- Why is it that creatures need memories?
Sianos B. Sian has had a long night. After staying up late working on the latest installment of Concealed Memory, his weekly column for the Central News, he's more than ready to head home. But before he can make it out the door, a woman comes knocking with an urgent request. One that she's not about to let him refuse...
Thus, he finds himself counseling a girl called B.D. Having lost her memory and eyesight in a tragic accident, B.D. needs his help to uncover her forgotten past.
An RPG Maker Adventure Game designed by Yoshitaka Nishida, aka Finger Puppet. First released in 1998, it won the grand prize in a competition held by the creators of RPG Maker. Later, Enterbrain created an Updated Re-release for the Playstation called "Forget Me Not -Palette-."
A translation by vgperson for the original version can be found here.
While the game is old, modern systems can usually run it; however, the colors may not always display properly.
This game contains instances of:
- All of the Other Reindeer: B.D. was socially isolated and treated horribly because of what her father did.
- Alliterative Name: Sianos B. Sian.
- Anachronic Order: B.D.'s memories jump around a lot. To help sort things out, each scene is numbered and named.
- Asshole Victim:
- Vector saw Macilt Krim as this. Unfortunately, he also lumped Krim's family into the same catagory.
- The Aging Man in the finale.
- Bad Liar: At the start of the game, when the Woman's trying to convince Sian to listen to her:Woman: "I look forward to your column every week, doctor! Er... What was it called, again?"
- Big Bad: The Aging Man is the one behind B.D.'s memory loss, which she spends the game fixing, as part of an experiment to make her and the other children of criminals into adults who will not inherit their parent's ways.
- Bittersweet Ending: B.D. regains her memories and is reunited with her mother. However, they have to keep running away from the police because of her mother's crimes, meaning there's little chance she'll ever get to have the normal life she wanted.
- Blood-Splattered Innocents: One of the first things B.D. remembers is red on her dress, which takes the form of red splotches.
- Bloody Handprint: Found on a wall in one Scene.
- Color Motif: Especially red.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: If B.D. runs out of 'health' in her memories, she complains that her head hurts, and ends the call. However, the next call simply puts her back in the starting room to try again.
- Decoy Protagonist: Sianos B. Sian is the character you control in the intro of the game and the one who introduces the plot, making it look like he will be the protagonist. But when he stars counseling B.D. over the phone, you control her instead, and the game is spent controlling her, with Sianos' only role being to grab the phone whenever B.D. 'dies'. Until the ending subverts it by revealing that 'Sianos' actually is B.D. working out her issues.
- Deliberately Monochrome: Combined with Splash of Color for the game's distinctive visual style. B.D.'s maze of thoughts is gray, with only splashes of red filled in. When Scenes are active, the room changes shades.
- Dreaming of Things to Come: Scene 11: A Distant Day's Dream, where B.D. recalls waking up from a nightmare where she'd gone blind.
- Girlish Pigtails: B.D. in the original game.
- Hard Truth Aesop: In-Universe: The moral of the "Just So" Story is that you shouldn't try to change yourself or become something you're not. Red Silhouette states that while they used to believe this was true, they've since changed their mind.
- Heel–Face Brainwashing: Zebub is trying to invoke this by erasing the memories of people deemed likely to become criminals.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Vector wrote The Inherited Sin, which claims that people who survive being victimized in terrible crimes are likely to become criminals themselves, and should be monitored closely. Vector himself was the Sole Survivor of a terrible crime, and his murderous revenge combined with his own writings led to him facing the death penalty.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: B.D. declares this near the end, just before going to face the Awful Truth anyway.
- Identity Amnesia: B.D. suffers from this; her name is just something she calls herself because it sticks out in her mind, and she isn't even sure if it's her real name or not.
- Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: B.D. must gather and place Shards in order to reconstruct her own memories.
- Journey to the Center of the Mind: B.D.'s maze of memories is the setting of the game, which she must go through to remember who she is.
