Celebrating All Things Romantic: Amnesia: Memories

How about another otome?

Amnesia: Memories follows a protagonist who loses her memory when a spirit named Orion accidentally fuses with her mind.

His continued presence will cause problems, so the only solution is to reclaim her lost memories, which will break the connection with Orion.

There is no common route. Instead, you pick your route from the start by choosing one of several parallel worlds Orion says might be yours.

It doesn’t give you any information about the worlds, so I just started at the top and worked my way down.

Since the protagonist’s amnesia is caused by Orion’s presence, he warns against going to the hospital. That means you need to hide your amnesia while trying to understand the unfamiliar situations you find yourself in. Each world shares the same group of main characters, but the circumstances and your relationships to them are always different, and your choices will determine if you get a good ending, a normal ending, or one of the many bad endings.

And because this is a romance visual novel, dealing with a boyfriend you don’t remember drives a lot of the conflict.

Something I really liked about Amnesia is how different the routes are. One route might have you searching for clues because your boyfriend is suspected of attacking you, while another will have your boyfriend flirting with other girls and expecting you to understand why. I’d even say some routes fall into different genres – romance, mystery, or thriller – because of how different their stories are.

As you play, you’ll start to pick up hints of an overarching plot, and I really enjoyed how that all came together in the end.

However, I’d say there’s only one route where I really liked the love interest (Kent; he’s the best by far), with a couple others that were okay or where I enjoyed the route itself more than the romance. And one had a good ending that just felt awkwardly forced in for the sake of giving him a happy ending.

So let’s talk about the protagonist.

She is basically a self-insert character without any internal monologue, narration, or even dialogue beyond your choices for most of the game. Orion takes over that role instead, talking to her to consider the situation and help her decide what she should do.

The justification for this is her lack of memories, but that feels weak to me. Even if you have no memories, you’ll still have thoughts. It would have been so much more interesting if there was some back-and-forth between her and Orion, instead of Orion’s responses letting you fill in what she’s apparently thinking about. Characters also comment on her being unusually quiet, so I could never quite shake the image of her staring soullessly ahead in between dialogue choices.

Anyway, my overall feelings on Amnesia: Memories are mixed. There are parts I enjoyed a lot… and parts that just felt bland. If you have a copy (it’s been free at least twice), it’s worth playing through, but I wouldn’t go rushing out to buy it.

Have you played Amnesia: Memories? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!