Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories (GBA) Review

While exploring a scary castle trying to find clues to a mystery, it's good to have familiar faces to help you out on your journey. That is, of course, if they remember you. In Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, you take control of Sora, who has to make his way through the Castle Oblivion and his past to uncover a dark secret presented to him. However, he'll be able to call on his friends to help him, after they remember who he is.

This key is my sword!!!! Chain of Memories looks great, especially with the opening FMV. It's really amazing to think that this video is being rendered on the Game Boy Advance, and a true pity it didn't occur over a year ago, when it would have been a shining achievement on the GBA, and not playing second fiddle to the graphical technologies present in the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable.

The rest of the game looks really sharp too. From Halloween Town to Olympus and beyond, there are plenty of locations you'll get to explore through again in this game. The only difference is instead of having a larger map, locations are broken up into rooms where you need to have a specific card combination to open them. If you don't have them, prepare for a headache. Early on you'll need to battle until you can find the magic number and open the door for yourself. It's a rather troublesome procedure that kind of messes with the flow of the game. There could have been a lot of other ways to approach the passage of one area to the next, and unfortunately games have been beset with a dumb idea.