming Tokyo Games show. You'd think this would be enough, wouldn't you?

For Square-Enix America, no, it apparently is not. This cash cow has more milk to give, and they apparently think their American fanbase is so stupid that they'll literally buy anything.

A few years back Square-Enix Japan released an enhanced version of Kingdom Hearts II called Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix+. This was a re-issue of the original game with the English-language voice acting we heard in America and gobs of new and altered content, and extra story stuff. Aside from addressing basically every fan complaint about the gameplay, FM+ included a new bonus boss (allegedly from Birth by Sleep and/or KHIII) and enough new storyline that Kingdom Hearts III is probably going to confuse Americans the same way the beginning of Kingdom Hearts II did. (The beginning of KHII, you see, is foreshadowed entirely in the Final Mix version of the original Kingdom Hearts, which was never released outside Japan, ha ha ha screw you Americans).

FM+ also shipped with an entire second bonus game, essentially a PS2 "remake" of the GBA's 2D Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories (Re: CoM to fans), which was also loaded with story events that you needed to know about to make any sense of Kingdom Hearts II's beginning. Most people weren't aware of CoM's portion of the story because, as a game which one is to play in order to have fun, CoM completely and totally sucked. People who liked to play games that were fun knew to skip it.

This is Kingdom Hearts: CoM in a nutshell: here, go through the entire plot of Kingdom Hearts again, only instead of actual locations to explore have some randomly generated bullshit, and instead of actual attacks, have a card-based battling system that was implemented with all the skill and panache the turd-flinging bonobos* we hired could muster. Once you get to the end, you find out Sora is repeating the plot of Kingdom Hearts due to a FIENDISH TRAP that Organization XIII laid out for him, but Kairi's Nobody is going to save him HELL YEAH, play Kingdom Hearts II if you want to see this lead anywhere that might possibly be worth your time. In the meantime, why don't you replay the game again as Riku to find out what he's been up to? Sure, the game still sucks as Riku, but don't you want to know? Don't you?

Seriously, Chain of Memories had very little plot (though of course what was there was critical to the sequel arrrggh), and the gameplay you had to trudge through to get there was mind-numbingly awful. YouTube videos of all the cutscenes from Chain of Memories were terribly popular around the time Kingdom Hearts II was initially released, because they let you catch up on all the relevant story without having to play that godawful game.

As a result of Chain of Memories being both plot-mandatory and complete crap, it meant that people who sensibly just wanted to play Kingdom Hearts II after finishing Kingdom Hearts didn't actually get to fight all thirteen of the titular bad guys in Organization XIII, who are otherwise sort of the point of the game. No, a bunch of Org XIII guys only appeared in the 2D misery that is Chain of Memories. Hearing countless fan complaints, Square-Enix clearly came to the conclusion that the way to make Kingdom Hearts II fans happier about this was to do a PS2 port of Chain of Memories and pack it in with the KHII Final Mix equivalent. It's the same incredibly crappy gameplay, sure, but now you get to see all of the Organization XIII members with rendered 3D models. That's sort of like getting to fight them in KHII, right? ... right?

Anyway, the Re: CoM didn't tack more than maybe $10 onto the price of Kingdom Hearts II FM+, so there it came off as a harmless little bonus. After all, it had clearly been produced on the super-cheap: huge swathes of the game had no voice acting, virtually all of the assets for the non-exclusive Org XIII bosses were recycled from KH and KHII, and thanks to the CoM engine being retained, there were only extremely rudimentary locations to render. Now, what Square-Enix is apparently thinking of doing in the US that fills me with unreasoning, terrifying rage is releasing the Re: CoM as a freestanding title, for $29.99. Presumably with very little of the expensive localization voicework that makes Kingdom Hearts a big deal over here, since hey so much of the original game isn't voiced!, and probably no fixes that attempt to make the fundamentally terrible gameplay not fundamentally terrible.

