Without question, the biggest thing Tasokare Hotel has going for it is its fantastic setting. It’s full of the outright supernatural—i.e., bedrooms changing shape when no one is looking to help jog the memories of their inhabitants, and staff and guests with disconcerting features, but is still based within the all-too-normal structure of your average hotel. Moreover, the nature of how the hotel works allows each episode to be its little mystery centered around one of the guests and the circumstances that have led to them ending up at death’s door. This is facilitated through a cast of enjoyable characters, namely the hotel’s staff.
The main character—and our audience proxy—is Neko, an idol-obsessed girl who is having difficulties figuring out her true identity. However, while she can’t seem to unlock her own memories, she has a unique talent for helping the other residents of the hotel remember their own pasts, leading to her joining the hotel staff. She performs the role of the fish-out-of-water (who asks all the basic questions we, as the audience, need to have answered) and the detective for each week’s mystery.
Throughout these first few episodes, however, it becomes clear that she is the overarching mystery of the series. Some rules we discover about the guests and how they recover their memories don’t seem to apply to her. Moreover, her natural intuition and deductive reasoning skills seem in direct contrast to her often hot-headed personality, making her an enigma in and of herself.
Of course, she’s not alone in her efforts to help the guests at the hotel. She is joined by Atori, a man who worked at a hotel in the real world and has a love for music but can’t seem to figure out anything about himself beyond that. Then there are Ruri—who is something between a tsundere and a dandere—and the flame-headed Hotel Manager who, despite being comic relief, absolutely knows far more than what he’s letting on.
With this core cast of characters, the anime falls into a set pattern. A guest arrives at the hotel, Neko helps recover their memories, and we learn about their lives and tragic near-deaths. Within these first three episodes, the first two of these one-off mysteries are rather mundane, with one of them being painfully cliché to the point that it has very little in the way of actual emotional impact. The third episode’s mystery, however, is a big step in the right direction. While it is still more than a little predictable, it opens up a lot of story options going forward and adds some much-needed interpersonal conflict to the cast.
On the animation side of things, the show definitely looks better than average. The character designs are clean and consistent throughout and the individual rooms are as detailed as they are different. There is also a great use of color, with the ambient twilight sun adding to the overall supernatural feeling of the anime. This isn’t a show with a lot of dynamic action, it’s mostly characters talking or searching rooms. However, what action there is does look decent enough.
As for the music, neither the opening nor the ending were shown during the press screening. The show’s normal soundtrack is unobtrusive to the point that I admit to not noticing the music at all. But since nothing stood out negatively, that means it was doing its job just fine.
All in all, Tasokare Hotel is an anime that feels similar to the 2015 classic Death Parade in terms of its setting and story framework but lacks the complexity of situations and powerful, emotional moments that made that anime stand out, at least in these first three episodes anyway. While they are entertaining enough in their right thanks to the world-building and main characters, this is a series that will live or die based on how interesting these “mysteries of the week” are, and how invested we become in the overarching mysteries of those working at the hotel. These three episodes build a firm foundation and I’m interested in seeing the stories built upon it going forward.
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