Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories is a Tragedy

Many of the games I set myself out to play are usually for the sake of experimenting or finding something unique to ruminate on. Like toys, there are plenty of creative projects offering so many cool ideas, aesthetics, and concepts to think about for the moment. Bring it home, speak highly of its novelty and move on to the next. There are games that have become engraved into my personality – action games or adventures with attitudes that strike such a chord with me that I essentially live out my life as if I’m living out the vitality of these games.

Then there are games that have stuck with me on an emotional level – where when I think about them, I recognize how personal, hopeful and meaningful the adventure was in the end. I don’t think any game has given me a heavier heart than that of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. And replaying it just recently made me realize why it has resonated so hard with me: it’s one of those standalone games that plays out and exists as a tragedy.

Imagine being Sora just after the first Kingdom Hearts – you were a lazy islander who suddenly got the chance to explore several iconic Disney worlds and become the one to stop evil. You got Donald and Goofy as your best friends on a road trip to live out Disney films’ classic stories. You defeated the evil known as the Heartless that threatened to harm those precious Disney stories – working side-by-side with the heroes of those films and seeing yourself become part of the fairytale. Finally, you ended it off by preventing the end of all worlds, saving the Disney princesses all at once and becoming a Disney-like hero yourself. Even by the end, Mickey revealed himself and believed in you the whole way through. It’s an adventure made not just for a Disney fan, but for any kid who grew up with the memory of some fantastical story. I loved it. You may have been separated by your childhood friend Kairi, you may not have found your missing friends by the end. But after travelling and fixing those familiar worlds, new ventures seemed like the next step for the newfound hero.

If the first Kingdom Hearts was about saving the worlds, then Chain of Memories is about realizing how valuable that journey really was. Sora and company now find themselves in Castle Oblivion, where the mysterious black-coated figures who inhabit it bring everything they’ve done to absolute zero. Their first threat is that they immediately forget every move they learned in the first game the moment they enter the Castle. Then the hooded figure presents an ultimatum. They can move higher and higher through Castle Oblivion to potentially find their friends and gain lost memories – at the cost of losing the memories they made in the first game.

Of course for the sake of the game, Sora and company begrudgingly carry forward. They’re given cards that essentially compartmentalize everything about the first game. The Disney worlds are no longer distant universes that you needed to ride a ship to get to, they’re now a single map card that the Castle recreates from behind a door. The worlds themselves no longer have the same memorable landmarks or locales as the first game, they’re now these randomly generated rooms mapped like a labyrinth created through the usage of cards. The action combat and youthful tactics of Kingdom Hearts is still here, but with a catch. Every attack is a card. Every magic spell is a card. Even your friends Donald and Goofy are no longer following your every step. They’ve been reduced to cards you summon out of nowhere.

To put this further into perspective, the Disney worlds loosely follow their original stories from the first game, but every cutscene and encounter with the characters have been reduced to cards that showcase the important parts of the story. When even the stories get divided into cards, that’s how you can tell how expendable the journey of Chain of Memories truly becomes.

Take the first Kingdom Hearts and make every component of it something that you manipulate, generate, or completely break. That is how it feels to play Chain of Memories. You’re no longer exploring the worlds, being friendly with the characters, or defending the innocent universes for a wholesome purpose. You’re no longer fighting an enemy that is as menacing as your imagination can picture. Sora and company go through these worlds pretending that they do not know anyone from their memories, because their memories recreated in Castle Oblivion don’t even remember them – yet they feel that they need to be there. Because Sora makes it so that his memory – and the feeling of the first game – is lived out.

Combat is disgustingly meta, with the feature of attacks being cards that have labeled numbers on them, the game introduces a card-fighting mechanic to the combat that purely exists to either disrupt your moves or disrupt the enemy. What seemed like gigantic & menacing bosses from the first game can now have all of their attacks immediately interrupted with the power of the right cards. You don’t just fight enemies, but you actively break their natural functions to master Chain of Memories.

You’re now going through these worlds, talking and fighting with these characters, growing how you would in the first game – but with the realization that it is ALL fabricated.

