Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories is a return to the scene of the crime, shortly after the ending of the first Kingdom Hearts game for the PS2 and before the upcoming sequel (Kingdom Hearts II). Once again players don the lead role of Sora (who is still desperately searching for Riku) with Donald and Goofy still on the hunt for Mickey. Stumbling upon a foreboding castle called Oblivion, players find themselves once again returning to many of the locations from the first game, battling familiar bosses and among other things - collecting cards. Chain of Memories is a pretty solid action RPG which throws in quite a bit of card collecting amongst the button mashing and jumping, with positive results, making the action a bit more flavored and strategic. We'll get into the minutiae of it all in a moment, but for the most part, this GBA Kingdom Hearts title is a pretty nifty game offering a lot of the flavor that made the first game so ultra popular, along with some new elements to differentiate it from its predecessor and the pending PS2 sequel. Read on and learn more.

As we already mentioned puts a heavy emphasis on card based combat and card collecting. Basically players collect different kinds of cards to unlock areas on the map and for combat. At the beginning of this adventure Goofy and Donald find themselves transformed into cards which Sora ultimately can use in battle. Other Disney and Square-Enix stars also are represented as cards in the game which make for some wonderful special attacks.

Besides the vanilla key cards of varying power (these are you garden variety "basic" attacks) and specialty cards featuring Disney's finest, players can also collect special magic cards (like Blizzard, as an example) that can be used. Players have access to these decks in battle by cycling through various decks and can use three in concert to apply even more powerful attacks against enemies. Players can be more strategic (in a quick way because combat is in real-time) by selecting cards and using them or they can opt to simply button mash until their decks run out.

Jumping is also part of the combat mix, as well as special moves players can learn during the level up phase of the game. No matter what you use or how you use it, players will ultimately beat tons of enemies that reproduce on the world map in droves and collect the experience points they drop and leveling up. To further explore the worlds, players must unlock world cards which are in turn used to unlock doors. That's the gist of the gameplay in Chain of Memories and while the leveling up portion of the game is also interesting, it really isn't all that complex ?players can up their hit points and learn new and powerful sleights as they move ahead.

Players that loved Kingdom Hearts will likely enjoy this game considering the fact that it offers the same charming characters from the Disney and Square Enix universes, respectively. The storyline is interesting, the concept explaining the world is as plausible as an RPG story can be and the cut scenes are well done. The game is also geared towards fans that never played the first game as well and the story is light enough so players can easily not know much about Sora's first adventures and yet still enjoy the cavalcade of familiar Disney faces and the new storyline

As in the first game, players explore Disney themed lands, team up with Disney's finest characters and take out some of Disney most vile bad guys and gals to jump ahead to the next areas. The areas you go into are mostly non-linear, allowing players to take on locales that they might not necessarily be ready for ?at least in the first parts of the game. No matter, because whether or not you're ready you can sally forth and give it a go anyway ?and that's a very important thing.

It should be noted that, in spite of this being a Game Boy Advance game, Chain of Memories is a visually appealing game. The developers did a good job of capturing the flavor of the first game b y adding a lot of window dressing. Characters look like who they are supposed to be representing (that sounds like an obvious point, but there are plenty of licensed videogame properties that offend don't that off), special affects are simple but visually appealing and enemies are detailed and fully animated. Chain of Memories is also smart, but also simple enough that adults and kids should be comfortable picking up and playing in a short amount of time.

So if you were a big fan of Kingdom Hearts and are looking forward to Kingdom Hearts 2, then you probably will find yourself entertained with Chain of Memories. The combat can be a bit repetitive after a sustained amount of play time, but the decent story, characters and card collecting aspects more than make up for it.