TASOGARE OTOME X AMNESIA

DESCRIPTION

CAST

OVA HorrorTasogare Otome x Amnesia: Taima Otome
MANGA HorrorTasogare Otome x Amnesia

REVIEWS

• 

  Maberan

  30/100
  A promising anime that manages to betray the source material through and through.

  I wasn't planning to watch this anime, but I had read the manga a long time ago and really enjoyed it. For those unaware, the story is about an amnesiac ghost who wants to figure out how she died while falling in love with the boy who is trying to help her. I thought it would be an easy nostalgic watch.

  And it was... for one episode. The pilot is an anime original that introduces us to Yuuko, Kirie, Okonogi and Niiya as well as the overall tone of the anime in a way that was unique and refreshing for a ghost show- even if half of it was the same thing but with Yuuko's layer unmasked. If there's one reason to watch this show, it's this.

  Because it's in the following episodes that I started seeing the issues with this show. Instead of rolling with the pilot that already introduced us to the main cast, we're treated to forty minutes of what are in fact flashbacks of the club members meeting each other. While this information is useful and necessary, it could've absolutely been made in one episode or cut entirely- I'm looking at you Okonogi.

  Episodes 5-7 are full of fanservice, romance and characters being cute with a moderate focus on the actual plot. It was passable if you ignore Okonogi, who suddenly thinks this is a harem and keeps asking out Niiya, who accepts almost every time even when he knows Yuuko gets jealous. We're also introduced to Shadow Yuuko, or the other Yuuko, a hateful version of Yuuko.

  The real pain starts at episode 9, where the spoilers begin. The only reason I wouldn't recommend you read them is to read the manga, which is about a thousand times better. So Yuuko has forgotten Niiya due to his inconsideration and her own hate towards the other Yuuko. And instead of trying to help her, reforging the relationship they had, Niiya just... gives up. I'm serious. He says he's sad, he misses Yuuko, he cries, then a wild Okonogi appears and Yuuko is forgotten to go eat with her for what likes months on end. It gets so bad he can't even see Yuuko anymore. But then he falls on her boobs and she remembers.

  Episode 10 is where the score went from a likely 5 to a 3. Yuuko's past is finally revealed after Niiya convinces her that the other Yuuko is just another part of her and they accept her death together as the events from 60 years ago unravel. (This is the manga's version.)

  Wait, no? That's not what happens? If you want to know: What happens is that Niiya runs away from the other Yuuko while telling Yuuko that she needs to figure out her past and the other Yuuko shows it to an unwilling Niiya instead to the willing Yuuko and Niiya. Then there's bullshit about Niiya having literally absorbed Yuuko's past and now she can't see him. But then he kicks a doll and she can and she finally accepts the other Yuuko. (This is the anime's version.)

  Why did they change that? At that point everyone watching had already figured out what the other Yuuko was and I was screaming at Niiya that what he'd wanted from the start was literally offering itself to him on a silver platter.

  But this is far, far from the worst things the staff changed, and I was mad when I realized what they were doing. If you thought Yuuko's death was tragic in the anime, you know nothing.

  In the anime, they changed one of the cruelest twist in manga history and destroyed Yuuko's character for... nothing! There's nothing in the manga that would need censure! Why did they do it?. So she goes to save a random ass kid and is sacrificed. She breaks her leg falling and just sits there dying until at the last moment she lets go of hatred as she dies.

  I guess they wanted to keep her pure and nice? But wouldn't that have made her pass away in peace and you know, not become a ghost? Because she was still alive. Am I supposed to believe that your emotions have a will of their own?

  Here is the manga version, highly recommend you go read it, even if it's just the ending.

  In the manga, Yuuko goes after her vanished sister instead of some random kid. When she gets to the school, screaming at the elders to let her sister go, she sees that Yukariko is Akahito.

  Then her sister turns to her and says: "Kanoe Yuuko is the sacrifice!"

