What is a quick and easy way to make an anime character relatable to the audience? Amnesia. No, it’s not that we have all had our bouts amnesia in daily life. In fact, actual amnesia is rather rare in reality. Instead, making an anime character have amnesia is essentially making them a blank slate.
As they explore their world, we feel like we are learning about all these characters as the main character learns about them. It gives us a sort of subconscious bond with them as well as intriguing us to unravel what terrible thing happened to them that made them lose their memory.
While it is not as commonly used in modern anime due to a constant shift from overused tropes only to have them replaced by newer, soon-to-be overused tropes, amnesia used to be a pretty popular trait to give to a main character in an anime series. If you are looking for anime where the main character has amnesia, give these anime recommendations a try.
Best Anime With Amnesia
Golden Time
While Golden Time is a rom-com, it also adds a big dose of drama in there as the main character deals with his amnesia. As he slowly regains his memories, he begins to grapple with a bit of an existential crisis.
He was in love with a girl before he lost his memories, but he fell in love with a new girl after he lost them. Furthermore, he is concerned that regaining his memories would fundamentally change the person he became without his memories.
While amnesia is often used because it is easy to use, Golden Time does well to explore those essential questions.
SSSS Gridman
Gridman starts with the main character waking up in the home of a classmate after apparently passing out on the street.
He has no memories, and discovers that he can see giant kaiju that are standing still and overlooking the city. Later, when a kaiju attacks the city, he discovers that he can fuse with Gridman, a being inside an old computer, and fight them.
While it would be spoilers to say why, by the end of Gridman the use of the amnesia trope is actually kind of perfectly used in a new way that has never been done in anime before.
Amnesia
I mean, it’s right there. It’s the title. This anime adaptation of a visual novel follows a girl who has lost all her memories. She is besieged by a series of handsome men that she has some connection to and begins to unravels that.
As the visual novel in question was an otome game, the main character serves as a stand-in for the player as they woo a man of their choice. The anime doesn’t differ much from that.
The main character’s amnesia is pretty handy as an excuse to not make her much of a character at all, but allows them to develop the male characters as much as they want.
Angel Beats
Angel Beats details the afterlife of a main character and his group of peers who have died. Having lived miserable lives while alive, they are given a shot to enjoy their youth in the afterlife.
While the main character himself has forgotten his previous life, he eventually recovers those memories.
As the characters are all dead and in that specific place for having bad childhoods, his back story reveal is just one more sad story to add to the pile of sad stories.
07-Ghost
As an older series, you will find a more standard use of amnesia here. The main character can’t remember who he is, and yet ends up being pulled into a political conspiracy after being involved in an assassination attempt on a higher-ranking individual.
As you follow the plot of the series, you unravel what he has to do with what has been going on. His amnesia is essentially a way of preserving mystery as they gradually tell his back story.
Elfen Lied
You get to see Lucy/Nyu’s true colors in the very first minutes of the series. It makes the bullet she takes to the head and her related amnesia a nice set up. You know she is a killing machine, was held against her will in a government facility, and now you are enticed to discover the why of it all.
Eden of the East
Sure, you can have a main character without memories and most people won’t give that trope a second glance. What made people initially interested is that the main character of Eden of the East shows up without memories and naked in front of The White House in the United States.
Luckily, the first person who stops is a Japanese tourist that helps get his nudity sorted out before the police would have sorted it. From there, he tries to regain his memories, as is tradition, but what you learn isn’t a character story so much as it is unraveling a past terror attack.
Kanon
Jun Maeda series are in love with the old tropes, and they often work for the emotional drama that fans have come to expect from him. While Kanon is one of his older and often more forgotten series, it wields amnesia fairly well.
A boy grew up in a rural area, something jarring happened, and he left. When he returns seven years later, he has no memory of the time he spent there.
This makes it somewhat awkward when he meets a series of girls who remember him but all clearly have traumatic stories that are waiting to be unraveled as he regains his memories.
Casshern Sins
Typically, amnesia lets main characters pretend to be nice and normal people only for them to sometimes discover that they were absolutely awful people before they lost their memories. In Casshern Sins, due to everyone trying to kill him, there is no mystery as to what sort of a person he was.
As it follows once immortal robots that are suddenly deteriorating, Casshern Sins really makes you want to watch in order to find out why. Amnesia is part of creating that unraveling mystery and serves the series well.
Haibane Renmei
It is pretty common to have one character with amnesia, it is less common to be dealing with a whole group. Yet, that is Haibane Renmei.
All the Haibane have no memories prior to being born as fully formed women from a cocoon one day. What they are supposed to do in their new reality is often kept from them, seemingly purposefully so.
Haibane Renmei is all about metaphor and symbolism, much of it all pretty obvious. However, it is the melancholy mystery that hangs about the air that makes it worth watching.
Planet With
Anime can occasionally be very creative. You will find that anime series that lean on the amnesia trope are interesting, but often not quite as unique as other series that forgo or subvert tropes. Not Planet With, though.
This series takes mecha and science fiction and splashes in a healthy dose of surrealism that makes it something wholly unique.
Of course the main character has amnesia. It is one of the less contrived reasons as to why he would put up with suddenly being taken care of by a maid and a giant cat after his parents died. It also makes it more interesting when he is suddenly compelled to fight the seven heroes that were just defending the city.
So he’s actually the villain? You don’t know because he doesn’t know, but we certainly are enticed to watch and find out.
Bee Train’s “Girls With Guns” Trilogy of Noir, Madlax, and El Cazador de la Bruja
Yes, I certainly could have – Nay, should have – made three separate entries for these three separate anime series conveniently made by the same studio, same director, and meme’d as a trilogy despite being standalone in plot.