A re-release of, say, the FM+ version of KHII for $29.99? I could dig that. That's a quality enhancement and you'd get your money's worth in gameplay. Releasing the CoM remake along with KHIIFM+? At $29.99, that would be super-rad. But the PS2 CoM remake by itself? That is a game that is literally not worth the ten bucks Square-Enix charged for it the first time. It is not worth $29.99 to anyone, especially not given the way they're apparently talking it up to GameStop: a game that features "all new 3D bosses and cutscenes." Yes, new 3D bosses you'll fight using one of the stupidest game engines ever devised, and cutscenes that went up on YouTube (with subtitles!) ages ago.

If Square-Enix does go through with this madness, and the Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories -Give Us More Money Edition- does in fact hit GameStop shelves, please don't buy it. Please. It is a move on the behalf of the publisher that condescends to and insults each and every one of use. In some ways this is an even less excusable act than allowing the crappy GBA version of Chain of Memories to be published in the first place. Regardless of what anyone tries to make you think, PS2 Chain of Memories will not be a cool new 3D game that retells the important bits of the Chain of Memories storyline. It's the same terrible old game we all hated the first time, with models recycled mostly from games we already played.

* The turd-flinging bonobos in question are Jupiter, who later went on to develop The World Ends With You. While TWEWY is horribly overrated by American critics, it is still not nearly as terrible a game as Chain of Memories.**

** When I was given a review build of TWEWY, I had to send it back after one awful night because playing the game for more than fifteen minutes at a time gave me terrible, crushing headaches. You need to focus on both screens at once if you don't just want to let the damn thing play itself, you see, and my eyes couldn't take it. I'm telling you this just to let you know that while TWEWY is a game that caused me actual physical pain, I still think it's much better than Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories in any form.

Comments

Love the hatred for CoM on this article. But if I want to take you seriously, I would have done a better job writing this. CoM is the best KH game to date, with KHI in a very close second, and KHII is very very dead last.

But of courseI would not expect you to agree, seeing as you are extremely silly. And milking the franchise? Nothing comparable to what its done to FF.

Whether you think the author is silly or not (although I find you saying that CoM is the best KH game to date and that KH2 is dead last HILARIOUS) doesn't take away from the fact that she's right.

Selling a remake of CoM for the PS2 seperate for 30 bucks would be a damn insult. Hell, it'd be an insult at 20 bucks. While the game was interesting to a point anybody who had wanted to play it already has and not giving us KH2 Final Mix with it would want to make me slap somebody upside the head.

As for franchise milking I think it's safe to say that Squaresoft has it down to a tee. Just because they're doing it with one franchise doesn't mean they aren't doing it with another.

PS: CoM was the least well received game in the franchise. Just a small note.

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Not bothering to voice the game, not even with cheapish soundalikes, also seems highly insulting to me, since the basic point of KH is pretty much "meet all these lovely Disney characters voiced by their original actors where available."

She has a point that charging that much for a game is pointless. At least make it like 20. And sell it on PSN.
And I do think that CoM is the best, because it had everything to make it a great game. Exciting story, new and intuitive gameplay, and more mysteries than an Agatha Christie library, lol. And KHII is trash, you can't deny it. Button mashing, poor ideas, and Atlantica. The only thing that made it good was the story. Which is what makes KHI and CoM better because they had both great gameplay and story.

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Eh, I'm not convinced that Square-Enix milks Final Fantasy harder than KH. Compilation of FF7 I could see an argument for, and FFX-2 was a massive pile of failure, but relative to the total number of FF-branded titles that's really not much. Most games released under the FF-brand are polished, decently playable, and at worst may be about characters or gameplay gimmicks I dislike. There is a big difference here between "dislike" and "this is fundamentally terrible" here. Even FFVIII, my least-favorite mainline FF game, is something I could easily defend as being overall a much better game than CoM.

CoM I feel is a genuinely bad game on just about every level, and it comprises - even allowing for the hypothetical KHIII - one-sixth of all extant KH games. As of this writing it is one-third of all KH games for sale in the American market; if Re: CoM hits before 358/2 Days or Birth by Sleep, then it and its remake suddenly account for one-half of all KH games on the American market. This does not reflect kindly upon the KH franchise. It wouldn't even if CoM happened to be a really good game.

