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If I keep playing these dating sims, I’m going to wake up with amnesia one day and think that I’m a high school girl. Or… I guess I’m a college girl in this one. Whatever!
Ever since I started reading Shojo-beat, I’ve been a sucker for Shojo. Don’t get me wrong, I love Shonen too but I always felt like I identified with the Shojo characters more often. That’s what makes games like Amnesia: Memories so much fun–not only do they give me a front-row pass to a Shojo universe, but they let you drive as well.
Amnesia starts out with an adorable boy named Orion who wakes you up after you pass out. As it turns out, he was traveling through the astral plane and accidentally collided with your mind. The effect was two-fold; your memories got pushed out of your head and he got trapped inside your mind in their place. I love Orion. He talks a mile-a-minute, is constantly stressing out about ridiculous worst-case scenarios and has a fantastic voice actor, even if it’s in Japanese.
Orion’s plan is for you to enter into one of the infinite realities in the universe and try to get your memories back. According to him, it doesn’t matter which universe you go back to, as long as it’s one where some version of you exists. You then get to choose one of four worlds (which presumably alter the plot) and away you go to figure out your identity and what boy toys you can try to score. Or have score you. It’s always a little shaky on which direction they’ll play it off of.
Amnesia is largely a visual novel, so don’t expect a lot of “game” here. In spite of that, I didn’t find myself getting bored. You get to affect the story as it progresses through multiple choices which in turn affect three parameters that you need to keep under control; the chemistry between you and your lover, the trust he has for you and how suspicious he is that you’ve lost your memories. Orion is very adamant that no one finds out that you have amnesia. He reasons several awful scenarios that might happen if they do, but my favorite one is where he’s afraid that they will put you in a hospital and your amnesia will cause you to forget how to breathe and you will die.
This one’s pretty good too.
In some ways, Amnesia almost becomes the “Orion show” as he bubbles up and down, left and right, addressing all the normal things that teenage girls are supposed to fret about. It’s bad, but by the end I didn’t care too much about Ikkyu, my boyfriend but sort of wished I could just date Orion instead. I mean, in a game about relationships, you sure spend a lot more time with him than your significant other. Oh well; I’m looking forward to seeing more of this world and getting more chances to have my heart broken, so I’m placing this in Tier 1.
