

0-rank cards can break any enemy attack but can be broken by any attack in turn. Each card has a number on it, 0-9, and higher numbers can break active enemy attacks, even if you’re not standing anywhere near them. The game only allows one attack in play at a time: yours or the enemy’s.

The cards aren’t just there to limit your actions. Unfortunately, items are one-use-per-combat, and if you want to restore your cards without them, Sora has to stand still to “charge” his special Reload Card, and he’ll have to charge even longer on subsequent draws. You can move through your deck at will, so maybe you’ll move to your magic cards to use some of Sora’s spells, or an item to refresh your deck. For example, the starting deck leads off with Keyblade cards, which cause Sora to take a swing. This deck is never shuffled, so you want to prepare it ahead of time for your tactics. Sora can move around freely, but if he wants to attack, he has to use his deck of cards. Basically, combat takes place in arenas after running into enemies on the overworld. The premise is incredibly hard to explain, and even the in-game tutorials are quite poor. Still, this idea set the stage, and the final game came into existence as a sort of real-time approach to card games. Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories began life as a turn-based, card battling game, though this premise didn’t survive the concept art phase. In Kingdom Hearts 2, he’s revealed to be the original researcher that the villain of Kingdom Hearts 1 usurped and impersonated, leading to the unwieldy practice of referring to the two by epithet. If Marluxia is Sora’s puppetmaster, DiZ is Riku’s. When he does get to be a character, it’s usually as a foil to Riku. Unfortunately, he suffers from the same narrative limitations as Donald and Goofy, with highly limited character growth. After they proved themselves, Square made him a regular character. King Mickey Mouse arguably doesn’t belong on a character list for the first game, since Disney only let Square use him in a single scene. Hasn’t had much screen time since, but recent entries seem to be ramping up to a big return. The lord of the castle, Marluxia is trying to guide Sora through the place for his own purposes. In the real world, it’s an open secret that Axel is just an alternate take of Reno from Final Fantasy VII, and is usually voiced by the same actor in each region. We soon learn he’s trying to play everyone against one another. Unlike the others, Axel seems to know Sora somehow. What really happened to her and how she ended up in the castle serves as the game’s central mystery.Ī member of the “Organization” that runs the castle. Even Mickey Mouse himself won’t be able to predict where he comes out.Īs Sora climbs the castle, he starts to remember a third friend from back on the islands, a girl who just… “disappeared,” one day. Once the campaign is complete, the game surprises by introducing a second campaign starring Riku, playable for the first time, as he tries to wipe out the darkness inside of him. This stranger leads him to the surreal Castle Oblivion, where the trio’s memory begins to trickle away, but with a strange promise that “to lose is to find”. The story would continue with Chain of Memories on the Gameboy Advance, which opens with a horribly compressed, pre-rendered, 3D animation, where Sora is a confronted by a figure in the same black cloak as the “Unknown” from Kingdom Hearts 1Final Mix. At the end of Kingdom Hearts, Sora finds himself stranded with Donald and Goofy.
