AMNESIA

(12 episodes)

What’s it about ?

Ontological mystery meets male harem romance. Adapted from a visual novel, and boy does it show.

Characters

Our main character doesn’t actually get named at any point (the ancillary material calls her “Heroine”, for what it’s worth). As the title of the show suggests, she suffers from a severe case of amnesia, unable to remember anything about herself (or anything else, for that matter). She’s completely shell-shocked by the experience, and is barely able to string two sentences together. It probably doesn’t help that she’s also the only one who can see and hear…

Orion, a very talkative sprite who claims to be the (accidental) cause for her amnesia, what with having lodged himself into her soul by accident. He’s very sorry, and spends the episode giving her “helpful” hints on how she can get better. Gods forbid she seek any medical help ! What she really needs to do is to pretend she’s perfectly fine, and keep talking to her “friends” like she remembers anything about them. That’s how she’ll recover her memories !

Said “friends” are a parade of generic pretty boys : the aloof one, the nice one, the slightly creepy one… Also, she seems to have been working at a maid cafĂ©.

By the end of the episode, she rans afool of the mandatory bitch squad, who’ve been stalking her all day and are angry about something she has no clue about.

Production Values

Pretty ! Besides Nekomonagatari (Black), which barely counts, this is the first show of the season that displays some style and artistic ambition. There’s a lot of work on colour and atmosphere, and everyone’s dressed in ridiculously stylish borderline-cosplay clothes for some reason. This is definitely a show with budget…

Overall Impression

… It’s a just shame it’s wasted on a –ing otome game adaptation, especially one which makes no effort towards disguising its nature. Orion is very obviously your game assistant, and one of the characters even pauses once to give a tutorial for the parfait-making minigame. This could have some charm, but the big problem here is the annoyingly moppy and useless “protagonist”, who seems to stumble onto every single “wrong” option available in her menu.

Still, it is very pretty, and I’m vaguely intrigued by some of the setup. I’ll give it one more episode for the heroine not to get too much on my nerves.

via [In which I review] New anime, Winter 2013 – Page 5.

Published by

Jhiday

I've been kinda blogging about anime for years... but mostly on forums (such as RPG.net's Tangency) and other sites. This site is an archive for all that stuff, just in case.

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