Plastic Memories

Review:

Found thru Npesta’s discord profile picture. I got curious what Anime it was from, found it, read the synopsis, and it sounded pretty interesting. Boldz also watched it and said it was good. 

Wow, that was better than I expected. I knew the concept of it was something to do with AI Companions for humans, but I didn’t think that concept would have so much depth and emotion. What I was neglected to be informed of prior to watching was the fact that these AIs have limited lifespans. That entire concept was new to me when I started watching it, and it changed the game.

 It reminded me of Assassination Classroom in a way, where it is a literal given that a main character will die at the end of the show. They even bring up the idea of being able to save them (or in this case, save their memories), but the show puts that idea off because it would be cheap. Saving Korosensei would be cheap, and regaining memories randomly in this show would be cheap. The entire show just had this constant emotion and almost life-lesson aspect that is comparable to Assassination class and Clannad. Time is finite, and the ferris wheel symbolized that perfectly at the ending. It was just so beautiful that I wanna put it above Your Name. I won’t put it above Clannad because I think Clannad’s concepts were more interesting and it had many many layers even with it’s stupidly long runtime. Plastic Memories above your name might seem kinda overrated, but Plastic Memories is 13 episodes only! Charlotte is in the top 5 for a reason. I even watched this entire anime in one sitting. 

Overall, just blew my expectations out the window. Insanely good character development, made me cry many many times, phenomenal story and concept, and overall an ending that is left up to the viewer’s interpretation which is nice. I personally think the new partner is just some random new Giftia and NOT a copy of Aira like some people think. I think the ending is showing a new chapter of Tsukasa’s life. Amazing job to the creators of this one and I can see why npesta and boldz liked it. 

(Edit: I moved this down below Your Name because I think Your Name just hits different. Recency bias is a huge problem with this list and since a day has passed I think Your Name hits different emotionally in some ways and is less predictable in a way. Your Name’s concepts are actually better than Plastic Memories because Your Name uses timelines in a way that is 1. Not cheap and 2. Complex and emotional. I also think because Your Name is only around 2 hours which is about 5 episodes in anime terms, it does more with less run time than Plastic Memories does.)