The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Unnamed Memory Act.2

Five hundred years after Oscar sacrificed himself to save Tinasha, the kingdom of Tuldarr is thriving. Prince Oscar of Farsas arrives seeking a cure for his curse and is guided to a strange underground chamber beneath the castle, where a girl lies sleeping. It's Tinasha, having put herself to sleep to await Oscar's lifetime once again, and she vows to break his curse for him. But the king of Tuldarr wants Tinasha to marry his son, and sinister witch forces are moving against both Farsas and Tuldarr. Do Oscar and Tinasha have a chance, or is history doomed to repeat itself?

Unnamed Memory Act.2 is based on a light novel series by Kuji Furumiya. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

I'm not a monster – I recognize that part of what irritated me so much about the first season of Unnamed Memory was that after building up a romance between Oscar and Tinasha, it swiftly undid everything. So I do like that the second season's first episode opens with Oscar going to Tuldarr and discovering Tinasha waiting for him, even if he has no idea who she is. There's something lovely about true love transcending time like that, despite Oscar and Tinasha not being the same people they were in the first timeline.

Regrettably, that's where the warm and fuzzy feelings end, because the series almost immediately returns to its old, unfortunate tricks. We barely get to know this Oscar or a Tinasha who ruled as queen of Tuldarr for a time before they're suddenly back in Farsas so Tinasha can break the curse that Oscar apparently still suffers from. There's no mention of how or when Tinasha put herself into a Sleeping Beauty state or whether or not the current king of Tuldarr is her descendant. The plot merrily skips from point to point without any information in between to make it flow like a story. It's like the PowerPoint version of a plot.

Even more upsetting is that barely any time is devoted to Oscar and Tinasha themselves. Oh, they're on screen a lot, but nothing meaningful happens. In large part, that's due to the aforementioned storytelling technique; knowing that Oscar takes Tinasha to a festival isn't the same as seeing them walk around the festival together and get to know one another. Introducing witchy villains by having them do bad things doesn't make the same impact as having them organically show up in the plot for reasons other than making Tinasha look powerful. It's a barely articulated skeleton of a story.

The art's most successful venture is Tinasha, who looks distinctly younger and more innocent than in the first season. Having her wear white instead of navy blue does a lot, and there's a sweetness about her that was lacking in the world-weary witch of season one. The animation has maybe one glorious moment when Oscar attacks from Nark's back, but otherwise, this is fairly workmanlike, and the voices do nothing to change that.

Obviously, I'm not in the mood to humor a second season of a series that can't be bothered to tell its story in an impactful way. If you were devastated by how things ended for Oscar and Tinasha last time, it may be worthwhile to see them attempt to get together a second time, but as of this episode, it doesn't look like Unnamed Memory learned its lesson.

I actually didn't think the first season of Unnamed Memory was that bad. Granted, I just came out of watching a ton of leftovers from the fall season worse than this, and they all make Unnamed Memory look like The Godfather by comparison. And hey, as a guy who worked on a farm as a teenager, I gotta give Unnamed Memory props for being one of the few shows I've seen that correctly demonstrate how to hold horse reins (no really, I get irritated over how many shows get this wrong). Still, in all, there's no denying that Unnamed Memory's first season was mid-tier at best and very, very rough around the edges. Even if you've never read the light novels, you can tell that there was a lot of plot and substance cut out since the slash marks are all over the place. A lot of anime are adapted to advertise their respective source material, but here was a show that felt so truncated that it was practically ribbing us and going, “So yeah, you're going to read the light novels to fill in the blanks here, right? Eh? Am I right, nudge nudge, wink wink?”

I didn't mind this new season premiere, although I did notice one huge problem: this should have been the second episode of the new season and not the first. Since the season one finale catalyzed this episode's events, waiting almost an entire year to see how things turn out is a bit jarring. The penultimate episode of last season had Oscar Farsas and Tinasha finally marrying after so much build-up, so their wedding could have been the appropriate and more fitting note to close things out. The following episode, the season finale, where Farsas has to travel back in time, feels like a more proper first episode to this season, as it would have provided an opportunity to reintroduce the characters and lore of the world, as well as bring back an important plot point. And it would be more effective in setting the stage for this vaguely Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya-esque arc involving parallel timelines and amnesia to boot. But that's just me. While I don't expect this new season of Unnamed Memory to redefine fantasy anime anytime soon, I think there will at least be enough substance there to encourage fans to read the light novels and fill in whatever storytelling blanks will inevitably be left out of this new season.