There’s a moment after going through the Hundred Acre Wood – one of the most innocent and adorable worlds of the original game – where you meet all of the Winnie The Pooh characters one by one, passing them by on the way to the end. It was already tragic enough that the first game treated this Winnie the Pooh world as a universe living in a children’s book – filled with minigames where the events and characters were being indirectly harmed by the Heartless. But now you have to go through a fake replica of the memory of this world that now exists within a card. Where everything isn’t real and only a figment of your imagination. But as you’re humoring the world and going through all of these cute mini-games and moments with Tigger and Eeyore and such, Sora mentions that he has to leave by the end. In the context of this game, it means that he has to move on to completely forget this world once he leaves to proceed to the next world of his memory and move higher within Castle Oblivion. But there’s this conscious moment where Winnie the Pooh says that he’ll come along with him. Sora says that he can’t, especially considering how every world and every character is already an illusion. But Pooh assures him that even if he forgets about him, he will never forget about Sora.

And then Sora leaves. On to the next world.

And that is where I proceed to bawl my eyes out.

Keep in mind when I say that Chain of Memories is a tragedy, I say that as a positive. This is a suspenseful, almost eerie game to sit through or even think about – what would seem like usual story or combat beats from the first game now become these super-imposed figments of an adventure trapped within the confines of the game’s larger subtext. Castle Oblivion and its rules are what absolutely dominate the feel of this game’s format – it forces you to go through the worlds and moments you loved from the first game, but progressing only means that Sora starts losing what was earned and gaining just as little answers to what climbing Castle Oblivion will do to him.

The actual story beats of this title are a distant call from the brave and youthful adventure of the first game. The mysterious black-hooded figures intimidate, assault, and taunt Sora at any possible moment. These tall and imposing enemies only make Sora’s scope of what is going on more sinister than what was happening in the surface of the first game. Then the mysterious girl named Namine suddenly becomes this super-imposed love interest to Sora’s tragic crusade. Sora becomes distressingly obsessed with wanting to save Namine after remembering her randomly – even the Riku he encounters becomes his rival in being the one who protects Namine and the Destiny Islands world that he creates have the characters strangely cheer him on in saving the girl. The goal post suddenly shifted, weren’t they there to find Riku and the King? And what about Sora’s childhood crush Kairi from the first game? There are small non-diegetic hints to us as players that Sora is being tricked or manipulated. But the tragedy of the game is that while he doesn’t know that just yet, he becomes an entirely transformed person where everything that happens here is all that matters. Castle Oblivion is the end of the line – there was no where else to go and there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to really give him answers but in here.

Even Riku has his own adventure in the bottom floor of the Castle while Sora’s descent into corruption is unfolding. If you thought Sora’s intentions of going through the Castle were desperate, then Riku’s is somehow just as distressing. Chain of Memories paints his journey as a chance at redemption – after acting as the pseudo-antagonist of the first game who succumbed to the darkness. The Castle makes him go through the Disney worlds but at a much more brisk pace and only through the memories he would surely be familiar with. Mainly, there are none of the Disney friends & cutscenes within these worlds and only the boss fights. Riku pulls through with the hopes of coming across Mickey and fighting the darkness in his heart, but the entire journey forces him to be alone. It strangely acts as a punishment for what he had caused in the first game while also being a sort of self-reflection to overcome his fears. Sora’s story may have been a complete lie, but Riku’s story is just as poetic. Both have the Castle to make them reflect on the expendable nature of their past adventures in the effort to move forward with who they are in Castle Oblivion.

It’s honestly why I become very engaged with playing through this game – it’s a messed-up adventure that plays with the genuine emotions you felt playing, let alone remembering the first game. In general, I love tragic stories or games about climbing a setting to the very end, but in here it’s all for the sake of seeing what happens next to our boy, his friends and his Disney memories.

