Developer: Diamondhenge Studios
Publisher: Diamondhenge Studios
Platforms: PC
Tested on: PC
Just Another Memory – Review
In many games, you will encounter bosses as the last border to the end of levels. Other games focus only on these boss fights and this is the case for Just Another Memory. As you are dropped into this game, you’ll immediately start with the first boss after a short cutscene. Combining this with a story about lost memories, this could be an intriguing game.
Story
At the start of the game, you’ll find yourself floating in an empty void. You can’t remember a thing but your name, Seth Dunwich. You hear someone or something talking to you. It appears to be your sword, the Crimson Sword. This sword will tell you that you fell in battle against the Cosmic Evil. You currently are in Limbo, the space between life and the afterlife. You need to find the fragments of your soul, held by your amnesiac allies to free yourself and your friends from Limbo. You can’t remember them at all, and they won’t remember you either, resulting in quite interesting conversations that will always lead to you battling them to regain your memories. After each fight, all memories of this person return to your mind, and you will move on to the next boss fight. Regaining all your soul fragments will let you and your allies leave Limbo and return to the real world and rise up against the Cosmic Evil. The story progresses after you finish each battle against a boss, resulting in a rhythm of cutscene, boss fight and cutscene.
Graphics
Just Another Memory has an anime-inspired art style. Most of the environments look very appealing but some are less good than others. The environments with each boss fights are based upon the locations of where the main character has met his allies, who are now the bosses in each fight. The more you progress in the game, the more effort that has been made in visualizing all the effects. A lot of particles that will damage you fly around the arena, and these all look very plain, being orbs with only one color. The animations of the characters in-game are very fluent. The characters in the arena look relatively small, but these will make them look detailed and give you enough space to move around. All the arenas have the same layout, being a round battle-platform. When talking, the characters are drawn with much more detail and they look just like they came right from an anime.
Sound
The music in this game sounds just like it came directly from an anime. Most of the music you’ll hear will be in battles against bosses. These tracks all bring that tense action feeling that just fits the battles you are in. The music will change with each new boss. Of course, when you need to rebattle one boss a lot, the music tends to bore you and get a little annoying as the music doesn’t change at that point. Furthermore, the game has no voice-acting, something that you could miss in an anime-style game. Mostly, the best voice-acting in these types of games is in Japanese, and this would’ve fit the game perfectly. Making it possible to play multiple songs, or adding a song selector to the game so you won’t hear the same song over and over again would be a big improvement to the game.
Gameplay
Just Another Memory is an isometric boss-rush game with some bullet hell features. This game offers ten bosses to battle, with an intriguing story about lost memories and a fight against an evil menace. These boss fights are fought in a circle-shaped arena which offers you plenty of room to move around, but you will have a lot of particles coming at you at some points in each battle, so moving around a lot and dodging will be necessary.
Just Another Memory has a very basic control layout with only a few things you can do to defeat the bosses in your path. After a patch, controller support has been added to the game, and this made the game a lot smoother as some commands didn’t register properly when playing with the keyboard. This doesn’t happen at all by using the controller. In this game, you can walk around, do a basic attack, a ranged attack that requires mana, a one-time special attack that can be used once in each battle and dodge. Sure, this isn’t much, but it should be enough for the game to offer a reasonable challenge to the players while not being all that difficult to handle as well.
When fighting, you’ll notice that your attacks won’t do much damage against these bosses, so you need to hit them a lot to eventually defeat them. When you get hit, this can hurt you pretty bad and could cost you a quarter of your life per hit. The one-time special attack mentioned earlier will also heal you up to your maximum health, so it’s best to save that attack for when you’re almost out of health. The dodge action can be repeated at a fast pace in this game. This results in really small windows of you being able to get hit by attacks. We noticed that we could dodge through enemy attacks and could activate a new dodge attack while inside an enemy’s particle and not getting hit. This dodging can be a bit overpowered at times and takes away some effort that should be needed to time dodges to not get hit. But this is definitely not a guarantee to not get hit as you will get hit sometimes, while you would think that you dodged that attack perfectly.
Conclusion
Just Another Memory is a Boss-rush game with quite an intriguing story and simple battle mechanics. The cutscenes between fights will continue the story while the only action this game offers is fighting against the bosses. The game looks pretty nice with good-looking environments and the in-game characters being drawn good as well. The sound fits the art of the game perfectly, but the music could get repetitive when rebattling bosses a lot. If you like games that are focused on boss fights, then this game definitely offers quite a challenge, while also bringing a story that could be interesting as well.
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