I am considering this a separate game from Sora's story because, well, it just feels appropriate I think. Hopefully nobody audits me. The remake of Sora's story was markedly worse than the original primarily because of the shift to 3D environments, the mechanics were basically unchanged aside from this. The remake of Riku's story is markedly worse than that!
Let me back up for a second. Chain of Memories is a deckbuilder. A fairly shallow one but still, you're putting some thought into the cards that make up your deck. Reverse/Rebirth, in which you play as Riku, boldly decides to remove all of the deckbuilding elements from the deckbuilder game in favor of assigning you different pre-made immutable decks for each world. Riku can't cast magic and only receives an Item card once, so your decks end up being nothing but a slew of identical Attack cards. The game is so unprepared for the bulk of its mechanics getting removed that boosting your Attack Power becomes one of your level-up options, something that was simply tied to Sora's level in his game. Instead Riku's big gimmick is his Dark Mode, which he enters by repeatedly breaking enemy cards. Dark Mode allows Riku to hit harder, double-jump, and use sleights, but since Riku has no means of reloading discarded cards and his decks often have a relatively low number of cards to begin with, using sleights is a bit disincentivized I think. In addition, the card that actually triggers Dark Mode is automatically eaten with no effect, which can be incredibly annoying! Again, Riku never receives any magic cards, so his only means of healing in battle (besides a mediocre one-use Boss card halfway through the game), is the somewhat randomly spawning Mickey cards. If you accidentally break an enemy card and enter Dark Mode, especially easy to do if you're trying to use Mickey's sleights, then sorry, no healing for you. Entering Dark Mode does instantly reload your deck for you for a fresh offense, which is kinda nice, but this counts as a reload as far as enemy card effects are concerned, so once again Riku can find himself getting screwed over by his inner darkness. This is thematically appropriate, harnessing the darkness should feel dangerous, but in-game it just means more feel-bad mechanics for the pile in a game full of them. Riku also can reload his deck with no charge time and all boss cards he earns are included in all of his decks, though the tradeoff for the latter boon is that he is unable to earn his own regular enemy cards at all.
These issues are all present in the original version of Chain of Memories. The remake, in recognizing that Reverse/Rebirth is rather flawed, decided to try and fix things with a couple new mechanics for Riku: Rapid Break and Dueling. Rapid Break is just, breaking an enemy's card really quickly in exchange for more DP for Dark Mode. It's essentially a reward for mindless button mashing. Dueling occurs when you play a card of the same number as an enemy, prompting you to enter a speed battle to break a large number of the enemy's cards under a time limit. Succeed and Riku performs a unique sleight for free. There are no consequences for picking a bad card during a duel, only for running out of time, so it's essentially a reward for mindless button mashing. I cannot really understate how much the dueling mechanic completely trivializes every boss fight. Once I realized you can just button mash it was kind of astonishing how braindead these battles became, and it really highlights what a poor bandaid these new mechanics are for how underbaked Reverse/Rebirth is. Now to be fair, Sora has plenty of his own ways to curbstomp bosses, but you still have to learn those sleights and acquire the needed cards and build a deck around them. With Riku, it's just a matter of starting a duel and then mashing X. It's lame!
I think one big reason this game stings so much is because I really like Riku as a character. I always tend to favor the flawed rival characters over their more agreeable protagonist counterparts, and Riku's story of accepting his affinity for darkness, that his friends have already forgiven him for his mistakes, and that they'll always support him, is overall more competently told than Sora's muddled memory loss tour, despite the lackluster dub. There's a particularly touching scene at the end of the game where Riku is about to head into his final reckoning with Ansem and turns to Mickey to do the old "please put me down if I succumb to the bad" routine, but Mickey interrupts him and happily says "Of course I'll help ya!" Riku's like "No no no that's not what I'm asking, I'm saying I want you to-" only for Mickey to cheerfully cut him off again and make it absolutely clear to Riku that he's not alone anymore. You don't get much of Mickey compared to the other Disney characters in the series but he and Donald and Goofy are such delightful party members. Even if I'm not very big on Disney in the year 2025, those three are undeniably excellent RPG characters.
Game Number: 11
Year Played: 2025
Platform: PS4