I remember being fascinated by Another Code: Two Memories when I first saw it in the pages of Edge magazine back in the early 2000s. An oddball DS game was always something to pay attention to, but this was one in which the main character had their own DS inside the game too. Or rather, they had a DAS, an in-game gadget that just happened to look exactly like that gorgeously angular first design of the DS. “Is it product placement when it’s your own product being placed?” asked Edge, or words to that effect. New worlds and new wonder. I miss the early 2000s.
Another Code: RecollectionPublisher: NintendoDeveloper: Cing/NintendoPlatform: Played on SwitchAvailability: Out 19th January on Switch.
If my memory is correct, Two Memories came out at the start of the DS’s lifespan. Now, it’s back with us, to bustle the Switch off to its own personal Grey Havens. I’ve been playing the new remake this week and it’s been a real journey. There’s loads it turns out I’ve forgotten, loads that I suspect has changed, but there’s one thing that has remained absolutely the same.
Before I get to that: Another Code: Recollection combines Two Memories and its sequel, R: A Journey into Memories, which was previously only released in Europe and Japan and came out for the Wii. Both games have been thoroughly reworked for the Switch. I knew that a DS game from 2005 or whatever would need some tweaks, but as far as I can tell, both games have new graphics and a new control scheme. As far as I can tell – I’ve played all of Two Memories in the new collection, but I’m still early on in R: A Journey into Memories – they’ve been given new puzzles too, and while the narratives seem to follow the same beats, there’s been a little quiet reworking to keep things sweet.
This is mostly, I suspect, because Recollection essentially combines both games into one big game. You can’t choose R: A Journey into Memories from the title screen at first, you have to work your way through Two Memories to get to it. And a lot of work has been done to join the two games so they feel even more like separate chapters of the same story than they did already. (In putting them together like this, incidentally, something really interesting occurs: Ashley, the white-haired teen protagonist, ages in between the games. She’s an early teen in Two Memories and a rather more (justifiably) grumpy older teen in R. Seeing characters not just aging but changing like this is a bit like spotting a shift in the weather in an open-world game. It doesn’t happen much, and it gave me pause.)