Review of Amnesia

Adapted from an otome dating sim game, Amnesia involves the Heroine (literally her name as a self-insert character) suffering from amnesia as she interacts with several men whom she has varying relationships with and can interact with a fairy named Orion, only she can see. Attempting to piece together her lost memories, the Heroine finds herself whisked into some supernatural circumstances. This adaptation has enough problems owing to its dating sim roots and largely seeming like it has more focus on advertising the game instead of making an effort to do its own take on its source material. It looked like Amnesia chose to use itssupernatural angle to explore the different story paths in the game to explore the Heroine’s interactions with the different male characters she interacts with in each route. The problem with doing this is that due to its messy narrative, the series has little time to explore and allow you to connect with most of the male characters that the Heroine interacts with and make them seem more like window dressing to pad out the anime’s runtime. This also has the added problem of not doing enough to explore the supernatural angle of the series for the majority of its run and leaving viewers largely in the dark about what is going on. The final story arc has a bit more meat to it with revealing the cause surrounding the Heroine’s predicament, thought even this is still messily handled with the series explaining things in an infodump in the title’s final episode since the final arc was more focused with the Heroine’s struggle against an antagonist.

Issues with Amnesia also extend to its characters as the series doesn’t really do much to flesh the majority of them out nor even have the time to do so. The Heroine is one of the more frustrating lead characters I’ve seen in an anime as she is extremely naive to trust others easily despite many of them having obvious nefarious motives and largely being pretty worthless when it comes to handling her present dilemma. While I’ve mentioned the male characters the Heroine interacts with are largely pretty shallow due to the anime’s limited focus on many of them, a few of their routes push onto the abusive side in regards to their treatment of the Heroine and regrettably get handwaved by the series to be done out of some sort of romantic tripe to protect her. With how utterly worthless the Heroine is and not being proactive to assert herself in those sort of circumstances, this can make these moments seem pretty problematic if viewing this from a different angle.

There are some other issues I could highlight with Amnesia like the ridiculous choice of clothing for the characters, questionable voice acting quality, and shoddy looking visuals. But I think what I covered above is enough to show why this is easily among the worst anime titles I’ve seen. The anime just exists as a promotion for its source material without doing anything to make things more engaging and this obviously shows in the overall quality of the title’s production and storytelling. I wouldn’t waste any time trying to track this down.