  The elders break Yuuko's goddamn leg- no, it wasn't broken in the fall- and toss her into the darkness of the buried shrine room and Yukariko orders they close off the opening and stands there as her sister screams her name, begging for her life as she's being buried alive.

  You think that's all? Months later, Yukariko returns after her dad killed himself over Yuuko's death and finds the comb Yuuko used to brush her hair one last time. Overcome by guilt and regret, she tears away the planks and finds Yuuko's rotting body. She weeps her sister's death until Yuuko's ghost shows up, warped by hate. She strangles Yukariko, who decides she deserves it and wants to be with her sister more than anything. But her loving words bring Yuuko back and she leaves. It's implied she severed her hateful self soon after that. Yukariko kept living in guilt, thinking it Yuuko's revenge.

  I went back to look at the dates and ok the manga finished a year after the anime but couldn't they have asked the author what they were going to do? Because this is so, so inferior to the manga and it pisses me off because you need to have read the manga to see. Everyone else just thinks this is sad as it is when in fact it's so much worse.

  And I am far from someone who rages every time an adaptation changes the littlest thing. But the changes need to mean something? Like when they use the movement of the elevator in episode 1. But this was 100% plot and there was nothing to change.

  So... if you're interested in this, highly recommend the manga if only for the ending and look at the first episode if you really want, it's the best one.

  About the animation, it was alright. I didn't like how they let go of the roundness of author's style. But the use of black bars, the old Japanese artstyle and the colors switches, while a little out of place, brought back memories of Bakemonogatari. The sunsets were amazing and when there's horror it's pretty well done- in the first part at least.

  I didn't like Yuuko's voice actress tho. I felt like she was way miscasted and that the character would've gained more from a less high-pitched and cute voice. She's still a ghost, after all, and this is supposed to be horror. The romance was... okay, I guess, if you count fanservice as romance, but can you really cheer for these guys? Yuuko's already dead! Niiya's gonna grow old and she's going to stay at 15 years old in mind and body. And he's going to stop going to school one day.

  The characters weren't particularly unique. Yuuko was 75% fanservice, Kirie is a tsundere, Okonogi's an idiot and Niiya's the male protagonist. The only interesting thing that was happening was the Kirie/Okonogi ship but that was dropped immediately after it started.

  I can't really think of anyone to recommend this too when the manga's so much better in everything.

  Continue on AniList
• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  70/100
  It would have been sublime without all of the harem bullshit.

  In every Japanese high school, there are clubs, ran by diligent students who wish to share their passions with others. While there are of course some unique clubs out there, just about every school has at least one club dedicated to the paranormal, be they ghost hunters, researchers, or plain old horror buffs. But there’s one school, cobbled together from both new and old buildings alike, where their Paranormal Research Club is quite unique compared to the others. Not only is it situated in the farthest reaches of the oldest section of the building, but it’s leader is nowhere to be found. Try as you might ,you’ll probably never see her... That is, unless you catch her moving items out of the corner of your eye, or if you should happen to stumble on her remains. You see, this club’s mysterious Ghost President is, in fact, a ghost, and her club was formed on the idea of figuring out the truth about her past... Her young life, as well as her untimely death. Should you join this club, don’t be scared. She’s nice. At least, she’ll try not to hurt you.

  Here’s a funny story for you... I went into this series blind, knowing no information outside of what I could remember about it from a previous viewing back before it had a dub, and for the longest time, I was convinced that it was a Shaft title, most likely directed by Akiyuki Shino, as it had his style all over it. There are quite a few anime out there that have an eclectic feel to their visuals, with a bizarre sort of cinematography that makes each shot transition feel random and disjointed enough to leave a jarring feeling behind, and while not all of them are by Shinbou, I generally feel the creepier ones tend to come from him, and this series had it’s creep flag raised high and proud, but where most of Shinbo’s work feels creepy in a skeevy, perverted sort of way... Even when it’s presented with some degree of subtlety, like it was in Madoka Magika... This one was creepy in a way that felt more appropriate to the horror genre. I thought, hey, I guess this means it’s one of his better projects, where he used his weird penchants to achieve a greater effect, right?

