I wanted to get this review out as soon as possible because… I have to apologize. I’m sorry. I endorsed this series when it first came out. I just didn’t know. I had no clue what kind of a trainwreck this would be. honestly!
Okay, so to start at the beginning: I actually liked Amnesia when it first started. It had a concept that really piqued my interest: the lead female wakes up not knowing anything, and suddenly she is dating this random guy with a weird fashion sense and she has no idea what’s going on. Over the course of the series she experiences this multiple times, each time dating a different guy. That had the potential to be a very interesting mystery-series with the right execution. It’s just… the execution was not right. Not right at all.
And yeah, the storytelling may be awkward and the animation may not be special and all, but those are just mere details. I called this a trainwreck, and I mean it. By far the biggest cause for that is the cast of characters.
Usually I try to avoid spoilers, but to get a good grasp of what went wrong I need to give some vague hints of what happens in the story. You see, this series at heart is a harem: over its course it shows the lead female together with a number of potential partners that it thinks appeal to its audience. Or at least, that’s supposed to be it. Regular harems work that way in any case. If Amnesia was based on the same principle then the creators have got a really low image of their target audience because, bar one, every single character in this show is a total prick.
Seriously, there are not many series that have so many unlikable characters in them. There is a murder suspect, a guy with bipolar disorder, an obsessive stalker, an incredibly whiny ladies’ man. The worst is the obsessive stalker. When I watched his episode, I had to do a double-take before I realized what the creators just pulled. I really have to restrain myself from just typing that out loud here. Let’s just say that every sane human being would just give him a kick in the groin at what he did there. The lead female just doesn’t do anything. Everything in this series gets done for her. And she doesn’t even realize it, just walking away happily as if she was the one who did all the work.
Oh, and as for the mystery part of the story… yeah. The final episode features an info-dump that has a good story buried somewhere underneath. But yeah, the final episode rushes through everything in order to stuff in all of the required exposition, which only ends up forced as hell.
One-Sentence Review: A series with interesting potential to finally be a good Otome Game adaptation… only to fail horribly with some of the worst characters imaginable.
Suggestions:
– Matantei Loki Ragnarok
– Saiunkoku Monogatari
– Ashita no Nadja
Note: with suggestions I mean series that worth watching if you liked Amnesia. NOT the other way around…
I have no complaints, no disagreements to voice, I can only ask myself, as I am sure Anca must be doing so right now of why I watched this..
Probably because we wanted to see if it could get any worse and it did!
The worst part was that this could have been a reverse harem Higurashi, and instead… they… ugh. I was really excited when I saw that CG from the game, the one with her in a cage =_=
We forgive you 🙂
Yes we forgive you. And thanks for your great work on this blog by the way.
Well, anyway, harems without tons of humor don’t really work for me.
It’s times like these where I appreciate both R;N and LB even more. Sure both their plots might not be great (Although LB is getting more interesting), but their characters are likable and have decent chemistry with each other. This show is proof that good characters and bad plot make for a much better show than the opposite.
@Arno:I prefer harems, even if their going to have drama/melodrama/tragedy later on that there be some kind of humour element.
I particularly dislike it though when harems pit on airs like this one does. Only thing I honestly was in this for were how the men looked and even then their clothes were horrid.
I got through a couple episodes (a few snickers later after seeing some of the costumes, narrative structure) before jumping ship. Did it get better or worse?
Why in the name of God does the green haired one look like N from pokemon..what on earth has science done! omglol
THANK YOU! I thought I was the only person who thought that!
This was really, apart from the bishies a pretty awful show in my opinion, the animation wasn’t up to the brains base standard, the gimmick was pretentious and the exposition was poor/condescending.
wait a sec, when was the last time a show with a cast of generic bishoneny dudes came out as actually good? i’m serious, i cant remember.
I liked Ouran and utapri, I also thought neo angelique was alright and I’m really enjoying Hakkenden actually.
Being forgetful in a post about Amnesia? Well played, sir.
Hiiro no Kakera ended up having a decent plot and a halfway working romance, as the series abandoned the harem idea.
Before that… well, HaruToki was very relaxing to fall asleep to?
The second season of Neo Angelique was decent, I guess – in 2008.
I thought HaruToki was just fine and very interesting, but I only watched it quite a few years ago when I was first getting into watching anime in Japanese.
I liked UtaPri too and I’m a guy. Ristorante Paradiso was another good reverse harem anime.
Good thing I let this one go, and now I know there’s no need for me to continue watching it.
“The lead female just doesn’t do anything. Everything in this series gets done for her. And she doesn’t even realize it, just walking away happily as if she was the one who did all the work.”
