Kingdom Hearts is a big franchise with millions of fans worldwide, one of their biggest fans ends up being my best friend Sensei who since the moment he acquired the whole collection for PS4 has spent countless conversations telling me how amazing and addictive the games are, and how much I should play them. Other friends of mine have equally praised it non-stop, and with such a strong reaction, I obviously couldn't keep sleeping on it.
Gathering my money, the moment I found a good sale for the whole package, I bought it and started playing. The first game was a great experience, way smaller than what I anticipated, I had only seen gameplay of the third game, so I was going blind into the old entries, but nonetheless a fun and thrilling adventure between these Disney Worlds. The gameplay was a little challenging but enjoyable to learn and play, the bosses in particular were memorable. I was also really entertained with the story, loving all the characters except from maybe Riku, who reminded me a lot of Sasuke from Naruto.
Anyway, first game was great! It pretty much lived to all those expectations that were put upon me, making me even more excited to dive into the next game. The next entry would come in the form of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, a mixture of an action, turn base card game? I can't really explain what type of game it is supposed to be, feel free to enlighten me, but it was weird and completely different from everything I had seen before.
The gameplay had two elements that from the get go make me not so much of a fan, first is the turned base encounters style, I like it when we fight big bosses, but I find it extremely repetitive when it comes time to grind. The second element is the deck building, I like card games like Magic, always loved playing them with friends, but I never had the patience to properly strategize and build an effective deck. These are very prominent things in the game making it already a test to my small patience, just use your brain Katie, but then there's another new element, unique to this game, that just makes things harder for little baka me.
You see even though this is similar to your traditional turn base game, the whole fighting is based in real time with you and the enemy making card decisions in the blink of an eye, and let me tell you there's some really strong bosses in this game that will challenge your quick reactions and thinking like no other. I found myself in the beginning of the game completely hating it, I couldn't move on for nothing, no matter what I tried, I would constantly fall down even to the small enemies. Obviously I started complaining with my friend, and he shared the sentiment telling me how it was really frustrating for him too, even in online forums it was common to see other players feeling hopeless in such a hard and strange play style. For the first time in my life, I contemplated the idea of giving up and seeing the cut-scenes online and following to the next game.
The following days were spent with me trying to watch the cut scenes but feeling my gamer pride, I know amazing how I still have one, hurt and also without patience to watch hours of scenes. I really do have a patience problem, moving on, that led me to simply ignore the game's existence while I would play other things in my backlog. Still, the feeling of disappointment kept growing over me and I just couldn't continue with postponing this, I would have to learn the game and finish it!
Getting myself ready for some tedious time grinding, I put one of my favorite podcasts, go listen to Triple Click, and started investing my time in building a strong deck, learning the card combinations and the perfect timing for each encounter. It was hard work, I had to push all my baka neurons to the limit and in the beginning was pure hell, but without noticing I started really enjoying this hell of a game. The story would keep getting weirder and weirder with all this memory loss talk and I just needed to know more, the bosses were starting to become really addictive too. What once was a boring homework, became a challenging, fun adventure. A really, really big one, let me tell you.
When I finally got to the end of the game, I got the best feeling of accomplishment I had ever felt playing a game, I was ecstasy! Then the game told me there was a second mode where we had to play as Riku, I wanted it to stop so bad. Still, Riku ended up being my favorite part, without having to worry about the deck building I could focus on the skills I already had mastered more closely, plus his story made him one of my favorite characters, I really grew to love him in those last 11 hours. (Then I saw his design when he gets older and DAM my boy gets gorgeous!)
Now a couple of days after I finished the game I'm still trying to make sense of how crazy the story line got, I also watched the movie of 358/2 days, the story is so, so crazy. But I'm also having some mix feelings regarding this experience, for one I hate it with all my being, I don't want to ever play this game again, the grind will follow me in my nightmares, and yet I love it! I love that I played it, I love how challenging it was to defeat the bosses, I love the crazy story, I love my edgy son Riku, I love Mickey Mouse and ship him with Riku, I love the card system, I just love it! Just please don't make me play it again. xD
PS: If you're curious, I played in Standard Mode.
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