- "Just So" Story: One is told in Scene 33, stating that the reason the moon waxes and wanes is its desire to become more like the sun or stars. However, it cannot become as big as the sun or as small as the stars, and thus is constantly changing, unable to mantain either charade.
- Lady in Red: The Red Silhouette, whom B.D. initially describes as just, well... feeling red.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Lassa Tobacco can cause a complete identity amnesia, which the founders of Zebub have been using to erase the identities of children born from criminals to suppress their 'natural' urges to commit crimes.
- Life Meter: Depicted as a meter filled with white rectangles. Moving from one room to the next, breaking through barriers, or certain other actions will deplete it, while finding memory Shards will extend her maximum amount of moves.
- Mama Bear: The Red Silhouette shoots the Aging Man for trying to have her daughter taken away.
- Meaningful Name: B.D. is eventually revealed to mean 'born of disorder', which was applied to children exposed to crimes.
- Once More, with Clarity: 'Final Scene: Palette' revisits Scene 46: Red of Beginning and the subsequent scenes, with B.D. finally remembering what happened.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: B.D., the heroine, does not remember her real name, and has to go on a Quest for Identity. Her real name is never given.
- No Name Given: The only characters known by their actual names are Sianos B. Sian (who is an in-universe fictional character), the Krim family members, and Retro Vector. Everyone else is either referred to by a nickname (the heroine B.D., which stands for born from disorder), a descriptor (Red Silhouette, Aging Man) or nothing at all (unimportant NPCs).
- Paparazzi: They are seen in Scene 17: Light and Crowds, hounding B.D. over the arrest of her father for the murder of the Krim family.
- Quest for Identity: B.D. has no memory of who she really is, and needs to go through a Journey to the Center of the Mind to recover her lost memories.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: B.D. agreed to live in Zebub and have her memories erased so that her father wouldn't be executed for murdering a family. When he broke out of prison and came to see her, he got fatally shot, and the Aging Man declared the project was a failure in her case.
- Shame If Something Happened: The Woman who enlisted Sian's aid to counsel B.D. and shot at him for his initial refusal makes it very clear that if he doesn't help, her gun might 'misfire' again.
- Show Within a Show: An unnamed one appears in the ending; it stars Sianos, a fictional psychiatrist who fights off bad guys, and B.D. based her alter ego off the show.
- Shut Up, Hannibal!: During the final scene, the Aging Man tells Red Silhouette that despite their experiment being 'reasonably successful,' some victims of violent crimes are destined to continue the cycle, to which Red Silhouette responds by blowing his brains out.
- Sins of Our Fathers:
- The Central Theme of the game is whether children of criminals will become criminal themselves, as asked by Vector's book, 'The Inherited Sin'. As it turns out, B.D.'s amnesia, and the amnesia of every inhabitant of Zebub, was intentionally induced to avert this and prevent the children of criminals from becoming criminals themselves.
- Canary's family was murdered by Vector because of Macilt Krim having robbed and killed his family.
- B.D. was isolated and made to suffer for her father Vector's crimes, including when somebody killed the stray cat that hung around her garden.
- Sole Survivor: Retro Vector survived the murder of their family by Macilt Krim, as did Canary Krim when Vector took revenge by killing the Krim family.
- Spoiler Title: Some of the Scene names reveal important details of the scene itself... Before you find the vital Shard. For instance, Scene 13: Straw Hat reveals what the present B.D. got from her father was long before you find the item in question.
- Tomato in the Mirror:
- B.D. is Retro Vector's daughter, and became part of the Zebub study in order to try and save him from being executed for his crimes.
- Sian is a persona created by B.D. that she retreated into after her trauma, based off a TV personality.
- Town with a Dark Secret: Zebub, where the game takes place, is one big human experiment where children of criminals are sent to live so they can have their memories wiped, in the hopes that they won't turn out like their parents.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: The minds behind the creation of Zebub want to prevent traumatized people from becoming criminals… by completely erasing their memories and identities.
