Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory : The Short, short version
Kingdom Hearts is a super popular series, but also has up until recently been an incredibly hard one to keep up with, and not just because the series has had so many twists and turns it makes Hideo Kojima games seem easy to follow. It’s been going for eighteen(!) years, across various platforms with games jumping back and forth all over the timeline. And they matter, they all matter. The side games, the mobile games, there’s probably some obscure pachinko machine in one casino in Japan bearing the Kingdom Hearts moniker that’ll be key to the plot of Kingdom Hearts 5 when it comes out in 2040.
This has been mostly remedied by the Kingdom Hearts: All in One collection which contains literally every console release to date, but that’s also a hell of a time investment, you’re talking dozens of hours across over half a dozen games (and also a couple were turned into badly edited boring movies for some reason).
So for any fan who wants to has an idea of where the Kingdom Hearts series has been and a small hint of where it’s going next but in a much more compact fashion, Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory is a pretty good (albeit it far more expensive because it’s a new $60 game vs. a collection of games for $20) option. It also emphasizes one of the series core strengths, the amazing music.
Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory has you timing button presses to rhythms of tracks from various stages from games in the series. It’s not all the songs, and there are some weird omissions (not one stage for any of the theme songs of the three main titles?) but it’s a good sampling of the original music with a few well-known Disney hits thrown in for good measure (though again, not as many as you’d think and only “Let It Go” from Frozen/Kingdom Hearts III even has lyrics).
Every few stages you’ll get a cut scene that’s basically a recap of a game in the series narrated by Kairi. But that is essentially all there is to Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory for better or worse. It’s great in that it’s not agonizingly long (took me a little over ten hours to finish) and there are plenty of challenge “stars” (specific achievements for each level) for those who want to indulge in mastering these tracks, and while you have to get some of these to progress, the game is mostly very lenient. Some stars are harder than others and in fact, require playing a stage multiple times to achieve. But to just get enough to merely finish the game you have to do a pretty minimal amount.
This is both good and bad in that it just feels like there’s a lot of potential unexplored in some aspects of the game. Levels and items mean virtually nothing, you can unlock different teams but they don’t have different abilities so it’s merely cosmetic. It wouldn’t have been out less than two years after Kingdom Hearts III, but it’s not hard to imagine a version of Melody of Memory where item use is encouraged more, guest characters mean more, you can unlock skills to use and all this leads to more varied ways to get the stars you need to proceed in the game, it would certainly make the price point seem more valid.
Is Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory a necessary purchase for Kingdom Hearts fans? I mean in all honesty the little bit (and it doesn’t occur till the end of the game of course) that teases what’s next for the series will likely be recapped in the next proper series game, but it’s also been heavily hinted (not surprisingly) that we may be waiting a long time for the next entry so if you need a new Kingdom Hearts fix asap Melody of Memory will likely fit the bill and is a good time. However, if you can wait for a sale on what essentially is a musically-inclined recap of the series to date, I’d probably do that especially since we’ve had a pretty big glut of game releases in the last week or two.
That’s all for today, but I’ve got lots of fun ideas for the near future especially since I have secured a PlayStation 5 (but can’t pick it up til Saturday) so see ya real soon!