@Zexion_VI_OrgXIII:

It's not hard to deny that KHII is trash. It has the highest Metacritic average of any KH title, 87%. It is basically impossible to deny that has some validity unless you want to do absurd crap like claim that Square-Enix bought every single high review of the game, or that somehow all 64+ outlets that reviewed the title were insane and stupid and their opinions don't count.

Now, I'm sure you have valid reasons for disliking KHII, and there are plenty of valid criticisms to be leveled at some of the gameplay and level design decisions in it. The same is true of lots of games that qualitatively cannot be called trash. It is possible to dislike something without it being terrible, and I cannot over-emphasize that I do not merely dislike CoM, I find it objectively terrible.

How can you defend CoM's story when roughly half of it involves repeating scenarios from KH nearly verbatim? It does introduce some passably engaging concepts and characters, but onscreen text limits force terse, unnatural dialog that make it hard to relate to anything going on.

The debut of Org XIII was okay-ish, but nerfed by the boss fights being truly terrible. Once you have a decent deck in CoM, which takes maybe thirty minutes to achieve, you can win almost every battle in the game by pressing the A button really fast. Combat rapidly degenerates into utter monotony unless you willfully choose to build sub-optimal decks that give enemies more of a chance to try and mount an offensive. Especially when far superior "card deck" RPG systems like Baten Kaitos already existed at the time, I just find that inexcusable.

Yeah, I can definitely deny KH2 is trash. KH2 was an extension KH1's. All they did was shift some moves around and add more. If you're gonna claim that KH2 was nothing but a button masher then you have to claim that KH1 was as well. They are not *that* different.

In fact the gameplay of CoM I felt was the worst of the bunch. Yeah, the card system was pretty interesting but it never came down to skill. It came down to building the most optimal deck. And once you got to that part it was the worst of just spamming attack and not doing much different.

And, personally, I'd take KH2 Atlantica over KH1's.

You would take a singing level? lol I can't tell if your serious or kidding.
KHII is a bit better than trash, of course, but easily the worse. They destroyed so many characters with it, especially Kairi. Her and DiZ were just convulted to nearly useless characters. And Sora just turned into a slave to some bitter old mans hate against Xemnas and his Org. They did a few things great, but only in terms of story and very little in gameplay (Drives was a great idea). But poorly implemented. and I reach the final point-DeviantArt. Enough said. They have completely destroyed my image of KH, especaiily of Roxas/Axel and Sora/Riku. *shudders*
KHI required a bit more strategy than KHII. Foe example, in KHII, you could beat the game without ever using an offense magic skill. Hell, only cure was used. And with CoM, the sleights and combos added a lot more to it. Riku's story was button mashing ,of course, till you went into Dark Mode. lol. But Sora's required a little bit of planning and understanding of the deck, which creates a lot more strategy for it then just "let me get skillz that extend my combos" in KHII.

So, I think I'll put this out there as someone who's actually played and beaten both KHIIFM and Re:Chain of Memories: There is absolutely no way on Earth that a stand-alone release of Re:Chain of Memories is worth $30. It's a rehash of the original with a few new cards and a single new boss battle (which should have been in the original ANYWAY). The camera is awkward, the plot at this point basically useless since CoM's biggest selling point was bridging the gap between KH1 and 2, and most of all, the OrgXIII battles were significantly more fun in Final Mix.

And I'll also add my voice to the disagreeing with KH2 being worse then KH1 or CoM crowd. KH2 basically took KH1, made it better and fixed some of the minor complaints. The "optional" boss battles in KH1, including Sephiroth and the Titan, where basically long boring fights against the camera and how often you can spam Cure and dodge-roll. The ones in KH2, at very least, required slightly more tactics and timing. You can argue that Reaction Commands made things easier, but I prefer a slightly shorter fight that is interesting to play and watch to a slow repetitive slugfest...

