Welcome back, gentle reader. I hope the other day's discussion of high-brow literature didn't bore you too much. Now, with that safely tucked out of the way for the moment, we may return to what's really important in life: video games.
I believe that I have played enough of Kingdom Hearts: Re: Chain of Memories. To make my verdict on it. In case you hadn't played the game, it is a 3D reiteration of the GameBoy Advance game, Kingdom Hears: Chain of Memories, which is a pseudo-sequel to Kingdom Hearts. This game takes place between the events of Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2, and it fills in some of the non-essential story gaps between the two games. Chain of Memories is by no means a necessary part of the overall story, but it plays around with the theme of memories and hearts and feeds the player some mushy bullshit about memories embedded deeply within our hearts.
The gameplay on the original Chain of Memories is interesting because it alternates from a 2D God's-eye-view in which Sora can explore the world until he bumps into a stray Heartless, to a 2D side-view where Sora uses cards in combat. This combat system is really, a lot of fun. The card system is easy to grasp the basics of, but complex enough that the customizable strategies a player can come up with are nearly endless. Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories is a really, overall fun game.
Kingdom Hearts: Re: Chain of Memories, however has been tried and found lacking. But perhaps you have an equation in your head at the moment that looks something like this: 3D > 2D. Therefore, Re: Chain of Memories > Chain of Memories. You may find yourself asking me, “Zac, if the original was such a good game and all that was done was to bump it up a generation, how could it not be better than the original?” That, my astute reader, is a very good question. The problem is that Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories was designed as a 2D game. This is the fatal error in it's rebuilding in three dimensions.
The battle system in Chain of Memories is a side view that allows the player to see all enemies on a single plane in any direction related to Sora. So no matter where the enemies are, the player can be aware of them all without much difficulty. In a 3D world, however, the player is watching from just behind Sora's head, leaving the field of vision much more limited. While That type of view was not a problem in the other Kingdom Hearts games, it becomes a real problem in Re: Chain of Memories because in the other two games, the player could have Sora swing his Keyblade as much as he or she wanted and he would automatically lock on to the next target and attack. Here, however, the player only has the cards. This change in the system means that the player cannot play in the same way. I played both Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2 gleefully pounding the X button as fast as I could and enjoyed it very much and this game looks just like the other two. But it isn't; the card interface is extremely limiting and it forces the player to keep track of enemies he or she can't see while running , dodging and flipping through cards to find the right ones to use. This system was much more intuitive and made much more sense on the GameBoy Advance.
Overall, however, Kingdom Hearts: Re: Chain of Memories is still a really good game, and much of my complaints to it are nitpicky. I would recommend this game to you, gentle reader, but only if you do not own a GameBoy Advance or a Nintendo DS. If you do have one of these hand-held systems, I would suggest you pick up Chain of Memories, but if not, the somewhat inferior reiteration will do very well.
Or you could play a current-gen game,
Zac
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1 comment:
Lol, nice addition at the bottom there, Zac. In either case, yeah, this problem is rarely noted by gamers. I think more credit should be given to games that can still be good in 2d despite other options.
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