A Journey Into Lost Memories is the sequel of Two Memories from the niche franchise Another Code. This sequel, was released for the Nintendo Wii, which means, it was a different approach compared to the Nintendo DS version, where the touch screen was used to interact through the game. There is no touch screen on the Nintendo Wii, instead, all of the puzzles were translated into the Wii controllers, using them for every single action in the game taking advantage from the gimmick that the console had at its time.
It was possible to mantain the same puzzles thanks to the joycons, but sadly they didn´t, I can understand why, if joycons were used to solve puzzles, that means, the game would be unplayable on handheld mode, it´s understandable but still a shame, I didn´t play the Wii version myself but while I played the remakes, a friend of mine played the original versions of the game, he showed me most of the Wii puzzles and I thought they were cool. Instead, you´ll find the kind of puzzle you are expecting, searching for certain code or unlocking something by searching keys, puzzles that wouldn´t require gimmicks.
A Journey into Lost Memories is the same -gameplaywise- as Two Memories, they literally have the same gameplay and the same graphic motor, which is obvious but interesting, I mean, A Journey into Lost Memories from the Wii was a totally different game from Two Memories, the game from the DS, but for this time, they are the same on the Switch. Two Memories is a game that occurs in a closed space, almost the entire game occurs in a big mansion you are supposed to explore, however, A Journey into Lost Memories is different regarding that, I mean, we are not moving through a mansion anymore, we´ll be exploring a whole town, not that big but still a significative difference.
What the team did with this remake is pretty cool visually speaking, I mean, it´s beautiful just to look through the environment, although, this game occurs in a more open area, where there is a lot of water, vegetation, trees, rocks. You can see the budget wasn´t that high because there are some textures that really don´t look fine, some areas look cool but some others look weird. It´s not a problem that would ruin your experience, at least, it didn´t for me, but I guess if you are a demanding person, maybe there would be blood coming out of your eyes a lot of times.
Same as the previous remake, we´ll need to collect memories scattered around the area, we´ll use the DAS in order to examinate them and get our little piece of lore that will make the story more compelling, there is an amount of 9 memories and they are a good excuse for exploring the area and to see what the world within the game has to offer you which is not much, it´s a game focused entirely on the narrative, so don´t expect too much.
Also, we have added another option to the DAS which is unlocking doors that require a certain combination, this feature wasn´t in the previous game, but it´s basically pressing the buttons are shown to you in the right order, it gets more complicated to do after a while since the dificulty increase a little bit at the end of the game, but nothing impossible.
However, what shines the most in A Journey into Lost Memories is the story, the first game had a cool story with interesting characters, but something I didn´t like about the first game is that the story is way too simple, I´m not expecting something mindblowing and complicated to understand, but that´s the turh, it was way too simple, also the only character that did matter to the story was Ashley (the protagonist) and maybe D, the others were there but they weren´t important and they are not even fleshed out, I understand that, because it was a DS game, I wasn´t expecting too much, luckily for me, its sequel is way more ambitious, the game isn´t as short as the first one, the story is waaay better, the characters are great, basically what a sequel is supposed to do, to expand the original game, this game had me around like 17 hrs I think while the first game was 10 hrs as much.
Despite Ashley getting to meet her father, she´s still having uneasy feelings because she doesn´t know anything about her mother, just the basics, the story does expand more on Ashley´s story, also, as I said, the characters here are better written and they serve a purpose on the story, even if that wasn´t the case, the game makes you to integrating yourself in their lives, to understand them more as people, that´s something I really like, the characters are just not archetypes, they feel like normal humans with their problems and circunstances, their stories can also interconnect a lille bit, everything flows natural.
The main theme of the game is to find the truth and accept it even if hurts so much, as it was from the previous game, it´s cool and however the script has a chance, it always throws at you that dilemma, but also, because of the other characters in this game matters, there are also other thems which the game takes its time to elaborate. There are a few moments that are actually pretty sweet because how their stories interconnect, moments that make this whole game worth it.
A journey into Lost Memories is a great game and also a great sequel, it´s exactly what you would expect from a sequel, the game is way better than its previous installment, and it doesn´t feel unnecesary, everything that happens in this game is interconnected with Two Memories so if you want to get the whole picture, it´ll be mandatory to play A Journey into Lost Memories. The game is not perfect, the puzzles while I liked them, they could be better, it´s such a shame they couldn´t let you use joycons as a way of solving them, also the story is really slow paced at the begining, there is like a ¨prologue¨ and basically you have to wait lke 3-4 hours for the game to finally ¨begin¨, I don´t mind but it might test your patience.
All of the screenshots were taken by me