However, the reason why I did not is that I could not really think of three separate ways to essentially say the same thing.
Perhaps the meme should be modified from the “Girls with Guns” trilogy into the “Girls With Guns Who Have Amnesia That is Key to the Whole Plot of the Show” trilogy, because that sums everything up.
To be fair, one notable difference is that the “girl with the gun” in El Cazador de la Bruja still retains her memories, but it is her companion that has the aforementioned plot-defining amnesia.
Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom
Although also made by Bee Train and featuring a girl with a gun, this series is not part of the trilogy because technically a man is the main character.
That is really the only difference from the aforementioned three series above, though. It still features a main character who has amnesia and it is the key to the entire plot of the series.
The interesting caveat is that as the plot progresses, you discover that the amnesia is kind of multi-layered. As in brainwashing on top of brainwashing for a thoroughly scrubbed brain.
Island
As is common with anime protagonists, a man washes onto an island with no memories. The twist is that what he can remember is that he is a time traveler and became one to save a certain girl.
After meeting a series of girls, he begins to unravel the mystery of his own memories and the complicated and sinister mysteries on the island.
Writing a good time travel story is tough, but this one fills the plot holes well enough and the reveals it pursues are interesting. It is a show good at sparking curiosity, as be should necessary when using the amnesia trope, but can have some other writing issues that ruin the pacing and tone at times.
One Week Friends
Amnesia isn’t a new trope to romantic comedy anime, One Week Friends at least uses it in a pretty interesting way.
As the title says, a guy meets a girl who loses her memories at the end of every week. She starts keeping a diary so she can remember him, and their relationship progresses the best that it can given the circumstances.
It is a pretty cute series, but always has a bit of melancholy to it due to her affliction.
Dusk Maiden of Amnesia
Again, it’s in the title. This series follows both a student at a school and a female ghost that has been haunting said school for a few decades.
While the series focuses on other paranormal mysteries on the school grounds, the overall plot of it is uncovering why the female ghost is haunting the building and how she died.
While that is a pretty good overall mystery that should have sustained the series, they actually solve it faster than expected, leaving time to focus instead on the budding romance between the student and the ghost.
Danganronpa The Animation
At first, it doesn’t really seem apparent that Naegi has any amnesia. He is his normal self and perfectly confident in his own personality.
However, the twist is that he, as well as almost everyone else, has some memory loss that is revealed later in the series.
The reveal of that lost period of time helps makes a little more sense as to why they in particular were trapped inside a school and told to murder a classmate if they wish to escape.
K
While K is a series with multiple main characters, they don’t all have amnesia. The series splits focus between the struggle of the various Color Kings and one mysterious Colorless King that is throwing things into chaos. Of course the colorless one can’t remember anything about himself.
That said, his memory recovery is used to make the confusing weaving web of plot lines in K all make sense by the end.
Dorohedoro
Every anime needs a problem to spur the main character into action. In Dorohedoro, the problem is that his head was turned into a lizard head, he doesn’t have any memories from before that happened, and he wants to know why.
While that is the driving factor behind the main character’s motivations, the anime actually follows that plot thread very little. Mostly he keeps getting pulled into situations that might gradually hold some answers for him.
Guin Saga
Like Dorohedoro, but in a more traditional fantasy setting, Guin Saga also details the story of a man who was cursed with an animal head that also wiped his memories clean. This time, the main character has a leopard head.
Again, like Dorohedoro, figuring out why he has an animal head and no memories is what drives Guin, but the actual plot of the show is about him protecting two young royals on the run that may also just so happen to lead him to his own answers somewhere long down the line.
Durarara
Durarara is a series where they really is no singular main character. All the characters have their own plot lines that will eventually all weave together. As such, while most people have their memories intact, Celty, as arguably a “mainer” character than most, is a dullahan missing her head and, along with it, her memories.
Unlike other anime series where the main character often suddenly clears up their amnesia for some plot-contrived reasons, Celty has a very clear path to getting her memories back. Find her head and the memories return with it.
Utawaremono
With Utawaremono, a series where the main character has amnesia and a mask he cannot remove, the lesson from the past few entries on this list is that you should never let someone change how your head looks (or steal it) if you want your memories to remain intact.
While the series follows the main character Hakuoro helping a village of demi-humans, much of the series is also about discovering who he was.
They are actually pretty clever in setting up a bit of a red herring on that front wherein the truth is actually a lot more complicated.
Chaika: The Coffin Princess
Much like the aforementioned Danganronpa, the memory loss of the main character isn’t immediately apparent.
The titular Chaika talks like a child, and a poorly socialized one at that. While she seems a bit off, her mind seems plenty intact.
However, you will later learn that it was just a common amnesia situation of the post-memory loss personality just becoming the main one. Her previous memories were removed as part of an experiment likely so as to not distract her from her intended purpose.
Zombieland Saga
I imagine it must be confusing dying, being revived, running from zombies, and discovering that you yourself are a zombie too, then told you are forming an idol group.
While Zombieland Saga is a wonderful comedy, passable idol show, and interesting take on zombies, there is actually a decent amount of character development in it as well.
For much of the first season, Sakura is balancing her new zombie idol life with trying to remember her past before her death which will shape who she becomes as a character in the second season.
Angels of Death
In Angels of Death, Rachel wakes up with no memories and discovers she is trapped in a building where each floor is the hunting ground of a different murderer. She teams up with one killer to climb the floors and find a way out.
As is traditional with any floor-based plot device, each new level uncovers just a little bit more of Rachel’s past, which is ultimately the key as to why the innocent-looking girl is in such a not innocent place.
Do you know more anime recommendations where the main character is suffering from amnesia? Let fans know in the comments section below.