The Gameboy Advance was especially a great format for this game, seeing the original game recreated in miniscule sprite form with the super-compressed PS2 opening (on a 32 bit handheld of all things) was a great way to present a fragmented perspective of the first game. The 3D remake is nice and its voice-acted and fully animated cutscenes really help paint the picture of the tragedy, but I feel that literally copying and pasting the exact same graphics from the first game doesn’t have the same effect. If possible, this kind of adventure about an expendable memory needs to be presented on a different medium altogether, which is why the GBA version is my preferred way of experiencing Chain of Memories.

As of now in my university years, I finally managed to fully play the original Kingdom Hearts. Even without playing it in my childhood, I still had distinct memories of what it was like when watching videos of it all the time. I adored growing up with it and recognizing it, and getting the chance to finally experience it, I consider it a wonderfully inspiring adventure that has become one of my all-time favorite games. I have its pseudo-sequel to thank for this, my friends and I in elementary didn’t get the chance to play the original game. We would end up playing Chain of Memories on emulators at school to live out the feeling of playing Kingdom Hearts. So if there was ever a game that resonated with me about treasuring our memories and what could happen if we think of them as expendable setpieces to move on from, it was this game.

Chain of Memories may exist to manipulate or retell the heights of Kingdom Hearts, it may even be a pointless re-tread of the first game to some. But if it does one thing considerably well, it serves as a conscious reminder of a great legacy. It exemplifies how precious of an adventure that the original Kingdom Hearts really is and what would become of it if you turned everything it stood for into a creation tool.

Didn’t Need The Incredibles 2, But I’m Certainly Glad We Saw It

You wanna know about how I saw Disney Pixar’s The Incredible 2? Well, it goes like this:

I’m off for the summer with no school to worry about. My dad is off for the summer with no work to worry about either. My mom happened to get a day off that Monday too. Aside from anticipating Father’s Day and what last-minute plans my sister would have in store for us, my mind was set on going out with them for the day. Not the usual shopping for clothes or lurking around the dollar store, but mainly to get back to something we haven’t done in a while. It was a humid summer day where all of us were off for the day, the one time where it’s not a weekend and we’re not cleaning, doing chores or having any outside plans along with my parents not having seen a movie in theatres with me for a while.

And more importantly, it’s been 13 years since we last saw Disney Pixar’s The Incredibles. Maybe there wasn’t any fan-driven anticipation for it from any of us. We remember the Incredibles from way back when – I remembered liking it and even gained a better appreciation for it when I heard Internet reviewers discuss it further – and seeing that its sequel was showing just down the neighborhood was akin to a pleasant reminder more so than a hyped-up event. Sounded like something fun to do: to go back to how that untouched universe was doing while we’ve been adulting and only now finding time to unwind. Why wouldn’t we want to see that continuation on such an occasion?

Which is why I want to state that The Incredibles 2 is a very comfortable sequel to watch. If you’ve been keeping up with how it has been advertised, chances are you may not have known what to expect. I certainly didn’t. I saw that Jack-Jack teaser, I saw a couple action scenes, and yet I didn’t know what exactly was the big event or actual story of this sequel. There wasn’t a menacing Thanos to expect or speculate upon to await some epic conclusion by the end of the film. There wasn’t even any marketing gimmick like the recent “EVERYONE IS HERE” announcement of Smash Universe. All I knew was that Incredibles was certainly coming back. In what shape or form was unclear, but I’ll say right now that it may not have mattered how big or small this returning story would’ve been.

All this gets rectified right from the beginning half of the film, let alone its previews showing the voice cast and animators expressing to the audience how making this film was possible.

Trust me when I say this. Think back to the first film and consider what you’d like to see again. The obvious elephant in the room of that question would be how that first film ended with them facing some random villain named The Underminer and maybe wanting to see how their life fighting crime (as heroes in media usually do) would turn out. Personally, I wanted to see how their family would still thrive while society continues to have a stigma against the so-called “supers”. Even small things like how Jack-Jack grows up or how Violet’s awkward life at school were things that I was thinking the sequel would lightly bring up.

Needless to say not only did The Incredibles 2 cover those little menial things, but it brings those little menial things front and center to the table. The film not only starts off seconds from where the first film left off, but it even begins with some exposition of a boy from Violet’s school who was supposed to go on a date with her but ended up witnessing the Underminer battle – and Violet as a Super.

