The Another Code/Trace Memory games tell the tales of Ashley as she discovers the truth of her parents across two games, alongside a young boy in each of them who also needs to find the truth about something, with themes of the importance of memories, loss, facing some hard truths and acceptance wrapped around the turmoils and drama of a teenager. Both of the original games are pretty dear to my heart and the first one a pretty formative one during my early teenage years.
In terms of the story, the first game is "mostly" untouched, and the touches and flourishes in certain aspects also come with drawbacks, but they always feel unnecesary considering the clean execution of the original story, at best the change in the order of events maintain the overall tone of the original at worst it gets rid of some of the mystery and hampers the flow. The second game is heavily changed with elements regarding the main antagonist, cutting some incidental characters and considering another element I'll mention later, it cuts the Wii game by around 40% or so. I can sum up what the major changes make to this story as leaving them way less surprising in terms of their mystery elements, which obviously doesn't affect me as much as I played the original titles, but I do think about how less interesting some elements are going to be presented to a new player in this remake.
The mystery element is pretty neutered but the themes of the story are mostly left untouched, I find the engame of R a bit more on the ridiculous side compared to the original but they still hit the key moments well enough, lack of subtlety in some moments aside, leaving the narrative as the most positive aspect of the game.
Presentation then is a mixed bag for me. The soundtracks were pretty distinct in the originals when it came to the instrumentation and their intent because of the contrasting tones of each title, the first one with a more sad, lonely melancholic atmosphere, while the second having a more of a summer vacation vibe with an adequate use of the more mysterious and melancholic tunes when that was necessary, and a smart use of arrangements of tunes from the first game also when needed, something that is lost in this remake, R no longer saves Emotions until the endgame and is now the standard puzzle theme across both games, and the arrangement given to that track is really lacking considering how unique the track originally is. The arrangements of the first game feel more bouncy and their lack of simplicity and different instrumentation by comparison make a track like the Edward Mansion lose its vibe. R's soundtrack survives the atmosphere part but there are tracks that feel like they were cut in my memory doesn't fail, plus what I already mentioned of the lack of the original game's music more so towards the end that funnily enough was something that tied both games together really well and is missing in this collection that ties the games even more with how it recontextualized some of the story beats.
The artstyle is something that would work better if Nintendo dared to give the same amount of love to every remake they produced, the models look clean but the enviroments have a lot of low res quality to them that I can't even be charitable about it and attempt to call it watercolor, it looks pretty plain and honestly in some ways worse than the originals, those games didn't seem to have much budget behind them on that front but they did a lot more to look timeless than Recollection does, with good use of the pre rendered backgrounds and character portraits on the DS, and the side scrolling movement mixed with more detailed 3D areas when exploration was necessary on the Wii.
So the story retains the themes for the most part at least, despite the change in order, the background of certain narrative beats and the lack of mystery in certain areas, and the presentation is mostly fine if mostly inferior to the original games, if those were my only issues with it, I would still easily recommend experiencing these unique stories with the atmosphere that they bring, but that is only half of what I valued from these games. Gameplay is the other half, and that has been pretty much butchered on most fronts.
The Another Code games were not only great titles for their interesting stories and characters, they were adventure games heavily elevated by the inventive puzzle design where they used every possible feature one could think of from the DS hardware and the Wii remote, and no effort has been made to translate a fraction of that magic in Recollection. There aren't any clever uses of the Joy-Cons or the hardware itself anymore, it boils down to a lot of simple puzzles based on observation. Each game has one gyroscope based puzzle, the controls of it being really janky which is weird in a Nintendo game at this point, but it goes along well with how terribly janky the camera gets in this game, something that really helped my immersion.
In the original game Ashley would have a quiz at the end of each chapter, a very easy one mind you but one that went along well with the themes of the game, that is gone, a quirk of Ashley that I always liked was her moments of being absent minded, she will get lost in her thoughts before a character would call out her name, that is gone.
My heart sank when the water pollution test was pretty much reduced to aiming the camera at a location in R. My cynical take on cutting a good percentage the second game is that it wasn't about improving the pacing or something like that but rather an easy way to not have to put any effort in making more puzzles to replace everything from the original.
The first game had 2 endings, to get the good one a decent amount of extra effort had to be put in the exploration and puzzle solving to uncover the whole story behind the Edwards, I'm not sure if that is still a thing in the remake but I got the good ending right away and I don't think I did anything special to get there beyond just exploring normally.
Been pretty harsh with this, but it comes from a place of love for this series, I can't in good conscience recommend these as the first way to experience Another Code, but something to be played only after that and this remake isn't what I would call essential to get even after that.
As an aside I'm really worried about how a Kyle Hyde collection will turn out now and honestly I would just rather have a new IP instead of having to critique how that is going to fare against the masterpieces that are the originals.
