How Another Code: Recollection rewrote its villain in an empathetic way

Content warning: Discussions of topics including conversion therapy, death, familial abuse, and ableism

Major spoilers for all of the games in the Another Code series

When I began playing Another Code: Recollection (2024) earlier this year, I knew the game would diverge from its source materials. The original Another Code games were developed for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii systems, so major changes were needed to reconfigure the puzzles originally designed for dual screens and motion controls. Even with these gameplay changes, the narrative of Recollection was nearly identical to my memories of the original DS game, offering a fresh perspective, and modern polish, on a beloved childhood classic. The adaptation of its sequel for the Wii was also a delight, providing me with the opportunity to finally experience a story that was never localized for North American audiences.

However, I was unaware that while Recollection is structurally very similar to the original games, the sequel game’s narrative received a major overhaul. Various story beats and character motivations have been changed, rearranged, or outright omitted, with some elements and characters reframed and reimagined. Among these changes, the most personally striking was the radical difference in one character: Ryan Gray, a neurodivergent-coded antagonist originally presented as an unambiguous villain, but reinvented as a nuanced, sympathetic figure in the remake.

Between his interpersonal interactions, past traumas, low empathy, and flat affect, Ryan’s personality and actions resonated a great deal with the mannerisms I associated with neurodivergent people, including myself. A morally complex character written with surprising nuance and depth, I ended Recollection regarding Ryan as one of my favorite characters. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Ryan’s original iteration was not a guileful but generally sympathetic character, but a conniving and duplicitous villain. Even with these major moral differences, the original Ryan Gray is still a neurodivergent-coded character, having the same traits as his iteration in Recollection, but how these traits are presented in the game’s narrative is extremely different.

One might assume this change occurred due to a change in writing staff during the remake’s development, but this is unlikely as the Another Code series’ lead writer and creator, Suzuki Rika, worked on Recollection as the game’s Scenario and Story writer. It made me wonder what could have caused such a dramatic shift in this specific character’s role and portrayal in the fifteen years since his original creation, and how this change might reflect a gradual shift in how society views neurodivergent-coded characters and traits.

Dr. Ryan Gray in Another Code: R – A Journey Into Lost Memories (2009)

Dr. Ryan Gray in Another Code: R – A Journey into Lost Memories (2009) is a scientist and researcher who the protagonist, Ashley Mizuki Robins, meets during a barbeque at Lake Juliet. He was allegedly tasked by Ashley’s father, Richard Robins, to watch over her while Richard dealt with a security problem within the J.C. Valley labs. A loquacious person with an intense interest in the field of memory research, Ryan builds up a positive rapport with Ashley as they establish a connection through their shared admiration of Ashley’s late mother, Sayoko Robins. Ryan’s genuine interest in Ashley’s thoughts and feelings serves as a positive contrast to her father, who had been absent in her life for several months and left her less than an hour after being reunited again. Ryan is also shown to be helpful to others, as he tries to assist another character, Elizabeth Alfred, in locating her lost music player, showing he is someone the people of Lake Juliet rely on and trust.  

Even so, some aspects of Ryan’s behavior are questionable and concerning, especially when it involves the tone he uses when talking with Ashley. From their first meeting at the barbeque, Ryan has a habit of undermining and dismissing the various flashbacks Ashley has been experiencing as she revisits Lake Juliet. When Ashley tells Ryan that she remembers seeing him thirteen years ago, he tells her that she is mistaken, making her question whether the flashbacks she had been experiencing were genuine. There are also smaller, subtler ways in which Ryan talks that feel condescending and belittling but are still pleasant enough to make the player wonder if there was anything worth questioning.

During the game’s final two chapters, Ryan Gray’s full nature is finally revealed as a duplicitous and cruel person who constantly uses and deceives people to pursue his goals. This includes erasing Richard Robin’s memories so that he can no longer remember his daughter, attempting to overwrite Ashley’s memories with Sayoko’s, and threatening to shoot Ashley and her father.  In addition to his cruel actions, Ryan discusses how he finds Ashley’s emotional distress at her father’s memories being erased to be confusing, as he does not understand what could cause her to react so strongly. When Ashley begins crying, Ryan breaks his normally flat affect to angrily shout at her to stop, as he believes that tears are a “defense mechanism” used by “weak-hearted people” experiencing “unnecessary emotions.”

