The Gameboy Advance was a pretty big part of my life growing up. Through those early years, I would collect tons of those stupid little plastic cartridges that can’t really be stored in any way besides a big stupid pile. But in that pile was one specific game. It was Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. And I liked it fine. I mean, it was alright. But I was busy playing the Fairly Oddparents game, plus I needed to get past Namek in my Dragon Ball Z game. So after playing a good couple hours of it, I put Chain of Memories down. But even though I never finished the game back then, something about it always stuck with me. In the back of my mind, it was always there. The game had an aura that I couldn’t parse. It made me uncomfortable. Up until that point, I had been a pretty content kid, not too complicated. I played games that were colorful and fun. But Chain of Memories was playing around with a feeling that I was only a few years away from discovering. And it was that feeling that kept me away from the game until much later in life. It was the loneliness.

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So I’m just gonna get this out of the way upfront; I think Chain of Memories is pretty good. The Gameboy Advance version’s just a little more interesting since the PS2 remake is just Chain of Memories in KH1 drag, but that one’s not bad either. The card system is pretty interesting, it’s got enough depth that you can put an actual build together. In some ways, it has way more of an RPG system than the mainline games. I know this title is sort of the black sheep in the franchise (and that is an extremely heavy title in this franchise) but I still find it pretty endearing. But that’s not what I’m going to be talking about. As fun as I think the gameplay is, I’m not here to talk about fun. I’m here to talk about the melancholic. The sort of numbing, creeping white sheen that coats the rest of this game. I’m here to talk about the sadness.

I’ve always thought there was something up with this game. Even back when it was released and I was barely used to pre-adolescence, I always felt it when I booted up Chain of Memories. At the end of the first game, Sora, Donald, and Goofy are just walking down this long, long, incredibly long path for seemingly no reason. Even with its uncanny length, the environments surrounding this road are idyllic: sunny Disney skies, full Disney grass, it looks like the perfect place to just set down and have a picnic. Chain of Memories picks up right after this scene. Same road, but a little less sunny. A mysterious figure appears to Sora and tells him that in order to preceded along his path, he’ll have to “lose something that is dear to you.” The group then suddenly stumbles upon this impossible-architecture castle; the Castle Oblivion. Seemingly popping up out of nowhere, there’s nothing right about it. The ground surrounding the path to the castle has fallen away into the void. The sky swirls unendingly in the distance, a gaping hole looking like an unsettling crown. This is something that should not be in this world.

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The gang enter and the interior is stark white, every nook and cranny with only accents of black shadow to break up the sterility. This isn’t a living space. Sanitized of life, this is the environment that Chain of Memories takes place in for the rest of its runtime. And this setting is the perfect place to tell the rest of Chain’s story. This is a place of isolation. After bumbling around for a bit, you realize that this castle holds recreations of worlds that you explored in the last game, with each floor containing one world. Upon entering your first world, you look around and realize that Donald and Goofy are gone as well. They can only be summoned briefly during battles, but are otherwise only present in the transitions between floors of the Castle and other miscellaneous cutscenes. And as the worlds are just recreations, the people that you meet are likewise only recreations. You run into old friends in each world that now have no idea who you are. Separated from your regular team and your connections to characters past, you press on through the castle’s floors. It just feels so insurmountably lonely.

I love having partners in games. No matter what game, I enjoy having someone there to share the adventure with. Even if they’re not that much help, just having them nearby adds camaraderie. When I was younger, I would construct emergent storylines between the characters for their battles. Goofy would launch headlong into battle, swinging his shield and getting the attention of most of the enemies, while I would flank around from the side and get ready for my strike. But the enemies would swarm Goofy and it would prove too much for him. In between calling lightning from the sky and launching fireballs, Donald would shout over the battle and revive his fallen comrade with a single spell. Then I would launch my flurry of strikes from my flanking position and take out the bulk of the group, leaving only the stragglers to be easily cleaned up. Even though this would only take up maybe fifteen seconds, these constant tiny storylines reinforced the bond that these characters shared. And in a way, it reinforced the bond that I shared with these characters. The sense that I was in this with other people. That I had friends along my journey.

Chain of Memories heads in the complete opposite direction. Not only do your friends not accompany you throughout the game, but they are ostensively reduced to a single move in your toolkit, just another function. Reliable, as always, but sterile as the rest of Castle Oblivion. This is only your story and you are the only one who can proceed it along. While in reality, this was always the case even in the previous game, the bandage is torn away here and you’re shown your path in stark clarity. This is only your journey. Only you have any sort of agency over it. This makes Chain of Memories an incredibly insular piece of media. It gives you room to think about what you’re doing without other people’s input. Why am I completing these worlds again? Why am I going through this game? Why do I care so much about Namine?