  Well, no, but I wasn’t too far off. This anime was actually produced by Silver Links, and it was directed by it’s most prolific and prominent employee, Shin Onuma. Want to guess where Onuma worked before he jumped ship to the newly founded Silver Link? That’s right, he previously worked at Shaft, and worked very closely with Shinbou. There’s so much overlap between them before 2009 that I actually found conflicting information, each of which gave one or the other credit for directing the second Negima series. I looked through Onuma’s filmography, and I was pretty impressed by what I saw there... Out of the titles that I’d seen, a lot of them were in fact titles that used a Shinbou sort of visual style, but with a smarter and more thoughtful approach. That’s not to say he shies away from the male gaze, or never accentuates the assets of his female characters, but he at least feels like he has the ability to turn such proclivities off whenever they’re not called for, which is a quality I don’t think Shinbou had very often.

  Since Dusk Maiden is a horror title, at least partially, Onuma does crank up the weirdness of his visual style to establish mood and create an unsettling atmosphere, or even to symbolically express the relationships between characters, and while it can get annoying once or twice, that’s more a reflection on the content itself rather than the way it’s being presented(more on this later). It doesn’t always work, but it at least consistently feels creative and ambitious, which I sadly can’t say for the character designs. The characters are drawn extremely to type, surpassing generic and moving all the way into cliche territory, even if it works in some cases, like in the design of the title character Yuuko, who looks like the archetypal Japanese beauty, with pale skin and long black hair, and a school uniform that Blood C had just made fun of a few years prior. It works in her case, as you’d expect a ghost to feel old-fashioned, but her love interest looks like every bland harem lead ever, the tsundere looks like your typical short hair, breast-envy tsundere, and don’t get me started on the genki girl.

  I’ve done quite a few reviews where my access to a soundtrack has been limited or outright non-existent CoughYurionicecough but with Dusk Maiden, I don’t have the problem at all, because the official DVD set comes with two soundtrack CDs in the case. There are now 45 tracks haunting my Itunes, but unfortunately, there isn’t much I can say about the soundtrack as a whole, because it’s kind of all over the place. That’s not to say any of it’s bad, but it’s about as varied and unrestrained as the show’s visual style, so there really aren’t any common features to discuss. It’s a bunch of different kinds of tunes, and they all sound good. Composers Kiego Hoashi and Ryuichi Takada clearly had a large order to fill, and I have to imagine that they exhausted themselves doing it. I guess three of the biggest trends across the collection would be that most of them either go for a traditional Japanese sound, a tense feeling of dread and urgency, or the kind of perky and upbeat melodies that you’d usually hear during casual scenes in any slice of life anime, but of a higher quality and less repetitive nature than your typical dating game background track.

  There are a few stand-outs, such as the theme for the mysterious villain Shadow Yuuko, which is both terrifying and full of very subtle foreshadowing. Despair is an aptly titled tune that sounds like a violin playing heavily along to a somber music box, and it’s also one of the few tunes I actually remembered from it’s use in the series before checking out the soundtrack CDs. This is also the case for Altar, one of the songs I noted as objectively terrifying during my viewing, as it can only be described as the theme to an upcoming blood ritual, with it’s mixture of ominous ceremonial noises and childish accompanying choir. I didn’t really care much for the opening, at least on a visual scale, as it looks just as eclectic and offbeat as the show itself, but without nearly as much inspiration or direction, so it just feels like a bunch of random clips set to music. I do think the song, Choir Jail by Konomi Suzuki, is very nice, as it’s intense and emotional, and is able to lyrically capture some of the darker elements of Yuuko’s situation. I actually liked the ending theme better, as it was a much prettier song, with beautiful visuals that are actually allowed to linger, and you get to see Yuuko herself singing it, which is a nice tough.