THAT is the film’s starting exposition. That some poor chap gets his mind wiped and makes things awkward with Violet. The start of many episodic mishaps in this big blockbuster The Incredibles sequel.

You see the family in a motel room due to the aftermath of their home being wrecked in the first film. They’re dealing with aftermath things like paying the rent or trying to earn income or trying not to bring up touchy matters at the family table. You know, while being superheroes.

It all seemed unnecessary to dwell on such things at first. But at the same time, it felt very reasonable to how this story SHOULD have continued back then. There are even dedicated moments to Jack-Jack playing around with his powers – not unlike that short film that was packed with The Incredibles on DVD – and Mr. Incredible attempting to babysit or train him.

It sounds like a lot of random, non-blockbuster noteworthy narratives being compiled all at once just to reach the length of a feature film – and believe me when I say that this does generally feel like a complete season’s worth of an Incredibles TV show just with high cinematic production. So here’s the draw of The Incredibles 2: there IS indeed some major event happening in the film that advertising or commercials may not have properly detailed. Mainly about a company trying to make Supers legal in our society again and a supervillain complicating that. But in my eyes, this feels more like a half event. A bigger event sitting beside many, many smaller events that you would have liked to see, but the movie gives ample time to make them feel as important.

This is because the existence of Incredibles 2 is all about catching up. Not some major, untold story that needed to be shown to the public, but a logical progression of the story we knew more than a decade ago. Many sequels have a huge gap in universe time from its originals while some start off immediately where the original picked off, much like this one. The difference is that those sequels are things you saw in due time. Of course you’d know how those movie characters would be like within a year or two. If the film warrants enough wiggle room, then they’d be itching to let it continue and make it some yearly or bi-yearly event.

The difference here is that Incredibles 2 feels like a film that should have happened shortly after the first one, but its strange, sudden gap from 1 to 2 is what makes it so appealing. My comfort in seeing it is purely on the feeling of a reunion that this film’s unlikely release gives off. This story isn’t like coming home after having left it for several years and seeing how much has changed or has “got with the times”. It’s more akin to hearing from a friend who tells you a story that left you hanging all those years and only now seeing exactly where it picked up. It’s like witnessing family history or sharing memories. There were so many times watching it where I went “Oh yeah, that!” which I probably wouldn’t have felt if I knew this sequel was guaranteed to come in a year or two’s span.

So if you were thinking that this Incredibles follow up hasn’t caught up with the modern era or that it feels subdued or uneventful or dated, then all I can say is that you’re right. It is a lot of those things, the main event of this film when you do watch it is even concluded very shortly by the end.  Supers weren’t legal, they try to make them legal, BAM, they are now.

But I walked out of that theatre with my parents not thinking about how limited that one thing was, but just how there was so much to unpack from seeing it. Even if it does feel like TV with a bunch of episodic stories happening scene-by-scene, I can at least say it’s well-paced TV. If this actually was TV where a “Jack-Jack learning his powers” episode comes up next week and then a “Elastigirl starts her first serious work mission” episode happens next week, then I’d always know what mundane event in the Incredibles family to expect. I’d probably just watch it by myself in my room while my parents watch TV or do anything else separately.

That’s why the event of Incredibles 2 isn’t some societal change where Supers can live peacefully with regular humans, at least that isn’t what completely resonated with me. All I knew was that I was happy to see this family again as I somewhat remembered them, get some questions or possibilities for their family get answered and showcased, and overall just knowing that they’re naturally thriving in their unique universe. The event is purely on its welcome existence – and in my case the personal circumstances that really made me think fondly of this film. If I watched this with my usual friends and treated it like the next big Marvel visual spectacle event, then I would probably be disappointed. But in this opportunity where I got to find a pleasurable time to spend time with my parents in our busy schedules, seeing a film where a familiar family is shown again and you see just how their lives are doing, I couldn’t have asked for a better time to see a movie about catching up with the fam.