You took the words right out of my mouth psgels. It’s so unfortunate; I loved the concept for this series but not the execution.
Indeed a trainwreck, you see, in the game she actually gains her memories as she advances and Orion drops hints of where did he got what little knowledge he has about humans, and Ukyo was the only doing the world jumping, making her do the world jumping too, actually messes greatly with the storyline, and to make the anime make sense they should have revealed Heroine to be originally from Ukyo’s world.
In the end they went for that ending which feels awfully anticlimatic considering all the build up, and eneded up causing the trainwreck, if they had worked it better and not chikened out at the end they would have make it at least decent despite being a info dump at the end.
not to mention that they only animated mostly the start of the rutes, for example: Shin’s becomes a mystery but to work at the end the Heroine needed her memories.
In Toma’s she even regained her personality halfway and was even able to tsukomi to Orion antics. They totally did away with any semblance of her persoanlity up to the very end the way they ended it.
I liked it up to episode 11 episode 12 pretty much makes the rest meaningless as they decided to resolve all with a deus ex machina, instead of using the development that was already in place.
Yes I noticed that actually teelaIsh, about not fully animating each characters routes. I think more expansion on ikkis route would have been nice.
Damn you psgels for making me waste my time by recommending this piece of s***, you son of a b****!
lol j/k, I had the same initial reaction that this could be an interesting series, but it got bogged down by the end.
In defence of the cage guy, I have to say that after watching the MC act brainless throughout the series, putting her in a cage so that she wouldn’t get into something stupid yet again didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Only of course the guy didn’t have the kind of God’s eye view we had, so I guess that’s not an excuse for him.
Kent was the most decent guy of them all and of course he only gets one episode because fangirls prefer psychotic abusers or some s*** like that.
It’s not like he knew it was going to be this bad.
They ruined another otome game. Oh well time to move on
@Kisara:A yet I will watch utapri too. This isn’t nearly as much a screw over as Hiiro Kakera though.
Haha me too, at least the songs would still entertain me :p
I remember getting flamed a few months back around the third episode when this was ranked in the top 10 for the month because I could already see it was a trainwreck then and couldn’t believe it was ranked so high… Glad I dropped this crap early, I feel vindicated.
Log in fail, mssk24 is also me
I’m a guy and I must say, I liked the show from start to finish. Barring a few unexplained plot points and the general complaints from the Western majority, it was a good Mystery. I liked brainstorming over the info bits dropped regarding the mystery and making my own inferences.(I already clued on to the Parallel Universe thing since ep 4!)
I will say the show knows how to create atmosphere and suck you in wanting to know more. The art style helps a lot too.
A rather enigmatic ending, although I suppose the director didn’t want to follow the usual ‘happy ending with X guy’.
Here’s hoping Heroine find happiness in whichever universe!
I hope you don’t have a cage at home :S
This show must have the distinction of having the worst characters I have ever seen. Even if the plot was fixed it would be seriously crap.
Hahahaha, good one! Although my house has cage mousetraps…
I put no emotional investment in the characters or their development whatsoever.
I simply focused on the mystery/suspense portion by analysing the clues, hints and foreshadowing, and speculating on what was really happening.
I guess that’s how I was able to enjoy it, by taking a really cold, detached look at it as a mystery. Think of it as a pseudo-intelluctual exercise.
PS. There are some people who liked it and gave it a high score. Ex:
http://angryanimebitches.com/2013/03/amnesia-overall-review/
Would you know if the TV series was popular amongst Japanese viewers? What are their thoughts?
I liked this until the final episode. I was wondering whether to score it five or six, with potential for seven depending on the final episode (all of those are good scores in my system). You see, most VNs that are slow and time-jumpy like this usually have a crazy, great plot twist at the end (see S;G, where the twist was revealed in the middle, or Ever17).
Then the final episode happened. All the time jumping was just for fanservice, apparently. No good reason for the dimension-jumping ability (Fairy King gave it to me is not a good reason, it’s an asspull). An infodump episode. MC remained passive until the end. No good reason for anything that happened in the past 11 episodes.
I scored it with a 2. I don’t think I’ve ever had a single episode change my scoring of a series that much. I used to see the previous episodes as buildup, and excuse their slowness and boringness and some of the silly stuff they contained. Surprisingly, they were meant to be the meat of the show.
From five to two with just a single episode. Yeah, endings are also critical. They make or break a series. The ending was terrible. Far worse than No. 6. Oh wait, No. 6 actually takes the cake with the tornado killer bees.
Lol… Oh my! I watched the first 2 episodes and that was it for me.
So glad.
For me I liked the different characters (except Ukyo, I was thinking all the time he was doing theather with the knife. Now I kill you, Now I don’t), being Kento the most relaxing and better done.