  The cast of characters was really small, being that they didn’t even introduce a fifth speaking role until episode 5, so Sentai Filmworks didn’t have a very tough job to do when it came time to cast the dub. I’m pretty sure they knew what they were doing, though, because they put four of their best talents in the main roles, with a small group of other well known names floating in from time to time as either small guest roles or nameless extras. They gave the title role to Emily Neves, one of the most in-demand voice actors in the industry, and in my opinion, the best new actor to debut in the 2010’s. She has a very wide range, as well as a chameleonic quality that easily puts her in a prime spot for numerous different roles, and it’d be an understatement to say that Yuuko was a complex enough character to give Neves a lot to work with. She’s able to put her talents on full display with this character, to the point that she could honestly just submit this series as her demo reel if she ever needed one.

  Clint Bickham hasn’t done a whole lot of acting in his career, with his only consistently active years being in 2013 and 2014, but he’s shown in other titles that he can play boring or generic harem leads while still sounding genuine and expressing believable emotion, which he does a fine job of here. Brittney Karbowski was of course the perfect choice to play Momoe, the energetic, carefree and somewhat dimwitted comedy relief character, as she was basically able to cut loose and overact like a psycho in all of her melodramatic, loud, upbeat genki girl glory. As for Jessica Boone in the role of Kirie... Well... I have nothing but respect for her, but my enjoyment of her performance in this series bears a direct correlation to my fondness for her character, and to put it nicely, I wasn’t fond of her very often. She does play another character briefly, but I can’t really say who for spoilery reasons, but I like her better there. It’s a great dub that I’d highly recommend, even if it’s just for Emily Neves fans.

  Sigh... Here we go again. It’s another damned school club anime. Ever since it was established that this particular sub-genre of Slice of Life was marketable, and that they could make a successful and popular one through little to no creativity or effort, they’ve been popping up everywhere, as excuses for story-tellers to cram a color-coded collection of waifus, or just a small harem, into one room so they could spend a season or two putting them through random stories. Dusk Maiden isn’t the first anime of it’s ilk to base it’s school club around an edgy sort of theme, hell, I don’t even think it’s the first one to use a paranormal theme, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t take the formula and do something bold and new with it. I don’t believe there’s any sort of idea or subject matter that’s doomed to failure from the start, and a good team can spin gold out of any sort of material you can imagine, so what exactly does this series bring to the table?

  Well, actually, it has quite a few things going for it. I don’t think i’ve ever said this about any other anime before, but I absolutely love the setting here. Dusk Maiden takes place in a Japanese High School that’s cobbled together in a make-shift fashion with old, historic buildings, as well as new construction, to make something of a Frankenstein school. I’m the type of guy who likes to explore whenever he enters new buildings, I always get into the video game frame of mind and start looking for loot or whatever the real life equivalent of easter eggs would be, and one of my favorite things for a school life anime to do is to set a few episodes in the old, abandoned school house. Well, in Dusk Maiden, the old, abandoned schoolhouse is part of the school itself, and it sets an atmosphere that wouldn’t be out of place in the Winchester mansion, a place I’ve always wanted to visit. The school is maze-like, it’s full of secrets, and the way it’s shot is so dark and creepy that I get excited at the possibility of what might happen in there.

  But that’s not even it’s best feature. Yuuka, herself, is by far one of the best characters I’ve ever seen in an anime, at least from a writing standpoint. There’s a lot I can’t say about her, for fear of giving away some pretty heavy spoilers, and the whole show is basically a character study on her(even though I don’t think it was trying to be), that almost every element of the story and plot are in some way connected to her. For the sake of comparison, she’s fleshed out and interconnected even more thoroughly than Haruhi Suzumiya was, and that’s quite a feat. She’s introduced to us as a bored, happy go lucky ghost girl, living her life lack-a-daisically in her clubroom, which was formed for the sake of recovering all of her lost memories, and there are far more layers in that sentence alone than you could possibly guess. There’s only one thing about her I wasn’t really fond of, and that unfortunately leads me to the show’s greatest failing. While there’s a lot to like about Dusk Maiden, it is ultimately a slave to it’s genre.

