An endless staircase, a deck of cards, and Sora climbing back through his own memories on a handheld.

On gut instinct, the community is harsh: Chain of Memories only edges out about one game in eight. And the criterion breakdown partly explains why. Controller feel sits at the bottom, ahead of barely 8% of titles, art direction does not do much better, and almost nobody dreams of experiencing it fresh again. Then one line breaks rank, and not by a little: the soundtrack, ahead of 93% of games. Yoko Shimomura's music survives the hardware, the memory, everything. Attachment, meanwhile, climbs back to dead average, on few votes. This is a game people love not for what it does, but for what it tells and what it sings.

The card system remains the most divisive experiment in the saga. Taking the action-RPG of Kingdom Hearts and turning it into a deck on Game Boy Advance was bold, and it never won everyone over. Those who clicked with it call it one of the best stories in the series. The others simply put the console down.

So, who is it for? For you if you follow Kingdom Hearts for the story, the melancholy and the music, and you can accept a strange system. Much less if you came for the pure controller comfort of a real action-RPG.