Tasogare Otome x Amnesia

 

It's hard to find a more enticing title than Dusk Maiden of Amnesia. It's the perfect title for an anime telling a horror ghost story. However, this show, much like the main character, Yuuko, seems to be suffering from some form of amnesia. It's been a while I've seen a story told in such a scattered, poorly organized manner. Yet you keep watching because the characters looks so nice and the premise is great, too.

The story is about Yuuko, a ghost haunting the grounds of a private school. Niiya and Kanoe, two students attenting the school, are able to actually see Yuuko and interact with her. They then decide to form an unofficial, paranormal investigation club to try and shed some light on Yuuko's mysterious past. This is actually a classic ghost love story. A human falling in love with a being from the Beyond and their love can never be... kinda. You see, it's not always a love story because like I said, the plot suffers from amnesia. 

This show has 12 episodes and we spend over half of it running around witnessing uninteresting tangents, receiving plot points like water slowly dripping from the tap. Again, this is really weird because there's a potentially very interesting story here, so why anyone would do this to us, the viewers? There's an excessive amount of fan service that ends up being annoying because it keep kicking the story down. It drags it to the mud and leave there for 6 or 7 episodes. Then, like Yuuko, the show decides it wants to tell a story again. What I'm saying is the pacing here could be better.

There are very nice moments in there so you stay with it. You can sense there's more to it, and the characters look so good. It has that nice Gangan feel to it. Maybe the problem is Tasogare Otome x Amnesia wants to be too many things. It has a little bit of everything. It goes from horror to comedy and harem, then it wants to be tragic but a stream of comedic moments comes trampling everything down. It gives you a nice ending and then it takes it back again. This show does that a lot, it slaps you in the face on every episode.

Maybe this is one of those cases where the anime wants to cover too much ground to give you a fair idea about the original material. The manga is 10 volumes long, so not a small tale by any means. It's funny, I really wanted to like this more than I did for some reason. I think it's because of the title. The words Dusk Maiden of Amnesia should be reserved just for the best ghost stories out there. This is a decent one and it could be really good with better passing and a less scattered plot.