The only real new track is a new jazzy arrangement of ‘Dearly Beloved’, which serves as Melody of Memory’s theme – and it’s really great! More of that would have gone a long way, for me at least, in holding my interest throughout the campaign. While there are a small number of inclusions from other piano and symphonic releases, I do think that including more re-arrangements or re-orchestrations would provide a bit more of a reason to advance and play on. While there is a large volume of tracks on offer, they are beat for beat the same tracks you remember, orchestrated in the exact same way. Your enjoyment will largely depend, I suspect, on your fondness and nostalgia for the Kingdom Hearts library of music. You can run through levels as one of four ‘teams’ of characters, including Sora’s group, Roxas’ friends, the Birth By Sleep gang and bizarrely, Riku and two random Dream Eaters from Dream Drop Distance, who just confuse gameplay by blending in with the bad guys you’re meant to be hitting. You’re really just focused on beating down on enemies and your own health. While the rhythm on certain tracks can be quite well-matched, in general your actions feel a bit removed from the music itself – you’re not splicing in instruments like, say, Amplitude or Rock Band, and the music won’t play any worse if you don’t perform well. It kind of works, but if you’re playing on anything other than Proud difficulty, it feels insanely easy, especially if you’re accustomed to rhythm games. Most attacks can be performed with (on PS4) X, L1 or R1, with occasionally a jump and glide with O required, or a spell with △. Your party of characters runs along a sheet music highway, where you have to hit enemies in time with the music. The actual rhythm gameplay is fairly simplistic, trying to mesh Kingdom Hearts’ action gameplay with rhythm timing. Earning EXP in tracks levels up your characters and also nets you bonus items you can use to heal yourself during songs, or components to synthesise more songs (like actual Disney tracks like ‘The Circle of Life’). You can fly your little Gummi ship between worlds to tackle their songs, unlocking more worlds as you collect achievement stars, progressing from the first Kingdom Hearts game to the latest, in what becomes the biggest Kingdom Hearts world map I’ve ever seen. The main way you’ll experience these tracks is through the ‘World Tour’ mode, which sets them out in much the same way as a world map from any of the Kingdom Hearts games. I have to assume there’s licensing and legal issues behind their absence. There’s also no ‘Face My Fears ‘, the headline track from Kingdom Hearts III by Hikaru Utada and Skrillex. However, there are notable omissions, like the lack of any tracks from the Pirates of the Caribbean or Winnie the Pooh worlds. Most of the tracks are field and battle music from the many worlds across each of these games, from Traverse Town to Olympus Coliseum to The World That Never Was. There’s a pretty staggering number of over 140 tracks in Melody of Memory, drawing from all the major entries in the franchise: Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts II, Kingdom Hearts III, Kingdom Hearts re:Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, Kingdom Hearts re:Coded, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance and Kingdom Hearts 0.2: A Fragmentary Passage. Transplanting rhythm game fun onto the action-RPG series, Melody of Memory is a cute walk through memory lane for Kingdom Hearts mega-fans. That’s a lot of Kingdom Hearts, and the latest game, Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory on PS4, Xbox One and Switch, is intended to be a celebration of everything up to this point, by focusing on the series’ memorable music, composed by game-music maestro, the legendary Yoko Shimomura (among others). As long as there are stars in the sky, and long soliloquies to be made about the eternal struggle between light and darkness – there will be Kingdom Hearts. The series, which crosses the worlds of Disney with Final Fantasy and has been going now for almost two decades, has so many games, side-stories, prequels and spin-offs that the recent so-called Kingdom Hearts III was actually the twelfth installment in the franchise.
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