Also the captain doesn't give me candy anymore, that is where I really started to get worried about the changes.
In terms of the story, the first game is "mostly" untouched, and the touches and flourishes in certain aspects also come with drawbacks, but they always feel unnecesary considering the clean execution of the original story, at best the change in the order of events maintain the overall tone of the original at worst it gets rid of some of the mystery and hampers the flow. The second game is heavily changed with elements regarding the main antagonist, cutting some incidental characters and considering another element I'll mention later, it cuts the Wii game by around 40% or so. I can sum up what the major changes make to this story as leaving them way less surprising in terms of their mystery elements, which obviously doesn't affect me as much as I played the original titles, but I do think about how less interesting some elements are going to be presented to a new player in this remake.
The mystery element is pretty neutered but the themes of the story are mostly left untouched, I find the engame of R a bit more on the ridiculous side compared to the original but they still hit the key moments well enough, lack of subtlety in some moments aside, leaving the narrative as the most positive aspect of the game.
Presentation then is a mixed bag for me. The soundtracks were pretty distinct in the originals when it came to the instrumentation and their intent because of the contrasting tones of each title, the first one with a more sad, lonely melancholic atmosphere, while the second having a more of a summer vacation vibe with an adequate use of the more mysterious and melancholic tunes when that was necessary, and a smart use of arrangements of tunes from the first game also when needed, something that is lost in this remake, R no longer saves Emotions until the endgame and is now the standard puzzle theme across both games, and the arrangement given to that track is really lacking considering how unique the track originally is. The arrangements of the first game feel more bouncy and their lack of simplicity and different instrumentation by comparison make a track like the Edward Mansion lose its vibe. R's soundtrack survives the atmosphere part but there are tracks that feel like they were cut in my memory doesn't fail, plus what I already mentioned of the lack of the original game's music more so towards the end that funnily enough was something that tied both games together really well and is missing in this collection that ties the games even more with how it recontextualized some of the story beats.
The artstyle is something that would work better if Nintendo dared to give the same amount of love to every remake they produced, the models look clean but the enviroments have a lot of low res quality to them that I can't even be charitable about it and attempt to call it watercolor, it looks pretty plain and honestly in some ways worse than the originals, those games didn't seem to have much budget behind them on that front but they did a lot more to look timeless than Recollection does, with good use of the pre rendered backgrounds and character portraits on the DS, and the side scrolling movement mixed with more detailed 3D areas when exploration was necessary on the Wii.
So the story retains the themes for the most part at least, despite the change in order, the background of certain narrative beats and the lack of mystery in certain areas, and the presentation is mostly fine if mostly inferior to the original games, if those were my only issues with it, I would still easily recommend experiencing these unique stories with the atmosphere that they bring, but that is only half of what I valued from these games. Gameplay is the other half, and that has been pretty much butchered on most fronts.
The Another Code games were not only great titles for their interesting stories and characters, they were adventure games heavily elevated by the inventive puzzle design where they used every possible feature one could think of from the DS hardware and the Wii remote, and no effort has been made to translate a fraction of that magic in Recollection. There aren't any clever uses of the Joy-Cons or the hardware itself anymore, it boils down to a lot of simple puzzles based on observation. Each game has one gyroscope based puzzle, the controls of it being really janky which is weird in a Nintendo game at this point, but it goes along well with how terribly janky the camera gets in this game, something that really helped my immersion.
In the original game Ashley would have a quiz at the end of each chapter, a very easy one mind you but one that went along well with the themes of the game, that is gone, a quirk of Ashley that I always liked was her moments of being absent minded, she will get lost in her thoughts before a character would call out her name, that is gone.
My heart sank when the water pollution test was pretty much reduced to aiming the camera at a location in R. My cynical take on cutting a good percentage the second game is that it wasn't about improving the pacing or something like that but rather an easy way to not have to put any effort in making more puzzles to replace everything from the original.
The first game had 2 endings, to get the good one a decent amount of extra effort had to be put in the exploration and puzzle solving to uncover the whole story behind the Edwards, I'm not sure if that is still a thing in the remake but I got the good ending right away and I don't think I did anything special to get there beyond just exploring normally.
Been pretty harsh with this, but it comes from a place of love for this series, I can't in good conscience recommend these as the first way to experience Another Code, but something to be played only after that and this remake isn't what I would call essential to get even after that.
As an aside I'm really worried about how a Kyle Hyde collection will turn out now and honestly I would just rather have a new IP instead of having to critique how that is going to fare against the masterpieces that are the originals.
Also the captain doesn't give me candy anymore, that is where I really started to get worried about the changes.
faea
3 months ago
now i'm even more interested in the originals, i'll probably have to give em a play some time in the future