  To be fair, the first four episodes get off to a great start. The pilot is written in an extremely clever way, setting up pretty much everything it has to, and introducing every single character at their best. The following three episodes are backstory as to how Yuuka and Teiichi met, as well as how Momoe and Kirie entered into the picture, and the dynamics between them. These episodes didn’t feature anyone outside of the main four, so it was able to spend a lot of time on them, building up their relationship as a club and as friends, and dropping a ton of really smart clues about Yuuko’s past and the identity of the mysterious enemy stalking them from the shadows. Of course, the good times can’t last forever, because this is a harem anime, and it just had to move into love triangle territory eventually. Granted, the culture fest story ar does introduce a pretty relatable villain, but she doesn’t stick around, leaving our little harem to it’s own devices.

  Being that this is a harem, we get all of the worst harem cliches. The main male character is a boring, unremarkable wet sock, but all three of his co-stars are in love with him, and somehow, the one with no explanation gets off the easiest. Yuuko’s love for him basically boils down to the fact that he’s the first person in the school to see and openly acknowledge her, which is kind of a low bar when you think about it, although it does make sense when you take the decades she’s spent alone into account. There’s another reason that’s eventually revealed, but it’s kind of pointless, outside of the fact that it IS a reveal. Momoe is in love with him because, as she puts it, he’s really capable and knows how to take action, which kind of floats between vague bullshit and a complete misunderstanding, as she probably got that impression from all of the ghostly mysteries that Yuuko allowed him to solve.

  Kirie doesn’t even have an explanation, as she just starts getting jealous of his relationship with Yuuko in episode 5, and from there, she spends the rest of the series either acting like a love-struck tsundere or dumping exposition and explaining things that most viewers would have been able to figure out on their own. This is in spite of the fact that she was a much more interesting character up until that point, and her relationship to her ancestor Yuuko had far more promise to it. Momoe at least stays consistent throughout this process, as she never stops being the comic relief dumbass of the group, but her love for Teiichi is so uninspired that at one point she actually proclaims, out loud, her joy over being useful to him. As you might expect, all of this is peppered with the usual harem fare, like barbie-doll nudity, a swimsuit episode, and girls cooking for Teiichi with a heavy emphasis on the importance of feeding him with their chopsticks(Say ahh! Christ, I’ll never understand the romantic appeal of feeding someone like they’re a fucking baby), but there is kind of a silver lining at the end of it all.

  Once the will-they-won’t-they hurdles are cleared, the actual romance between Yuuko and Teiichi is a really lovely one, and it’s not hard to get invested in it. Granted, there’s very little substance to the romance, and some of the more obvious issues with a human loving a ghost are largely avoided, and a poignant, beautiful ending is immediately ret-conned by the post credits sequence, and the two rejected romance options never let go of their obsession after he’s officially off the table, but it’s still very effective for what it is. The harem elements absolutely cripple Dusk Maiden’s potential, and the romance may be weaker than it seems on the surface, but thankfully, these elements are never placed front and center, and Yuuko’s story is still strong enough to make the series worth watching. If you squint hard enough, you could even see some messages hidden in the text, like that most people only see what they want to believe, you can’t be a complete person if you cast aside negative emotions, and labyrinthian school buildings are fucking awesome.

  Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is available from Sentai Filmworks. The original manga is not available stateside, but the DVD does come with two OVA episodes... One that’s pure comedy and pg-13 nudity, and one that’s an extended version of the final episode, but I have no idea what’s supposed to be extended about it. The CD soundtrack, as I mentioned, is also included.

