Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory Review: Groove is in the Heart

"Just one more level.", is what I keep telling myself. "One more" is one of Data Riku's taunts in Kingdom Hearts III's DLC. After he says it, he attacks you dozens of times with savage ferocity. "One more" is just as false when I say it to myself. "One" easily becomes "five" or "ten" more. Until eventually it means "lose entire days and nights to level after level". While sketching out this review, I wrote that first sentence, then figured I should take another look at the game. Before I knew it, two hours had passed. Then three days. So if my review of Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory is late, it is because of Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory.

Melody of Memory came out just a few days after the launch of the glorious new Xbox and PlayStation consoles. If you are looking for a game to prove the value of your expensive hyper-modern hardware, this is not it. It is a small rhythm game dressed up in the skin and assets of the Kingdom Hearts series. You won't need 4K or HDR or Ray Tracing. 

In fact, I would not buy this game on a home console at all. Melody of Memory is a game built for mobile. It would have been great on phones. If any genre is perfect for a relaxing ten-minute shit break at the office, rhythm games are it. Luckily, Melody of Memory is on the Nintendo Switch. You will not find here the next revolution in gaming. But you may find an unhealthy addiction that somehow justifies the game's slightness.

Melody of Memory has to be the least impressive Kingdom Hearts game that Square Enix has ever charged a full price for. At $60 - plus tax - the value is hard to justify. You get a ten hour campaign with about a half hour of new story content. Digging deeper to unlock your mastery of these melodies might grant you as much as 30 hours of playtime. In terms of pure consumer advise, you can spend that same money and get ten thousand hours of Ubisoft content instead. And that stuff might look a lot better on the new gargantuan TV your gaming hobby now demands of you. Ten years ago, Birth by Sleep was half this game's price and was a full Kingdom Hearts experience, not just a vague impression of one. Games are more expensive now. Even smaller filler titles like Melody of Memory are investments I suggest you make in caution.

My critic brain keeps finding any number of issues with this product. My hands, however, cannot put it down. In fact, literally after writing that last sentence, I walked over to my Switch and played another level. I just unlocked "Don't Think Twice", the Kingdom Hearts III theme song and really need to try that out. Give me a second... I'll get back to you... Just hold on...

Much like how the game Theatrythm was built around the rich musical traditional of Final Fantasy, Melody of Memory does the same thing for Kingdom Hearts. There is not enough praise in the world for Yoko Shimomura's work on this series. The franchise would be half as good if it were not for her dramatic and whimsical compositions. She managed to bridge the gap between JRPG melodrama and bubbly Disney cartoons in a brilliant way. Her score adds a serious depth and air of disturbing mystery to the otherwise simplistic nonsense that make up the adventures of Sora and his friends. She created a very distinct Kingdom Hearts style that can be appreciated and even replicated.

I should mention that Shimomura did not write all the music in Kingdom Hearts. She did not work on any of the Utada Hikaru pop songs that make up the series' main themes. Those are also just as central to the identity of this universe. There is a slice of humanity whose hair stands up on end whenever they hear the guitar rifts of "Sanctuary". All the music in this series deserves celebration. And maybe $60 is steep for a glorified juke box with a button press minigame on top of it. However, if you're even thinking that, you clearly have never sung "Simple and Clean" on a Karaoke Night. Your life is lesser for it. 

In terms of gameplay, Melody of Memory has the Kingdom Hearts tracks, but not the Kingdom Hearts experience. It looks like Kingdom Hearts, but it does not play like them. Part of me really wishes they had done more to fuse together rhythm elements into an action RPG. If Crypt of the Necrodancer could add a dance beat to a dungeon crawling Rogue Lite, you can add a dance beat to anything.

But, Melody of Memory isn't that. The Kingdom Hearts bits are entirely decoration. They're an overlay to just hitting buttons at the right time. In theory every song is a "battle", where you see Sora, Donald, and Goofy running down a path slaying Heartless. But our heroes are really the strings in Guitar Hero and the bad guys are notes. The most variety comes in with the rare times you hit a different button to cast Thundaga or the even rarer times Sora needs to jump or glide.

There are Kingdom Hearts-style menus. But the only customization options you will find are whether its Sora running down the sheet music or Roxas or Ventus or Riku. Melody of Memory claims to give you EXP and levels. However, as far as I can tell, those stats do absolutely nothing at all. HP is the only stat that could possibly matter. Every missed note has a small HP cost. So play the song well or SORA FUCKING DIES. Maybe with maxed stats Sora can survive a few more extra misses. Otherwise the only other thing the menus do is let you buy more bonus songs. You purchase tunes with the only surviving RPG mechanic: item crafting. 

That's everybody's favorite part of Kingdom Hearts, right? The crafting? Right?

However, while the Kingdom Hearts combat is entirely just visual, it does make for a good background for the songs. As a rhythm game, Melody of Memory is really solid. Yoko Shimomura's tracks are slamming. You may not get every single song in the OST, but you get every piece you could ask for. There are quite a few songs I was surprised to rediscover. The Three Musketeers battle music from Dream Drop Distance is some seriously rockin' shit, dude.

The collection of songs in Melody of Memory has some solid highlights. It even has "Circle of Life" from The Lion King, which has not been in any Kingdom Hearts game before this. You want to kill Heartless to "One-Winged Angel"? You can. The quality on this game's recording of "Part of Your World" is terrible. There's a huge echo on Princess Ariel's voice, which bugs the fuck out of me. But the song is here for you to enjoy with Sora floating over it nevertheless. You won't get any Tarzan songs sadly due to stupid copyright reasons. Fuck you, greedy estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs, I wanted to kill Heartless to "You'll Be in my Heart". And fuck you, Disney, for being cheap on this one.

