Before we begin, I just want to give a bit of a PSA: if you're planning on picking up Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory solely for the story, don't. Like other spin-offs in the series, this game's story is canon, but there's so little of it that you're better off skipping it. I'll get more into the story and its impact on the series as a whole a little later on, but for now, just know that this is an experience for rhythm game fans first and Kingdom Hearts fanatics second.

Kingdom Hearts has had a special place in my heart for close to two decades now, and that's due in no small part to its music. Longtime series composer Yoko Shimomura, to me, stands at the absolute top of her field, with compositions ranging from whimsical romps through a fantasy land to powerful, emotional pieces that tug at the heartstrings. Her music has masterfully set the tone of the series since day one, so it's no surprise that Square Enix went and made a game about it. If anything, it's a surprise it's taken so long. 

Melody of Memories is somewhat of a spiritual successor to the short-lived Theatrhythm series. Where that series took a side scrolling approach to mixing combat with rhythm action, Melody of Memories takes that concept and translates it to 3D. For the most part, it's a reasonably successful transition, and given the Theatrhythm concept was incredibly solid to begin with, the result is a game that well surpassed my (admittedly low) expectations. 

Like Theatrhythm, Melody of Memory's main game mode has your characters placed along an on-rails track, on which enemies will cascade towards you in time with the rhythm and beat. Hit those enemies at just the right time, and you'll defeat them and start racking up combos and points. If you don't hit them, your health — along with your precious combos and points — starts to disappear. If you miss enough of them, and lose all your HP, you'll die, and have to start the song from the beginning again. It's a suitable enough gameplay loop, really, and while it doesn't feel particularly Kingdom Hearts-y in its implementation, it gets the job done for a rhythm game. 

Thankfully, there are interesting additions that mix up the formula throughout the game's playtime. Beyond just whacking enemies, you'll also have to jump, dodge, and cast spells and abilities, and having three "lanes" of characters and enemies to worry about — often requiring simultaneous attacks that force you to think about your button presses. The game's boss fights, while rare in its story mode and limited in number, change the forward-facing perspective to a side-scrolling one, with a focus on fast-paced action and precise hits. Here, you'll have to contend with analogue stick inputs too, with a quick flick of the stick in various directions. And that's on top of "dark attacks" from the enemy, which require you to hit a string of notes as precisely in time with the beat as possible, else you'll get a beating from the boss. Boss fights are easily the most interesting part of the game, so it's a little disappointing that there's so few of them, only about 5 in the 140-odd tracks on offer. 

So let's talk about those tracks, because I have some very mixed feelings about the selection on offer here. You'll unlock each track in the game's "story mode" (more on that later), where you'll generally get two tracks for each world, spanned across all of the worlds from every game in the series. The first song is generally some sort of environmental track, something that plays while you're just walking around a particular area and exploring. The second is usually that world's unique battle track. The problem here is that while the battle tracks are very good for a rhythm game, with fast, energetic beats, the environmental tracks just... aren't. Make no mistake, I absolutely love a lot of the environmental tracks throughout the series, and Yoko Shimomura has a fantastic ability to capture the tone and feeling of each world perfectly, but far far too many songs just don't make a good fit for rhythm games. 

To compound on this, the selection of songs on offer is weirdly limited and has some odd choices. For example, most Kingdom Hearts III worlds only have one song, which is utterly insane to me. Surely, you would think, they'd want to prioritise the latest game in the series, get some eyes (and ears) on something that's still very much being sold across other platforms at full price most of the time. And there are some worlds that are absent altogether, like Kingdom Hearts' Deep Jungle (based on the movie Tarzan), and Hundred Acre Wood (based on Winnie the Pooh). Winnie the Pooh is a series staple! And the songs from Hundred Acre Wood throughout the series are some of the most heartwarming and nostalgic pieces.

That's to say nothing about the lack of songs from games like Kingdom Hearts II, where The Little Mermaid's Atlantica featured actual rhythm minigames with a variety of adapted and original songs involving Sora and his friends — all of which are absent in Melody of Memory. And to top it all off, the songs that are available are the original, MIDI-ish songs from their original games, and not the orchestrated adaptations featured in the HD remasters. It's a big bundle of strange choices and baffling omissions. I can understand that licensing is a little difficult, with things like Tarzan and Winnie the Pooh not directly falling under the purview of Disney itself. But this is Disney and Square Enix, the latter one of the biggest games companies in Japan and the former one of the biggest companies in the entire world; surely, if anybody has leverage to make these things happen, it's these two companies. But they didn't, and haven't, and the result is a game that feels like a budget title due to its song choice alone. 

And so we come to the story, if you can even really call it that. In Melody of Memory, you play as... Kairi's digitised memories of Sora? Data Sora injected into Kairi's heart? The ghost of Christmas past? Look, basically, at the end of Kingdom Hearts 3, Sora went missing, and a bunch of scientists have now hooked a comatose Kairi into a big machine so she could do some magic stuff and get clues as to where he is. Now, you control Sora, as well as a bunch of other characters, through a digitised path of memories, while Kairi recaps the story of the entire series in voiced-over clip shows every few worlds. That's it, that's pretty much the whole thing. At the very end of the game, after defeating Xehanort again (because the series just cannot let him go) there is some new story content, setting up what I assume is a series of weird, interconnected pseudo-spinoff games that will be absolutely vital to even remotely understanding the next numbered game. 

But that's kind of the problem here, new story content is pushed all the way to the end of the game, and consists entirely of about 10 minutes of cutscenes where not much really happens. In true Tetsuya Nomura fashion, these cutscenes also have characters say the word "Unreality" wayyy too many times, which is up there with just about the most obnoxious of Kingdom Hearts storytelling. If you were itching to play Kingdom Hearts 3, but didn't want to sit through eleven confusing and disjointed games of varying quality, Melody of Memory might actually be a decent tool to catch up on the series' story. It certainly covers just about everything there is to see, lays it out in a way that rivals only the most dedicated YouTubers, and you could just stop before you get to the (very limited) Kingdom Hearts 3 content. But that's not what Melody of Memory is, it's billed as the next chapter in the story, the next step towards a post-Xehanort world. And on that front, it fails to be even remotely engaging. As I said at the start, this isn't a game for somebody looking for the next chapter of the Kingdom Hearts story, it's a game for rhythm game fans who happen to also like Kingdom Hearts music. 

On a slightly more positive note, Melody of Memory is, for the most part, technically and mechanically sound, even on Switch. It runs at a very smooth, consistent frame rate, it looks about as good as you could expect, and has reasonably good tools to accommodate for input lag introduced by wireless controllers and display drivers. It does take a little while to hone those settings in correctly, it took me about 15 minutes to get the input delay settings just right in docked mode, and I'd have liked to have separate settings options for handheld and docked, but all in all it does the job just fine. I will say, though, that I did experience a surprising amount of dropped inputs from time to time, where I definitely pressed the button or flicked the sticks and it just completely missed it. That was frustrating, but it's impossible for me to say it was a problem with the game, where it could be an issue with my controllers, my wireless environment, my console, or even the Switch version of the game. There are too many variables in play to really hold it against the game, so I'm considering it an outlier, and hoping others don't run into the same issues. 

All in all, Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory is a mixed bag. It's a game at odds with itself, a self-contained contrast of both very good decisions and very bad decisions. What's here is good — the gameplay is solid and it's a lot of fun — but what's missing is a little more damning. It's not a must-play game by any means, but if you're a fan of rhythm games, Kingdom Hearts, and the musical stylings of Yoko Shimomura, then you're likely to have a good time. If not? Probably best to give it a pass.