Will I Remember Another Code: Recollection?

I love the art style they have for character illustrations and wish there were more chances to see it in the game itself.

The Switch still represents a golden age for ports and remasters. With hundreds of games finding a new home on the platform, fans continue to beg for more. There are even remakes of games I had never heard of. So it was with Another Code: Recollection, which remakes two games originally for the DS and Wii, respectively. Here in America, the first game was localized as Trace Memory, while the second wasn’t released until now. My love for adventure games and the interesting look of Another Code was enough for me to buy it… and promptly forget about it for a few months. Based on the total lack of buzz surrounding this release, I think it flew under the radar for most folks, too. But this isn’t some low-rent shovelware. It was developed by Arc System Works and published by Nintendo itself. I would love to say that this is a hidden gem in the making, but after finishing both stories, I’m not exactly sure where I stand.

Recollection is unlike most other game collections because it doesn’t let you choose which title to play first. You must start with the first, Two Memories, which will roll directly into the second, Journey into Lost Memories. Part of me thinks this is really cool. However, there are obvious problems that follow. If you only want to play the second game, you have to play the entire first one. If you only want to play the first game, you won’t get a credits sequence and must awkwardly back out at the start of the second one. This is annoying, but I could see it as a defensible choice. What’s more baffling is you never unlock the option to start at the second game, even after you finish it. There’s no chapter select, either. If you were dumb enough to miss a single collectible at the end of Journey Into Lost Memories, you’re out of luck (asking for a friend). Regardless, by forcing all players to start at Two Memories, Recollection in some ways puts its best foot forward.

If you love mom's dead parkour drama, this is the game for you.

Ashley Mizuki Robbins never really knew her parents, because they both died when she was a toddler. Or, so she thought. Right before her 14th birthday, she receives a letter from her not-so-dead father. Enclosed are instructions to meet on Blood Edward Island and a mysterious device that could very well be the Switch 2. Things aren’t that simple. On the island, Ashley is separated from her guardian. Then, she runs into a child ghost who can’t remember anything except his first initial, D. Ashley and D join forces to explore the Edward Mansion, with hopes of both restoring D’s memories and finding Ashley’s family.

Once the story’s cards are on the table, it’s not hard to see where things are going. It’s still a perfectly fine little story. Ashley and D develop an enjoyable friendship. But despite the spirit of a 10-year-old hanging around the whole time, the narrative is skewed more towards science fiction than the supernatural. Ashley’s father is developing a machine that can manipulate memory. It’s thematically resonant with D’s amnesia but ultimately unrelated. And, despite the machine looking just like the Animus, the original game’s release predates Assassin’s Creed 1 by two years. It’s called the ANOTHER. Why, I’m not exactly sure. The result is characters constantly using ANOTHER as a noun in lines that sound grammatically wrong. I imagine this goofiness is a result of translation, but they could have just changed the name so it sounded better.

A mansion without secret passages is hardly a mansion at all.

Either way, the narrative does a poor job of establishing the stakes surrounding ANOTHER. It was supposedly developed as a way to erase traumatic memories for those suffering from them. That doesn’t sound bad on its face, but this is an anime-styled game, so of course the whole point is to dramatically recover repressed traumatic memories. So Ashley’s dad ends up spending 11 years faking his death, working in isolation on his dead wife’s greatest invention, only to suddenly realize it was bad to do that. What the villain planned to do with the stolen ANOTHER isn’t really clear, as the thing isn’t exactly portable. The full power of the ANOTHER isn’t shown until the very end of the second game, where it becomes a magic do-anyting machine that would obviously be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands. In both cases, though, its implications are surface-level. The personal stories surrounding Ashley’s and D’s families are more interesting.

Another Code is primarily a narrative, visual novel-type experience, but the mansion’s puzzles are a highlight. Generally, you are either manipulating some mechanism or searching the environment for clues to a passkey. Mechanical puzzles in a mansion setting… it’s basically a Resident Evil game without any monsters. Whether it was playing the right piano keys to open a secret compartment or balancing a scale with differently weighted coins, I found these puzzles to be the right amount of challenging. There’s an optional hint system, should you need it, which is good at starting you on the right track. Working through the mansion’s rooms gives a constant sense of progress. The Two Memories portion, then, is paced very well, wrapping up its plot in a handful of hours in a satisfying way. I can recommend it for adventure game fans, provided you have reasonable expectations for scope.

They tell-don't-show a battle of the bands that goes absolutely nowhere.

When Recollection inevitably rolled right into the sequel, I was excited. There’s been a timeskip, Ashley is now 16, and she is moody. She got really into rock music offscreen, and she’s upset that she’s been dragged away from her band for a family visit at Lake Juliet. As soon as she gets off the bus, some kid steals her bag, and her reaction is priceless. I was totally on board for this development in Ashley. So many games write teenagers as tiny adults, and this felt a lot more realistic to me. It also subverts the clean ending of Two Memories. Of course things aren’t going to be wrapped up all nice and tidy, there are going to be pain points. Ashley does mellow out, though. The bag-stealing kid turns out to be looking for his missing father, and Ashley herself starts having flashbacks of time with her mom. Realizing that she is kind of doing the first game over again, Ashley puts her pride aside and starts to expose years-old secrets.

Between this setup and the inviting campground atmosphere, I was ready to like Journey into Lost Memories even more than the first game. Sadly, the more I played, the less I enjoyed it. This game has the worst pacing I’ve seen in a narrative-first adventure that I can remember. The number of characters has tripled from the last game. Aside from Ashley herself, though, they all feel pretty bland. You can’t run ten steps without a lengthy cutscene pulling you into a subplot that affects nothing. There’s a whole section about these garage band kids, and the singer is being a bully because she’s insecure(?), but she’s actually a really amazing singer. Except whenever we’re meant to hear this music, the game fades to black, so you’ll have to take their word for it. This kind of stuff makes the game feel 10 times as long as its predecessor. I suppose the various plot threads are meant to converge at the end in an exciting way, but the writing fumbles it. It’s more like everything gets resolved, and the story suddenly realizes something else needs to happen. The solution is several Metal Gear-esque infodumps that eviscerate any semblance of momentum you might have held on to.

This clock tower puzzle! It made no sense to me so I just brute forced it.

The puzzles are also a big step backwards. For one thing, they feel much more infrequent. Their quality is inconsistent, too. There are a handful of the fun brainteasers from before, but the game relies just as often on gimmicks like the world’s least responsive RC boat and a motion-controlled marble maze. Instead of bespoke keys, many doors are simply opened with a QTE. The biggest puzzle in Another Code: Recollection is the disparity in quality between the two titles. My best guess is that remaking the DS game from 2D gave them more opportunity to streamline and adjust, while the Wii adaptation didn’t have those affordances. I was trying my best to think of the game as a visual novel, but when the writing isn’t great and the puzzles don’t make up for it, it’s hard for me to stay tuned in.

I really hate to come down so hard on Another Code, because its heart is in the right place. Ashley is a fun main character, and her voice actress elevates the material. The painted art style seen in menus looks beautiful. And Two Memories is a tightly paced, enjoyable romp. But by reducing the separation between its games, the collection forces me to look at it holistically. Despite its best efforts, Journey into Lost Memories drags down the whole package. It’s hard to recommend when so many narrative games hit the mark more successfully. Should you ever see it discounted to an appropriate degree, it might be worth trying at least Two Memories. Tragically, though, it seems like Another Code missed its chance to escape from obscurity.