Have you ever had those days where a spirit just decided to invade your mind and make you lose your memories? Me too! So now is, of course, the perfect time to deal with relationship issues!
In Amnesia: Memories you play as a Japanese university student who is on summer vacation. You also have one of four Worlds you can choose to take part in. Within you’ll need to balance work, hiding your amnesia, reclaiming your memories, and getting closer to your boyfriend.
Oh, did I not mention? In Amnesia: Memories your main character (MC) is female. I really wish there was more visual novels like this, but I’ll take what I can get. You can name the MC as you wish too. Each world is a different boyfriend you are able to be with, and each one will have its own complications.
Generally in Amnesia: Memories you will go down a base path to get to the end. Choices do come up though, and what you answer to these choices will slightly alter some events and ultimately decide your ending. There are multiple endings to shoot for – a few bad endings along with a good and normal ending for each path.
In general, I actually found it difficult to just blindly get a good ending. In fact, when I thought I was en route to a good ending I wandered right into an unavoidable bad ending. The other time it seemed like I was going okay for a good ending, I ended up with a normal ending. And yet, despite this, I still felt compelled to find out more, and yet I wasn’t often going back to reload a save and choose what I thought might be a better answer. Well, I did, but after I had finished.
Luckily, you can do both quick saves and regular saves. Quick saves can only be loaded while in-game though and not from the main menu, so you’ll either need to new game or load a save to load it up. While it might seem useful to leave multiple saves throughout the path, after doing some digging, there are only really a few times where a path might differ enough to warrant it. And even then, it’s only for hitting a bad ending. Despite all of that, I still want to go back in and aim for the better endings and see even more.
Why do I want to see even more so much? Because I really enjoyed the story. The amnesia aspect of it is handled quite well, and I often found myself trying to choose the options that seemed better to hide that I had amnesia. Well, except while I was working on the Heart World, where it’s established pretty quickly that your MC has amnesia – though they do blame something else for it at least. It also didn’t feel like a drag doing each world, as each one was different enough to not make it just seem boring. Each world is the same, but how character interactions have worked out (and of course who your boyfriend is) differ enough to make it work out just fine.
That said, I did notice some typos. Whether it was a missing space, a randomly injected 2 into a sentence, or just some grammar oddity, they were there. You can generally overlook them at least, as the story was really quite good.
The voice acting is all in Japanese, and it along with the music aren’t distracting enough to take away from the game. The sound effects are also fitting, especially when it comes to the little in between “loading” screens. These screens will either feature a character or an art relevant to what happened that day in the story.
If you were looking for more than just a VN in your VN, then look no further! Amnesia: Memories features two mini-games that you can play, challenging the men from the game. You have your choice between Rock, Paper, Scissors and Air Hockey, with both getting progressively more difficult the further you get through challenging the men.
Rock, Paper, Scissors is pretty easy to abuse. My pro tip: always choose rock. Should you win, you get to bop your opponent on the head with a hammer. If you lose, you need to defend yourself from them bopping you. Don’t worry though, all this “really” requires is you tapping the correct icon on the screen with your finger.
Air Hockey, on the other hand, is a bit more annoying. I’ve always found it awkward to try and hold the Vita on its side and you have to do just that for Air Hockey. The puck can also be pretty finicky and I found it actually pretty easy to accidentally score on yourself. I also had one game where the puck had landed at just the right spot on the middle line that the AI wouldn’t go after it and I couldn’t hit it. Thankfully I hadn’t actually scored that game… To win, all you need to do is score 7 points before the opponent does. This gets really tricky to do on the later opponents where the AI actually starts to get better.
Amnesia: Memories is an intriguing story regarding memory lost. I found myself really getting into and often found it hard to get away until my eyes were just getting too tired to keep reading. The fact there’s also two mini-games attached helps too. I really do wish we could get more English VN’s that have a female MC. It’s nice and refreshing after seeing (and reading) so many VN’s that have a male MC. Amnesia: Memories is definitely a high recommendation from me to anyone who enjoys VN’s.
Amnesia: Memories Review Score
4.5/5
Amnesia: Memories is available now on Amazon, PSN, and Steam.
I would like to thank Idea Factory for providing me with a copy of the Vita version for review.
