Another Code: Recollection Has A Lot of Charm and Deserves to Be Known

Nintendo is quite known for having a vast library of first-party IPs (Intellectual Property) that generally hold a lot of love from their respective fans. While it’s absolutely possible to keep track of them all, it’s unfortunate just how many are left behind while others are getting almost yearly releases. For every Mario Party that gets announced, Custom Robo continues to collect dust on the Gamecube. For every Pokemon entry that gets pushed out the door, Elite Beat Agents watches while it’s left on the DS. For every Legend of Zelda that’s polished to perfection, the Mother/Earthbound story goes untold and incomplete outside of Japan’s GBA finale. In the midst of all the fun, it’s sad to see which franchises get left to the wayside.

However, not all stories fade in the sands of time. In the era of the Nintendo Switch, we’ve seen multiple series get another chance in the spotlight, both first and third-party. The World Ends With You, Endless Ocean, Famicom Detective Club; these are all series that finally got releases after years of being dormant on their respective consoles. That’s exactly the case for Another Code: Recollection.

For the uninitiated, the series began in 2005 on the Nintendo DS as Another Code: Two Memories in Europe and Trace Memory in North America. Playing within a similar puzzle narrative genre as Hotel Dusk and Last Window, you play as 13-year-old Ashley Mizuki Robbins who gets lost entangled in a web of mysteries and puzzles as she tries to find her father on a forgotten island. It was a unique take in the video game landscape that was a lot more tranquil and mindful of its time.

This game would get a 2009 sequel on the Wii in the form of Another Code R: A Journey Into Lost Memories, but only localized in English in Europe. Taking place two years after the events of the first game, Ashley is back to re-connect with her father after being absent for much of her childhood. Unfortunately, her father’s accidentally became enveloped in work again not long after the first game and Ashley’s left to her own devices as a new story unfolds. The sequel roughly a similar gameplay structure as its predecessor (puzzles interwoven with the story), but the stakes are slightly higher in this one as you reach the end.

For the sake of not divulging spoilers, that’s as much as I can tell you all; the best way for you to get the full experience yourself is to play the game to the very end, or at least watch someone else do it.

Now we come to the present day, sort of, with the remake of both games wrapped up in a collection that I had the hardest time finding a physical copy for. Released on Nintendo Switch in January of 2024 after being announced in a Nintendo Direct on Sept. 14, 2023, this came as a surprise to all of us. When I tell you that no one saw this coming, I truly mean it. This series along with Hotel Dusk, Elite Beat Agents, and others were considered far too niche for Nintendo to remember, especially with how its original developer Cing went defunct in 2010. However, lo and behold, Another Code gets another chance in the limelight, and there was a lot of love poured into its development.

My personal experience with Another Code was only peripheral until recently. I remember seeing traces of Trace Memory being written about in a long forgotten book, and it getting a mention here and there in video essays, but not much past that. So when my local library had the game available for sign-out, I took the chance and completed the experience across multiple nights in a week.

The games really takes their time with how they conduct the experience, but not in a way that’s difficult to get through. If anything, the pacing was really well structured so that the player could explore each world without feeling too padded or too rushed. That could also be attributed to the chosen art style – cell shaded graphics with a more softer tone and lighter colours really help ease the player into the narrative. What seals the experience in a nice package is the sound design really letting the world speak for itself in a way that immerses you in all the action. Beautiful hues, storylines with satisfying payoffs, and perhaps one of the best songs I’ve heard from a video game in a long while; It’s all here, and it plays wonderfully.

It might not be the most in-depth narrative born out of a Bong Joon-Ho movie, but it’s one that I definitely could see families getting wrapped up in. We see Ashley and her world develop as the story progresses, and in turn we get to see her grow. In a way, it’s a coming-of-age story that really hones in on its themes of curiosity, relationships, and grief while keeping things relatively small-scale. In doing so, Nintendo published something special that, frankly, a lot of the movie industry could really learn from.

I really enjoyed my experience with this game, and the developers really did something special with this one. As Nintendo Life video producer Zion Grassl puts it, “While the story and simplistic gameplay could be somewhat lost or underappreciated by adults, I think Another Code: Recollection will be most enjoyed by the youth“. If you’re one for something with a more emotional but still light-hearted journey, bring this story into your life.