Overall Review: Amnesia

The best course of action is probably to forget (pun intended) that Kaori Nazuka's career ever included Shujinko's role.

I'm not going to pretend otherwise: I had pretty high hopes for Amnesia. It was a Brains Base production, it starred the wonderful Kaori Nazuka in the lead role, and the first episode made the plot feel quite intriguing and mysterious. It didn't hurt that the animation and execution were fluid and of pretty high quality either. Unfortunately, neither the characters nor the content were able to live up to the production values, and there were certain moments when this series was just plain bad. While I like to complain about harems of all kinds, I normally don't outright hate them; that being said, I don't really even hate Amnesia as a whole. I do, however cringe at the last third of the series, where unsatisfying material turns into an almost unbearable mess.

The biggest fault with the series really does lie in its characters. Not only is Shujinko constantly unimpressive and completely without personality, but even the bishounen, the love interests who should be interesting enough to draw us into the world, are boring as burlap sacks with the words "potential boyfriend" written on them in permanent marker. The cliches are rife in this series, so much so that it's hard to take any of the characters seriously. Shujinko is the ultimate trouble-attracting girlfriend who requires a man to keep her safe from the dangers of independence and using her head, while each boy is as controlling and perfect as the one before, with minor adjustments to make them distinguishable from one another. Of course, not all of them are as bad as the others; Kent, at least, understands Shujinko and tries to change to suit their relationship (which isn't really a good thing, but at least he's not forcing her to change) while Toma is a psychopath who's so disgusting he makes Ukyou, the murderer, look positively wonderful in comparison.

Really, at some point the absurdity of it all is too much and you stop taking it seriously enough that things that shouldn't be funny are, and it's almost amusing to see how much worse it can get next. After Toma and his... methods... I have to say I was pretty much through pretending I had hope that Shujinko would magically become interesting and the series would live up to the initial image I had of it. It's a shame, really, that such good production and voice acting talent went to waste, but there's really no point in crying over spilled milk now. It isn't the worst anime I've ever seen, but it certainly disappointed me enough that I doubt I'll be watching another otome game adaptation anytime soon, even if they feature my favorite seiyuu in the world. Now, let's all move on with our lives and forget any of it ever happened.