Memories are a very precious thing. They are the sole bridge connecting us with a past that no longer exists. The ones we've loved and lost live on inside that sea of memory, and the experiences we hold dear often find a way to sink even deeper than that, possibly even becoming a part of who we are. That has been true of many of my favorite anime, movies, and games over the years, as I'm sure it has been for millions of other people that share this experience of life.

Some time around the midway mark of Unnamed Memory's first episode, I was struck with a terrible thought: "If I keep watching this, it's gonna ruin my memories of the novels." Like Mal in Inception, that thought never left my mind again for the duration of my viewing experience. That single thought ended up summarizing this catastrophic adaptation perfectly. It's not even worth watching for those who loved the novels; in fact, it should be avoided entirely by absolutely everyone.

Visually, this show utterly falls short of what it deserved. Almost every scene manages to be incredibly bland and uninspired, as if the studio wanted to do the absolute bare minimum to have a presentable product. The art style fails to capture that of the novels, the characters are weirdly-proportioned at times (why is Tinasha's head so massive?), and everything seems "flat", for lack of a better description. There are moments of decent-ish animation, but those are greatly overshadowed by a parade of washed-out colors and generic backgrounds. The aggressively-mediocre presentation sucks the soul out of the magical world of Unnamed Memory, a world that perhaps is best experienced through the eye of imagination anyway.

The music and sound is passable, and in fact may be the one redeeming area of this production... But watching this show for the music would be the equivalent of eating a dirt sandwich because you enjoy bread.

Of course, an anime is more than its animation, and a great plot can save even a low-budget show. Unfortunately, there is no excusing what studio ENGI did here. The LN is absolutely full of what I'd call "moments in time." These moments feel incredibly real, and pull you into the story with great clarity and immediacy (if you've read it, you understand). The anime seems to view these moments as hindrances to reaching a quota, and it shows. It skips over an astonishing amount of content, hitting the major narrative events like that one PowerPoint presentation you wrote in college at 11 p.m. the night before it was due. The result is neither worthwhile for LN readers nor enjoyable for first-timers. The main plot loses it's luster without the character development that supports it, and the jarring amount of off-screen romantic progress transforms the carefully measured, nuanced dance of Oscar and Tinasha's relationship into an out-of-control train barrelling downhill without reason. There's no denying it: this is an unmitigated disaster.

Unfortunately, studio ENGI will be slaughtering the second half of this wonderful LN series as well, as a second season has been announced. The only upside to this is that the author of the LNs will (hopefully) be getting paid for this adaptation of their hard work. It must be sickening for the author to watch their beloved story get butchered like this... It's genuinely sad to see.

To sum it up: don't watch this show. Just don't. To anyone who saw potential in Oscar and Tinasha's relationship in spite of the awful adaptation, please read the novels. A believable, gritty world of magic and intrigue awaits you, a world that studio ENGI tried their hardest to erase. As I watched this anime, the wonderful imaginary worlds that this novel had carefully crafted in my mind were slowly being overwritten by bland, lifeless, inferior recreations.

And ultimately, the world inside those memories was too precious to throw away.