Well, that fight was...underwhelming.
Marluxia barely did anything. At the beginning he'd attack maybe 5-6 times and just stop. He wouldn't attack anymore until I destroyed the scythes. And even then, he didn't do much. With so many low Attack cards I shouldn't have bothered the 10 seconds making a deck of zeros.
The fight just didn't come off as a final boss.
and Sora returns to the hall, where his first response is to… seal the door with the Keyblade? I don’t think the game really did a good job of implying there was anything beyond the door worth sealing away. Am I wrong? Is he afraid of the room itself and its starry expanse? Or is he just that angry? You can tell from this screenshot and the events of the last entry that Sora is furious, I don’t doubt that, but I still don’t see what this accomplishes. You could say he’s just behaving irrationally, but hold that thought because Donald and Goofy pre-empt his actions by closing the door in the first place! You have to make up an answer to make this work, because the game isn’t talking. Sora’s response isn’t that extreme on its own, but it is an extreme response to the stimulus, which is to say: no stimulus at all!
Let’s not even begin to talk about why Sora doesn’t just imprison villains in rooms to begin with. From what we see in the series, while the Keyblade can unlock anything, it’s only ever used to lock specific locks… I’m just not sure why this is one of them.
Made funnier in that if Marluxia was still alive, he could just teleport out.
Couldn’t she just unlink her false memories from the real memories of the Castle? I guess the memories come in larger Platonic “chunks” than I initially assumed?
In an ideal world, yes. Namine removing herself shouldn't remove the non-Namine parts of Sora's experience in Castle Oblivion. At the very least he would remember that he went into a weird castle and fought black coat-wearing badguys.
Least when it comes to the Riku Replica, the false memories are probably the only memories he has, as he may not have even been active until the false memory input.
If nothing else, I feel I understand the real-world reason for this ending. My guess is that CoM’s was designed such that if the game didn’t sell very well, Square could ignore it in future games. If Sora doesn’t remember the game, no one should need to remember the game, and so CoM becomes optional.
But as with you, I feel this was the case.
And that’s Chain of Memories! Wow, two whole games behind us. Two games absolutely, one-hundred percent, top-to-bottom completed and we can move happily on to Kingdom Hearts 2–
MOTHER FU—
Remember the good ol' days when the CoM instruction booklet was so secretive on who you play as in R/R that they covered him with a big question mark, but you could clearly see the Soul Eater sticking out?
You could also probably guess that there's more to the game because Billy Zane is listed in Sora's credits.
I believe the commercial even had a shot of Riku and Ansem.
Kingdom Hearts has never been very good at secrecy.