Memories Off

This anime was kind of boring the music was teribble it sounded like it was skipping.. the story is bout a guy who girlfriend dies in a car accident and how he blames himself for her death because he asked her to come and pick him up and so the story is bout how he over comes this by meeting gurls that all have some of her traits

Some context is necessary before diving into the review proper. This is a 3 episode OVA adaptation of a multi-route visual novel, with each of the three episodes covering one route from the game. The characters are the same each time, but each episode is standalone and there is no continuity between them by design.

From that preamble, you can probably guess the main issue with this series, right? The OVAs lop off a large chunk of the game's story (released as a separate game called Memories Off Pure) and have to condense hours worth of content in each route to a crisp 30 minutes that ... also includes all the necessary exposition that was skipped over. At best, we're getting a survey of each route, and it's difficult to be invested in Tomoya's relationship with each girl in such a short period of time.

The accelerated pace hurts this series more than most because of its premise. The series begins an undetermined length of time after the death of Tomoya's girlfriend Ayaka, and her absence and Tomoya's attempts to reckon with her death are a core part of it. Her life and death is covered in Memories Off Pure, but we only get the aftermath in the OVAs. With only a few very brief flashbacks depicting her, we hardly get to know Ayaka at all, which makes it hard to care all that much about her. In fact, her absence is deeply tied into the events in 2 of the episodes, and that works to its detriment as the tragedy of her death feels purely theoretical rather than something you feel along with the characters.

Another factor working against it is the visual presentation. The animation quality can generously be called "sub-hentai", and this manifests most negatively in the lack of expressive faces. This is a series where characters are constantly going through Big Emotions, but blank faced stares when a character should be anguished or overjoyed and mouth movements that don't match the voice dubbing create a disconnect with the audience. Many dramatic developments come across flatly because of the poor character acting animation.

This all sounds very bad, and to an extent it is, but there are a few redeeming qualities. The 3 girls, while largely adhering to common VN tropes, are varied in personality and tone, and their routes don't always go the way you would expect. One is even downright tragic, in a way that surprised me positively. The plot is pretty basic and short, but what we get is generally solid. While I would normally say you should just play the VN given that it greatly expands the plot, that is unfortunately not possible for most as the game is not translated into English as of 2023 (and given that it was released in 1999, is unlikely to ever be translated at this point). You're probably better off skipping this one, but if you're intrigued by the premise and aren't fluent in Japanese, this is likely the only way you'll be able to experience the story.

So as a romance anime lover this was pretty bad. Each episodes was hard to follow. The MC and his romances were weak or strangely rushed. Then the past girlfriend trying to assist the MC with his "new" romances were also cringy and strange. I understand each episode were separate stories (or I hope they were) so it doesnt really pertain to one another. Even so it was hard to follow and truly understand.

Story: weak, hard to follow, and not very intresting. It had some intresting moments though.

Art: older style, which I dont mind, but could be better used with some scenes becoming 16fps or ... something like a stop motion.

Sound: nothing special

Characters: MC is strange a lot of times, and the girls arent very special but they are different with interesting connections.

Enjoyment: it was bad, but not to hard to finish. Not going to continue to watch though.

Overall: give it a try, some others may like this but in general it was pretty bad, maybe the other seasons get better.