Here I thought the problem was the plot, not the characters. Everything was OK till the final episode with the half-assed explanations and the “this all happened because that prick made a wish and unexisting forces decided it should be granted”.
I’d have loved to have a better plot and double the chapters with more world travelling and more chemistry between all the characters. Also with the MC becoming more active and trying. She was never granted a chance to shine as the one who unveils the mistery.
Wasted potential, though it looks like the source material had also gone for easy half-assed explanations, so it was wasted since the start.
Also, what happened with all the bishies whose loved one was killed in their worlds? Every world ended with the MC dead, truly evil for each bishie who lived on there after she departed.
I’m not sorry for the cage guy. At all.
Please can someone tell me what the stalker did? I am really curious now but I don’t want to watch a trainwreck to satisfy it.
He drugged her and put her in a cage.
WHAT? AND HES SUPPOSED TO BE A POTENTIAL LOVE INTEREST? WHAT IS THIS, STOCKHOLME SYNDROME THE ANIME?
Yep.
Well, except for the second point. That would actually be a pretty awesome premise.
I like it. A typical reverse harem, nothing more, nothing less.
Jeez. I’m glad I didn’t watch this after all, not that I had planned on it anyway.
TBH, I think 64 points is being far too generous. This was most definitely one of the worst animes I have ever seen.
Despite the problems of the show, at least its got one of the best-sounding opening and ending songs. It’s got that cool pop-rock-guitar riff going for it, different from usual moe stuff.
How many of you think the same way? Did anyone enjoy the songs?
Look up Zoetrope by Yanagi Nagi and Recall by Ray.
It’s alright you didn’t know it was based on an Otomate game. As it so turns out many of these otome game anime adaptions are based off Otomate games: the various Hakuouki series, Haiiro no Kakera and this one.
Otomate can come up with somewhat interesting premises, the problem is they tend to write the same kind of unlikable, walking stereotypes for the harem, brain-dead protagonists and really contrived romance scenes pretty much every time with no real character developments for any of the cast. Unfortunately, as is the case with a lot of otome games, they rely on the crutch of the popular male voice actors hired to portray the characters catered to their target audience to draw in sales and get lazy with everything else to push out the games faster.
If you think the fault in execution lays with the anime staff, it is in a way that they are being slavishly faithful to the source material when really they should take liberties to make the characters more like people and less like guys you just want to punch in the face.
It really wasn’t the worst anime but not the best either. I was more so-so but still, I liked it.
I watched this because of the bishies and the art and because I find the premise of the series interesting. I find it funny because the way it’s executed is similar to that other otome game turned anime *cougharcanafamigliacough* which had the same problems too: great premise, bad execution, weak heroine, bad last episode (could have been 4 or 5 episodes more not just info-dump). The guys aren’t so bad either as I liked how each guy is not perfect and have their own quirks both good and bad even if it’s just for a few minutes.
But yeah, the heroine and the execution should have been better.
I forced myself to finish this series in hopes that the main character would die.
Like really, I know she’s supposed to be “different” and weird… but she was just soooooooooooooooooo ridiculously unrealistic and stupid. I think the last episode was definitely the best (not because it’s the last lol) cause it sparked the small hope of watching the main character die. The ending was painful :(, not only did the main character survive… she had to pick one of those fucked up guys to go out with. I was secretly hoping the main character would stay in that weird chess board place with Orion, cause Orion wasn’t a douche.
So yeah, I totally agree that the characters were unlikable, especially the main character.
Main character = ****ing retard (“Sorry and thank you. This is pretty much the only things I say throughout the anime, derp.”)
Shin = straight up dick (“Oh hurr durr, sorry I say dickish things sometimes, but I like you… idiot.”)
Ikki = emo playboy (“My eye powers don’t work on you, but I’m going to keep trying… also I’m in love with you, but I’m going to continue flirting with other girls cause that’s the kind of guy/douche I am.”)
Kento = robot (“If you have time come to my university so I can work on my school stuff while you sit on the fucking couch for hours. Also I like stocking my mini fridge with different brands of water cause I want to show you how eccentric I am.”)
Toma = … (“I’m only drugging you with sleeping pills cause I want to protect you. These pills won’t affect your health in anyway… probably.”)
*I actually liked Toma until the hurr durr druggy cage part.
In conclusion, Amnesia would’ve been great if the main character died like she’s supposed to. Would’ve made a great comedy anime! Jk… I wish I got partial Amnesia so I can forget this bull.
I thought when Shin said he killed a person that that would somehow become relevant to the plot, but nope. Was that part just put in there so he could be an asshole filled with angst?