After last time’s severely disappointing game, I was feeling burnt out on otome games. It was like my dreams were crushed, something that I was so excited for turned out to be the most disappointing thing ever.
Suddenly I couldn’t trust people’s reviews anymore, so when I turned to the well reviewed Amnesia: Memories it felt like a rock was lodged into my stomach. Despite my initial trepidation, this game ended out being my second favorite game that I’ve played so far -- right beneath the incredible Hatoful Boyfriend.
The story .
Amnesia begins with you getting, well, amnesia. However, it’s not regular amnesia. It’s not even super amnesia. It’s amnesia caused by a spirit named Orion accidentally taking lodging in your brain.
You spend the entire game trying to fool the people around you into thinking you have all of your memories so they don’t take advantage of you or attempt to send you to a hospital, because this type of amnesia is only cured by going through your daily routine and trying to jog your memories.
That’s the basic story of the game, however the main meat of the game is dependent on which route you choose in the beginning. This isn’t the traditional otome game where you play the game and decide the route after you meet the available bachelors.
No, this time you get spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds (as well as joker after you finish the game) to choose from and the route goes from there. You start with a boyfriend who is themed around whatever you picked in the beginning and you start the game dating him. I really think that that’s a neat feature I haven’t seen in an otome game before that.
The guy I first dated ended up being Ikki, the spades route. In his route you’re trying to find out more about him because he’s a womanizer and neither you nor Orion can figure out why on earth you’re dating him.
You end up trying to deal with his angry fanclub, find out if he’s really as awful as everybody says, not get fired from your job, not get murdered by his angry fanclub, and figure out just what he means by only having a month left in the relationship.
The mechanics
Throughout the game you’re presented a ton of choices, more than I’ve seen in most otome games. Because you have amnesia there are a lot of decisions you made with your pals that you just don’t remember. You also don’t remember your relations with most people and how you do your job.
Because of that, you get choices like how formally or informally you speak with coworkers and friends, how you should respond to questions, and if you should ask about certain events or just try to wait for characters to bring it up instead.
This led to a level of challenge I wasn’t expecting because I was making the wrong decision just about every decision. I was speaking too informally, asking too many dumb questions, the list goes on. Eventually I had to just get a walkthrough so I didn’t screw myself over.
If you act too suspicious about not remembering anything, it could ruin the route. Some characters have more leniency than others. The route I picked, Ikki’s route, he’s extremely suspicious towards the strange behavior.
Early on in the game if you make too many bad decisions you get the bad route super early. I can’t say the same for the other routes because I haven’t played them yet, but from what I’ve read the suspicion level threshold varies depending on which boy you smooch.
I flipping loved this mechanic. As frustrating as it was to keep screwing everything up, it kept me so engaged. I had to seriously think about different clues that I had seen in previous encounters or try to make the most educated guess.
As I mentioned earlier, I did eventually cave and read a walkthrough so I could finish the game, but boy is this a cool mechanic. It worked so well in this game, and I’d love to see more otome games try to do something like this that really ramps up the difficulty.
The heroine
Another interesting thing about Amnesia: Memories is the heroine. She is much more of a player avatar than usual. She has no personality at all. All of the internal monologuing is done by Orion, the spirit who knocked all of your memories away.
He’s the character you’ll end up seeing and hearing the most as he gives voice to your internal thoughts. I really have mixed feelings on this dynamic of the game.
It’s interesting to have someone who’s not you narrate the game, but the amount that this personalityless avatar really puts you into the game is negligible. Despite the creator’s intentions, I never really felt like it was really me as the heroine. Her age, 18, is called out at one point and I’m like “but I’m 20.” This goes on with other things like how she does have a backstory, she’s a freshman psychology major, and how characters interact with her.
I understand why they left her mostly personalityless, but I would have preferred that she did have one since she already has a backstory. I’m interested to see how this plays out in the anime, which I’ve heard is awful, seeing as she’ll probably be a talking character in that. If not, well that sure would be one interesting anime.
The character designs
Okay I have to take a moment here to talk about the character designs. They’re just bad. Though in my opinion the worst offender is Kent. You may be asking to yourself, why is that? Well, here’s why my dear reader. It reminds me of the stuff I did back when I was 15. Let’s take a moment to compare the designs
There’s basically no difference in the levels of awfulness. There is one main difference, well besides the fact that the art in this game is actually decent. It’s that the person who designed him wasn’t 15 years old.
It’s okay when a 15 year old has that edgy stage in art where everybody has fifty belts and is unfashionably asymmetrical. But this is an adult person designing his atrocious outfit. It hurts me just to look at him.
Why does he wear that many belts, what purpose does that achieve? He’s not even the edgiest character in the game, he’s a nerd who’s in grad school for math!
So going into the game, I hadn’t really paid much attention to which guy was with which route. I didn’t even realize that you had to pick the route at the beginning and that locked in the guy you dated. So when I was given the option to choose a universe I shut my eyes and let my cursor randomly click on a button.
I ended up going the Spades route and that meant I dated Ikki, the womanizer. I don’t think I could have made a better choice, to be honest. I really enjoyed his route, I thought it was interesting and I loved his character. Throughout the game I really was wondering if he was actually a good guy or not, which is exactly what the creators wanted.
Game update
Well it’s another short update, I’ve made good progress writing the game, which I can’t show you because I don’t want to spoil the story. I hope to be done in a week or two so I can get started coding the game so you’ll be able to play it after I finish writing all the articles.
What’s up next
Next week I’ll be playing Dandelion ~ Wishes Brought to You ~ on recommendation from our EIC, Nick Dowell. It’s sure to be an experience.
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