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There’s also another component to Chain of Memories’s loneliness; drifting away from friends. Self-isolation. Over the course of the game, Sora’s memory is being overwritten and slowly shifted. While he starts out the adventure wanting to get back to the real world and to his friends waiting for him there, he’s eventually drawn to obsession over finding and protecting Namine, a new character who is responsible for his memory loss. There are plot-related reasons why Sora cares about Namine out of nowhere now but separate from that, the idea of Namine is what’s important. From a thematic standpoint, the object of his obsession isn’t important, it is important that this is a character that Sora is head-over-heels hell-bent on getting to and that Donald and Goofy just don’t get it. They just don’t get it. They’ve been with you through thick and thin before, but they still can’t get in your headspace for this journey. From their point of view, this entire journey is pointless. They don’t know about this Namine girl. They don’t know what she means to you.

We were all been kids once. And most of us have had that first “one.” A pivotal aspect in plenty of people’s lives is when they find that “one,” that person that they’re just so intrigued by that they willingly give up other attachments. And this ties into one of Chain of Memories’ strongest themes: navigating adolescence. Over the course of the game, Sora becomes more enamored by Namine and more headstrong when it comes to getting to her, frequently ignoring Donald and Goofy’s warnings until it finally comes to a head and Sora leaves them behind and goes looking on his own. Sora willingly sacrifices his connections for a newer, more exciting one. And Donald and Goofy respond back with confusion, anger, but eventually, acceptance, vowing to support Sora no matter what. But this process is messy and it doesn’t resolve neatly, just as it oftentimes doesn’t in real life. Sometimes, that “one” is just what you needed, sometimes it’s not. And sometimes you end up burning bridges that you didn’t need to. This is just life. It’s sticky and no one has figured out the winning answer for it. Someone usually gets hurt, whether it’s your friends, your “one,” or you. But hopefully, you can still come back to what you’ve left behind and reconcile.

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Themes aside, the actual act of playing the game is also pretty disillusioning. You just go from floor to floor, rehashing old stories, each world equally useless in the grand scheme of the game. None of these worlds are truly “real,” so your actions in them end up feeling pretty worthless. The best that you can hope for at the end of one of these levels is a moral victory. Whenever you want to replay a world, you essentially reset it, erasing your previous progress, and really driving home how hollow these worlds are. They’re just to be used as tools, shifted around and discarded as easily as any other tool in your arsenal. The disconnected nature of the game is something that’s frequently brought up against the game as a negative, and while I admit that the game can get monotonous going from world to world with the only compelling bits of story happening between floors, I’d also argue that’s the intent. If Chain of Memories was trying to put you in the shoes of Sora, making you feel as aimless and lost as he does through most of the game, I’d say they succeeded.

As the game goes on, you, just like Sora, start to forget why you’re even continuing at all. You don’t get any answers or really any good reason to make your way through this castle for quite some time. A guy in a cloak says you need to go and you do. It feels inconsequential, like just something to do to pass the time. And we as the player go along with Sora on this adventure, for no real reason. We, the player, don’t really have an end goal. We go through the motions, we just do what we’re told. To touch back on a previous point, this is the life of an adolescent. School, chores, rules we follow, these are the things that we “need” to do, that we do every day. But every so often, we catch a glimpse of something just a little bit more exciting. We find something to keep us going. That “one.” Whether it’s a purpose or a person, that “one” is the thing that we fixate on and dominates our thoughts. No one who ever beat Chain of Memories ever won any cash prize afterward. But we still did it, some of us more happily than others. Some of us saw in Sora’s journey a little bit of ourselves. A lost, meandering odyssey but with that one compelling angle that he just needed to see through. And eventually, he does see it through. It turns out to not be what he thought it was, but it helps inform his values and what he thinks is important. And nothing speaks to the process of growing up like that. Following through on a plan only for it to not be totally what you want, just leaving you the memories. That’s life. And it’s beautiful. You may not always have total agency over your life, but you always have control over the lessons that you can learn.

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There isn’t much in this world that’s permanent. And there isn’t a way to make other people see the world exactly as you see it. You can never communicate every sight that you see or the way it makes you feel. In a certain sense, no matter who you’re surrounded by, you’re always isolated in your own unique world. And there’s a certain amount of loneliness that comes with trying to make sense of a world that only you see. I can’t speak for anyone besides me when I talk about the way that Chain of Memories makes me feel. Or the time in my life when I played it and felt those feelings. I was a young kid, and I was experiencing complex thoughts that I wasn’t ready to deal with. It made me very insular. It made me feel like I was the only one. And it’s funny to me that Chain of Memories has such a strong read for me today since when I first experienced it as a kid, I didn’t pick up any of this. Just an overall sense of unease and disappointment that I couldn’t play with my friends. I never finished it back then, but I wish I had. Because there was a resolution to the loneliness in Chain of Memories. There was hope and acceptance at the end. Hope that things would be better and acceptance of what had been. Eventually, I was ready to emerge out of my own loneliness but it took a bit longer than the 20-ish hours that it takes to beat Chain. And as it is, I’m doing ok. Things are good, the world is good, and the people in it are generally good. And now that world of isolation is just a place that I can visit, not stay.