Anyway, for a game this simple, there is a vast depth of skill here to acquire. On Beginner setting Melody of Memory is pathetically easy and way too slow. Standard is what I recommend for getting started. I'd play the whole campaign on Standard. That way the game eases you into its tricks. On Proud you are wading chest-deep in rivers of Heartless. You got swarms of notes pouring in faster than your brain can handle. 

At first this tidal wave of music simply blew me away and Sora died instantly. But after a week of fiddling with this thing, I've reached a kind of zen one-ness with the game. Maybe I have not yet hit Super Saiyan levels, but I can at least follow the action. I'm nearly there. I actually find the faster difficulties easier now, because it more closely matches the tempo of Shimomura's music. Melody of Memory can be a vast ocean of challenge, and its on deepest, most dangerous depths, it is a rewarding instrument to play.

I never thought "Simple and Clean" would ever kick my ass before playing this game. That song is really long, by the way, so I recommend you do not miss. 

I do find one thing confusing about this system, however. You have three options for the regular attacks. You can press A (or X on PS4, which is weird because attack is traditionally Square in this series). Or you can press any of the shoulder buttons. That means five buttons exist that all perform the same task. I naturally assumed it would be more like Guitar Hero with Sora, Donald, and Goofy each belonging to a certain "string". That is not the case at all. Any button can work for any character. You do need to press two or three at once for linked notes, however. I find that alternating shoulder buttons better keeps you in rhythm. Weirdly, there is also no penalty for hitting buttons when there is no prompt. So if you are way too early, you can still hit the note and be fine.

There's also two alternate gameplay modes. Or really, one other alternate mode. It just is presented with the notes coming from either the left or from the top of the screen. This is used for what the game calls "boss fights", which are the same as any other level but just the notes fly in front of a video of Kingdom Hearts combat. This mode also is used for "Memory Dives" where you'll play notes while some FMVs plays in the background. So if you want to ruin Frozen's "Let It Go" by throwing some bleeps and bloops over it, here you go.

I should mention the one monumentally stupid oversight. Melody of Memory has a one-button mode - which is a great option for accessibility. It is nice that games are this forward thinking now. But the one-button mode does not work in the story campaign, it is only an option on the main menu track list. In order to unlock any songs on that main menu, you need to beat them in the story mode. So if you needed that one-button mode, Melody of Memory is totally unplayable.

This is the kind of issue that makes my personal grievances: like how "Twister" from The World Ends with You is missing, seem like a small mistake. I also really wish there was an option to play with the touch pad, but no such luck.

Importantly, Melody of Memory is much, much better game than the boring Kingdom Hearts II Atlantica minigame. And its infinitely better than the god-fucking-awful ice cream rhythm game from Birth by Sleep. This series has real bad history with rhythm games, Melody of Memory redeems it all.

None of this is particularly heroic or innovative gameplay. This whole experience could have been a minigame in a Kingdom Hearts IV, I guess. Melody of Memory is a very simple idea made out of mostly reused assets made very well. This collection of old parts that were put together in a handsome way. If we had to have a cheap cash-in game, this is a perfectly fine one. Plus, it is 2020. I'd rather play games that did not kill their developers versus the late-capitalism labor nightmares that are things like The Last of Us 2 or Cyberpunk 2077.

Even in terms of story, Melody of Memory is thin. Usually Kingdom Hearts explains away its gonzo gameplay experiments with long baroque story explanations. Chain of Memories took like an hour to justify why you had to fight with cards now. Melody of Memory does no such thing. Sora does not, say, fall into the Castle of Rhythm and he is not confronted by a mysterious dude in a black coat calling himself "The Lord of the Dance". In fact, there is no story at all for most of the game. You start immediately playing tracks while Sora fights Heartless with no context. It is so abstract you might think there is no story at all.

It is not until you are some way into Melody of Memory that you get even the vaguest justification for what is going on. Sora's longtime crush, Kairi will narrate a recap of all the games up to Kingdom Hearts III. Turns out we are diving into her memories, which is why the entire game is a sped-up replay of the worlds of the other games. However, nobody explains why this is playing out as a rhythm minigame. Maybe Kairi has music in her soul and needs to dance it out. It happens to all of us sometimes.

Worse, this is as close as we have ever gotten to Kairi starring in her own Kingdom Hearts game. She's the third most important character in this franchise and she has been playable for all of five minutes in one DLC. Even after ten hours in her mind, we learn absolutely nothing about her as a character. Her POV gives us no new perspective on the events. She's not even playable besides two songs at the end of the game, as she once again defers and lets Sora be the star. The story even concludes on a promise of another adventure - but Kairi is not invited! We started 2020 out with Kairi defeating Master Xehanort in the new climax of Kingdom Hearts III Re:Mind. Now we end the year with this poor character getting done as dirty as she ever has been. Such a shame.

Sorry, I have a lot of problems with the way Kairi has been treated in this series.

Melody of Memory does not deserve to be saddled with that baggage. Because this is not an important game. It is just something you pick up and are shocked by how addicting it is. And that is all it had to be. I hate defaulting to saying a game is "just fun". "Fun" is too subjective a statement to mean anything. All games are fun to somebody. What about Melody of Memory is interesting beyond that? Not a whole lot. Why am I even reviewing it? Because I've reviewed every (non-mobile) Kingdom Hearts game since 2010 and I have a tradition to uphold. Plus, maybe there is something to respect out of a game with very low ambitions that can pull them off artfully and impressively.

So maybe we have not learned all that much in this exercise. Please, excuse me, I need to play out "Vector to the Heavens" on Proud. I must honor Xion by playing her theme perfectly.