Lynxara- CoM's story was great. But only during the Castle Oblivion portions. Of course the Disney was just filler. lol. But from trying to guess Axle's loyalty and his countless betrayals to Marluxia's revolt against Xemnas was rather wonderful. Vexen, Lexeaus, and Zexion's counter-attack with Riku was also very good. Namine destroying Sora's memories piece by piece and forgetting everything was a nice element added, as well.nearly everything was excellent about the story, if you just ignored the Disney portion.

Einherjar-there are 2 new boss battles, actually. Zexion and Marluxia's 3rd form.

Anyway, everyone has an opinions, so they can voice it as such. I dislike KHII, you all love it. And vice versa with CoM. So then lets jsut continue with our lives and anticipate the releases of Birth By Sleep, 358/2 Days, and coded (which is now rumored to come to the PSP, like Agito and the 3rd Birthday.)

I have to wonder why you're playing Kingdom Hearts if you want to ignore Disney. I enjoy the games, but the plot is pretty paper thin at best and mostly an excuse to run around interacting with Disney characters. I enjoyed the Singing Level because... you know, it's Disney, and singing is a major part of what Disney does.

And honestly, letting DevientArt influence your opinion on something is pretty silly. It's DevientArt. Five minutes there and I can find a picture of Luke Skywalker as an obese furry or Max Payne in a gothic maid outfit. If it exists in someone's imagination, it will end up on paper.

It was a joke about DeviantArt's silly fangirl base.

Yeah, I'd take the singing level because A:) Atlantica in KH1 was pretty damn frustrating and B:) the rest of KH2 was huge and made up for any kind of 'stage' that it'd make. Plus I found it fun.

And your points about CoM point out one of the fundamental reasons why it's kind of the least regarded overall: It's just a sidestory. An interesting sidestory but one nontheless. As was pointed out before one of the big draws is the Disney and Squaresoft worlds melding in a hella interesting way.

So, yeah, we can agree to disagree at this point.

@ Zexion_VI_OrgXIII:

I kind of object to you telling me that I love KHII, because I never said that and frankly I don't. Kingdom Hearts II is ambitious but has some fairly significant gameplay flaws; the same goes for the original Kingdom Hearts. Both games over-relied on half-baked gimmicks and mini-games that I skipped whenever possible, and both games are guilty of trying to coast on spectacle. I'm sure a theoretical KHIII will address KHII's issues on an engine level, hopefully making better use of the Reaction Command system and not just pointlessly screwing everyone who has the temerity to pick the Wand.

Now, I liked the KHII Atlantica. The only significant flaw with it is that the songs weren't very good; they'd clearly been written in Japanese and translated awkwardly into English. That said, the Little Mermaid was about the importance of singing and music, while the swimming engine from KHI was a miserable piece of crap. I'd rather play a harmless and quick rhythm game section than the Hell of Poor Targeting and Physics that could bog you down for hours in the first game. Especially since the rhythm game has, you know, something to do with the movie the level is based on.

(Granted, I would've really preferred Little Mermaid not have levels in KHII at all, since it was obvious they hadn't thought of any new plot for it. It was clearly just there so they could reuse old character models.)

Finally, if you have to admit that half the CoM plot was filler, you are admitting it's not a very good story by definition. A good plot does not include any non-necessary elements and moves along at a steady pace; it certainly does not repeat the plot of another work for no particular reason. The Castle Oblivion stuff was basically generic fighting anime villain crap, and if you like that sort of thing it's fine, but it's not in any way memorable or significant.

I can't comment on your weird feelings about DiZ and Kairi in KHII, except to say that Kairi was always a boring generic character I didn't really care about, while DiZ was a terribly silly idea from the get-go. So, you know, maybe you have a point here, but if so it's not one I'm capable of caring much about either way. I don't play basically anything Square-Enix expecting more than a passable story, and their attempts at multi-game stories are usually ridiculous beyond belief.