Originally posted by PsionicDiamond:

Does anyone know how long roughly this game is?
I'm struggling to grasp the whole card system and honestly... I just hate it.
I'm just dragging myself along but I want it to be over asap

If anyone can provide a tip or something that'll make it more bearable let me know :)

Sleights are your friend, Sonic Blade and Lethal Frame are extremely solid. Early on, just using groups of 3 cards at once helps a lot on bosses until you can make your deck better.
If you still find the experience frustrating, I usually just recommend looking up a cutscene movie for it in that case.
COM's gameplay is pretty divisive and it's not uncommon for people to just skip it and usually watch a movie for it.

game was pretty short, took me like 24 hours of game time for sora's side and Riku's side is supposed to be like 1/4 of that.

I 100% archivment RE:CON and well lets just say the base game is very short but the gameplay is boring for me and grinding the max level is very annoying since you only have to rely on 3 at most slights for soras side which makes every fight a copy paste.
The slights are: Tornade, Mega Flare and Holy for mobs and for bosses esp the last one Mega Flare and Lethal Frame + Sonic blade so yeah you get the idea on how dull the game is - tbh the gba version is much more fun since the game was meant to be played on 2D and is just an awefull port to 3D battle system.

Enemy card farming without the rng minipulator (which can be found via youtube) is just hell on earth

Rikus story is short very short but since he starts with his own deck that you cant edit the last few bosses are a pain in the bumm on proud mode.

I never play chain of memories again, kh 1 and 2 are games I gladly come back to but that one is a big no for me

also make sure you watch every chapter in 358/2 days (you can skip them all after you hit the play button) for extra cards in chain of memory

if you just want to know whats going on in the story of chain of memorys you can also just watch the whole stuff on youtube aswell.

I appreciate the tips guys, but this game is actually so bad I'm probably going to skip it.
It's just constant 'card breaks' and I find it all too confusing... I don't understand why they went with this direction, but I hope there's no other ones like this in the series

If you do end up continuing, good tips are


Set up your deck well so you don't have to search for cards and can mostly just spam your loadout with triangle

Use roulette rooms to farm 0 and high numbered cards, moogle shop, chests, zzz rooms (just make sure to keep at least 1 roulette card so you can go to another one)

Getting good cards from moogle shops is really helpful early on, and each shop gives you free 5 attack cards

Put heal cards at the back of your deck for easy access (if you want to make sure they're not broken and can be reloaded, use any card + 2 heals with 3x triangle)

To avoid enemies breaking your cards, and to break any enemy cards, use triangle 3x, if the numbers add up to 10 or over then the enemy can't break them without a 0 card, and even if they add up to only about 6 or 7, they're unlikely to break them. may have to grind a little bit at the beginning so you can use more cards but shouldn't take too long.

for bosses if you don't have enough cards to use triangle too much (since triangle makes the 1st card become unreloadable for the battle), just wait for the boss to use their card and break it with a regular X button high numbered attack card

Stacking multiple cards (even if it is just two fire cards) is a massive difference in damage. Early on you can stack two fires or two blizzards together to make fira or blizzara and it helps a lot with the early game. When leveling, choose sleights whenever possible and then raise your CP higher in the early game to help you get a solid deck faster. Once the sleight system clicks, you'll be smooth sailing from there.

You’ll need to look up the story at least, cause it’s important.

But it’s not that complicated. Pick cards with a higher number than your opponent to break them. Then use the overpowered sleights.

Sonic Blade is broken and very easy to set up

They make it sound more complex then it really is in game.

Just make a deck with all fire and blizzard high numbered card, they just destroy the game by itself if you constantly use them a a sleight to make firaga and blizzaga

Generally speaking, in Chain of Memories you want to pick a sleight and build your deck around spamming that sleight. Most enemies, including bosses, quite simply can't interrupt sleights (except low-value ones like Ars Arcanaum) and they universally do MUCH more damage than their component cards.

For example, say you want to build around Lethal Frame. Once it's unlocked, the sleight requires a Stop card and any two keyblade cards. So what you do is set up your deck in exactly that pattern, one stop card followed by two keyblade cards, repeated for as many stops and CP as you have. So long as each card is value 3 or higher, the total sleight ends up being 9 and is unbreakable by anything but a zero card, which enemies rarely have at their disposal. And because the Stop card ends up removed after your first reload for being used in the sleight, you can then line up a keyblade-only sleight with the leftovers like Sonic Blade.

That's basically how Chain of Memories works. You build decks in anticipation of spamming a desired sleight over and over again, thereby not even participating in the whole value game it tries to impress on you in the tutorial. It is possible to build a deck that merely spams normal attacks and plays similarly to KH1, but is unreasonably expensive as you'd want every card in your deck to be value 7 or higher. Which means spending a lot of time farming moogle points and frequent reloads because of a necessarily tiny deck with expensive CP costs.

Oh yeah, forgot magic cards were op so you can set up a lot of those and or sleights, like they said

Yeah... COM is a card game it's ok, the story is nice

Originally posted by PsionicDiamond:

I appreciate the tips guys, but this game is actually so bad I'm probably going to skip it.
It's just constant 'card breaks' and I find it all too confusing... I don't understand why they went with this direction, but I hope there's no other ones like this in the series

if you're getting constant card breaks they're either playing a higher number card (2 beats 1, 3 beats 2 and so on) or theyre playing a 0 card (0 breaks all cards but can also be broken by any card) I get it though. Its one of those titles you either jive with it or you don't. I enjoyed it myself but i didn't like Dream Drop. Can't stand flomotion personally. To each their own and sorry to hear you didn't enjoy it

it's like 30 hours in total. sora's story took me like 25 and riku's took about 6-7. his is a lotttttt faster but yeah the game is just eh. it's cool how it's a different system and forces you to change your deck to adapt and win but besides that it was a slog. i will say it makes bosses easier cause the same bosses who had unstoppable moves in KH1 can be stopped now as long as you have a higher value in cards. i just finished the other day, watched the 358/2 days cutscenes in 2x speed on youtube and just now finally reached KH2(one of the greatest games of all time). just don't burn yourself out. if you're getting annoyed just step away for a day or two, the game isn't going anywhere

For casual, and I've beaten this game twice now, it's about 20 hours for Sora, 5-ish for Riku (you can just brute force it and just watch all the cutscenes). It isn't hard when you figure out that sleight abuse is pretty much the way to go, then it's not really a chore anymore. I do enjoy this game, but I get a lot of people just don't because it's different than the rest of the series.

If you go for all achievements in Re:CoM, that's a totally different story and don't recommend unless you're an avid achievement collector like I am.

(Basically if you want to grind for like 10 or 12 hours in total, this is your game to 100% achievement on)

If you REALLY know what you're doing, you can 100% Sora's story in like 25-30 hours.

Riku's in like 10-15.

But keep in mind that when I say "know what you're doing" I'm talking some TAS level "manipulate the game's RNG to force drop enemy cards" shenanigans.