  I know a lot of this review came out more negatively than I wanted it to, but that’s because all of this anime’s best qualities are either subjective on my part or mired in deep spoilers, which made it’s worst qualities so much easier to talk about. I did, however, have a mostly positive experience with it, as behind all of the groan-worthy harem nonsense, there’s an engaging story surrounding a really complex and interesting character. The comedy is also largely effective, although it never quite reaches the precedent set by the pilot episode. There are parts of it that remind me of Robert Westall’s The Promise and the animated movie Paranorman, which can never be a bad thing, and it’s strongly constructed mystery is far more memorable than it’s cringe-worthy harem elements. I wish the ending had stuck to it;s guns rather than resorting to a cheap cop-out, especially since it never got a sequel to justify it, but I still really enjoyed the story up until that point, for the most part. I give Dusk Maiden of Amnesia a 7/10.

  Continue on AniList
• 

  BR4ECJlAB

  100/100
  One of the best romance anime I've ever seen. I recommend it for viewing.

  However, before telling about the impressions, a little background , I added this to the PTW, because I saw the opening many times playing osu!, and then it didn’t interest me very much, but after listening relatively recently, I decided to take a look anyway. After watching, naturally added it to the playlist.

  The anime itself begins in the spirit of Suzumiya , yes, I think that for me they were about equally interested in the beginning, only this anime has not been crap!? since the middle of the season , i.e. interested me right away and made it clear that there might be something really interesting here, but starting from the second series, I realized that I would definitely watch it to the end, and I was not mistaken .

  About the plot.
  It would seem that the main character is "shkila", the most ordinary (or almost) Japanese schoolboy, around him is a harem (or almost) of girls, and this is made clear right away. And how could this turn into something worthwhile? But here all of a sudden there won't be constant stupid ridiculous situations that I've probably seen a lot in the first series of all sorts of random anime . Yes, there will be ridiculous chest grabs, although it seemed to me that they even managed to do this in a couple of places quite coolly and I did not consider it stupid crap. Even the topic about oh, but they have bigger breasts than me, how come there is, but it was not inflated into something gigantic and did not force my hand to reach for my face.

  The laws of the world as a whole are logical and anime does not go beyond the framework that it builds itself.

  The main characters were revealed quite well, although most of the time was devoted to only two. Their communication didn't seem like something that suddenly appeared and came to an illogical end. It grew and changed, along with what the two of us went through, and it was nice to see that not everything was easy and simple in their favor.

  I liked the ending. I have almost come to terms with the fact that the main character will be left alone, and it seemed to me very logical and fair for what kind of story. But the fact that they left them together, or rather the reason they stayed together, made me smile.

  Yes, if you've watched shitty anime, you can drop it in the first episodes, because you've seen it somewhere before, and you "know" what's going to happen next. But I watched a little and always give a chance for what will happen next. And I'm not disappointed.

  Every 4 episodes, the anime "changes" direction as it seemed to me, promoting new thoughts, and changing the tone of the story. At the same time, it does not loss on what was said before. In some places it makes me think and I realized that all these grabbing for the chest and vulgar jokes just a lure to talk about something more seriously.

  Continue on AniList

SIMILAR ANIMES YOU MAY LIKE

• ANIME

  MysteryHyouka
• ANIME

  ComedySankarea
• ANIME

  HorrorAnother
• ANIME

  ComedyBakemonogatari
• ANIME

  Dramaef: a tale of memories.
• ANIME

  ActionAngel Beats!
• ANIME

  EcchiNazo no Kanojo X
• ANIME

  ComedyNatsu no Arashi!
• ANIME

  DramaJigoku Shoujo
• ANIME

  ActionJibaku Shounen Hanako-kun
• ANIME

  ComedySeishun Buta Yarou wa Bunny Girl Senpai no Yume wo Minai
• ANIME

  ComedyCharlotte