Review of Amnesia

Amnesia: I Wish I Had It After This Actually, you know what, I'm pretty sure I'll be contracting amnesia when it comes to this series because it is one of the more forgettable pieces of work I've seen so far this year. It was incredibly underwhelming. It's sad to see Brains Base put out such a terrible piece of work, especially considering how well they've done with series' like Natsume Yuujinchou, Baccano, Spice+Wolf and Durarara. This series doesn't even come close to capturing the same magic as those series. So where did this series go astray? Honestly, it fails when it comes to its plot andits characters.

Amnesia is about a girl who wakes up on August 1st only to find out that she has amnesia (go figure) and doesn't remember anything prior to the date she awakened. As soon as she wakes up, she discovers she can see a strange, fairy-like being known as Orion that no one else can see, as Orion tries to assist this girl in trying to recover her memories. As the series progresses, the protagonist continues to get into accidents only to awaken on August 1st all over again, except she seems to awaken in an alternate dimension where her relationships are slightly different.

This series was painful to watch for many reasons. The first being the characters are downright terrible. The protagonist isn't even given a name throughout the series. I'm assuming the biggest reason is due to Amnesia being an adaptation to a visual novel where you program your own desired name. Having a nameless protagonist works fine in a visual novel...but not an anime. The protagonist felt detracted from the rest of the characters because she had no name or at least wasn't referred to by name. It's just hard to get invested in a nameless character. The least Brains Base could've done was give her a name. Can you imagine if Aniplex didn't name the lead protagonist in the Persona 4: The Animation? It would be so much harder to get invested in "Yuu Narukami's" character because it would be detracting that the other characters won't refer to him by name. At any rate, to get back on topic, that's still no excuse for the rest of the characters. Besides Ukyou, all of the characters felt bland as cardboard and that might be an insult to cardboard. All of her potential love interests were either uninteresting or just had unappealing personality quirks. Still, as much as I disliked all of the characters, the protagonist ground my gears the most. While I realize she had amnesia and that can throw off how you would normally act, her thoughts and actions were completely illogical. Her methods of trying to get her memories back were extremely round-a-bout and it seemed like whenever she decided on doing something, I smacked my forehead out of frustration and screamed "idiot!" at my computer screen. The protagonist was a weak character with almost no redeemable qualities whatsoever. She acted illogically, she had zero personality, and the series provided very little motivation to her character whatsoever. I haven't seen a lead female protagonist in an anime this bad since watching Felicita in Arcana Famiglia.

The plot and story was abysmal. I will admit that this series did have a nice mystery element at first. It was really the only reason why I even kept watching because I was intrigued as to why she would continue to wake up on August 1st and I was intrigued as to why she kept ending up in different dimensions. However, the payoff was far from satisfactory and I felt duped by the time it was all said and done. The explanations that were given to us in the end were baffling at best and all-in-all, I was still left with more questions than answers. On top of that, I found this series to be riddled with cliches and the scriptwriting to be downright piss poor.

The animation is sadly one of the better aspects of this series and even then, I wouldn't call it "good." From a technical standpoint, the animation isn't bad. I just found the character designs to be dreadful. Overall, I just couldn't get past how ridiculous the character and costume designs were for each character. While I am aware that the series was trying to implement a "playing card" atmosphere for each character, how they were designed was off-putting and somewhat corny. One of the more off-putting aspects of it was how the characters never changed clothes. They continuously looked and dressed the same throughout the entire thing. The ONLY costume change I can recall is the lead protagonist in her normal everyday clothes and her night gown. That's it. Again, much like the character name, that is something that might work in a visual novel, but not an anime.

I will say ONE good thing about Amnesia. It did have some really good music composition. This was Yoshiaki Dewa's first series in regards to music direction and I must say, he did a remarkably good job. The theme songs by Yagi Yanagi and Ray were both really well done and they were the few bright spots I can say about this series.

All-in-all, I have only a few words to share for Yoshimitsu Ohashi (Director) and Brains Base. This was terrible. This was an absolutely terrible attempt at adapting a visual novel that probably would've been difficult to adapt in the first place. They committed several cardinal sins in the adaptation process and some of which are downright unforgivable. The best way I can describe it on the whole is lazy. This series was lazily written and lazily produced. It didn't try to tell a compelling story. It didn't try to create an engaging romance between the protagonists and the love interests. It didn't try in almost every aspect of anime production. I cannot recommend this series to anyone and I can assure you this is probably going to end up on my Worst Animes of 2013 list. If there was ever an example of how to NOT adapt a visual novel to anime, Amnesia is probably the best example I can think of.