Review of Amnesia

At first I thought I was going to like this anime. After watching the first episode, I thought the show had potential - I mean the premise was interesting after all. I wanted to know more about the Heroine and Orion. More importantly, I desperately wanted to find out what happened prior to August 1st. Did I get to find any of that out? No. Well, I did in the end, but the ride to get there was anything but enjoyable. Now I understand that Amnesia is an adaptation of an Otome game. The format for these games are as follows: you are presented withmultiple love interests, you pick one route, you complete the route, and you move on to another route. That's essentially like Amnesia, expect shorter, uninspiring, and frustrating.

The pacing of the series felt rushed, but jarringly slow at the same time. What do I mean by that?

Well, the Heroine only spends a short amount of time with each guy. Most of that time consists of trying to find out who her current boyfriend is and what she must do to pretend that nothing is wrong. There is little opportunity for the Heroine and any of the male leads to connect, and if there was it felt shallow and fulfilling. Each boyfriend the Heroine had was unmemorable. I can't remember any of their names for the life of me. That's not a good sign. The only thing those guys had going for them was their character design, which was comprised of mismatched articles of clothing, patterns, and colors. Once a key event has happened in a route, the episode ends. Seriously. Each episode has a cliffhanger, and the viewer is just left there with so many unanswered questions. In addition, the following episodes does little to answer those questions. When you think you've pieced some pieces of the story together, it all just comes to grinding halt. You are back at square one. All of a sudden, most of what you learned a few episodes ago did not matter and in fact had no significance to the overall plot and its conclusion. This lack of overall plot development is what I meant by jarringly slow. It's so slow it's like nothing happened.

On to character development.

There was little character development with the Heroine. She showed little motivation to seek the truth and would have probably done nothing if it wasn't for another character guiding, pushing, or influencing her to do something. She only redeems herself somewhat towards the end when she displays some sort of free will. Usually the protagonists in VNs have don't have too much character and/or back story. This is so that the player can live vicariously through the protagonist. When adapting a VN into an anime however, the protagonist needs to have substance. It's really hard to cheer on a character you don't care much for, or worse, are ticked off at.

I guess the Heroine and I are suffering from Amnesia. We both don't know what's going on most of the time, but we just go with the flow in hopes that somehow this story will end.