After temporarily stopping Ryan, and restoring Richard’s memories, Ashley soon discovers the reasons why Ryan chose to hurt so many people. Ryan Gray was the biological son of Judd Fitzgerald, the founder of J.C. Valley, and witnessed his mother die protecting him at a very young age. As a result of this, Ryan was wracked with grief, constantly crying, eventually closing himself off from the rest of the world and going entirely non-verbal. Not knowing what to do to help his son, Judd decided the best thing to do was to erase all of Ryan’s childhood memories and have a trusted family friend adopt and raise his son. 

In a cruel irony, Ryan grew up to be a scientist in his own right, leading to him being mentored, and later employed, by Judd, admiring and respecting him. As time went by, Ryan learned that Judd was his biological father, causing Ryan to feel immense self-loathing for admiring the man who erased his memories. Between this and Judd choosing Sayoko as his successor, Ryan plotted an elaborate revenge scheme against his father and the company he built, which ultimately led to Sayoko’s murder. By the end of the game, Ashley, while sympathetic to his backstory, has an extremely negative opinion of Ryan, saying that she will never forgive him for what he has done.

Ryan’s character in A Journey into Lost Memories is an unambiguous villain, whose actions in the game are presented as being truly despicable and unforgivable. He is also uncomfortably reminiscent of a variety of classic stereotypes many neurodivergent people are familiar with, particularly those of us on the autistic spectrum. The most notable being extremely, “abnormally,” emotionally detached from the rest of humanity, something that has been used to vilify autistics and people with low empathy. Just as traits associated with mental illness or neurodivergence are often portrayed as evil and frightening (from intrusive thoughts to so-called “split personalities”), “emotionless” villains are a stereotype throughout fictional media, with low emotionality and empathy often linked to a supposed lack of humanity.

This trope implies that individuals who do not experience “correct” or “appropriate” emotional responses to the world around them are “wrong” and must have their behavior “corrected” to suit the norm. Ryan’s childhood experience of having his father erase his memories to “heal” him during the natural process of grieving is also uncomfortably reminiscent of conversion therapy, made all the worse that the narrative seems to sympathize more with Judd Fitzgerald’s perspective than Ryan’s—much in the same way that a lot of media, fictional and non-fictional, sympathizes with the “struggles” of parents of autistic children rather than engaging with the perspective of the children themselves. 

While it is extremely doubtful that this was the intended message from the game’s writers, Ryan’s story still plays into long-standing stereotypes and paints an extremely negative picture of people who do not meet societal standards of neurotypical, making us seem dangerous, untrustworthy, and abnormal. This is what makes Ryan’s story in Another Code: Recollection all the more startling given the major contrasts involving their character and presentation.

Ryan Gray in Another Code: Recollection (2024)

The Ryan Gray that Ashley meets in Another Code: Recollection is nearly identical to the original iteration of his character if one solely compares them on surface-level details. Ryan Gray meets Ashley during a barbeque that her father holds at Lake Juliet, introducing himself as a behavioral psychologist allegedly working at J.C. Valley. The two soon develop a positive rapport as they discuss Sayoko Robins, and how memories shape a person. The major differences between the two iterations are how Ryan’s subtle dismissive language is not present in the 2024 version, and the few remaining instances have been majorly re-framed. For example, in both games, Ryan tells Ashley that she is susceptible to “false recall” in that she misremembers certain events that did not occur. The original Ryan Gray uses this as a weapon to gaslight Ashley into doubting herself, while Recollection’s Ryan uses this to establish a shared connection, as Ryan also has gaps in his memory which he concludes are signs of misremembering his past. Ryan is presented with some parallels to the protagonist, already inviting a level of audience interest and sympathy not nearly as present in the original.

That being said, there are several oddities surrounding Ryan that the player observes as the game progresses. The first is his uncanny ability to appear and disappear from a scene in seconds, almost as if he teleported himself to the area. Then there is his second scene in the game, where Ashley temporarily experiences a strange, sudden headache while talking with Ryan at his cottage. Finally, there is the strange phenomenon where the only people capable of seeing Ryan are Ashley and Ryan’s collaborator, Sofia Callaghan, while Richard and the current director of J.C. Valley, Rex Alfred, are both incapable of seeing him.

These curiosities continue after Ashley thwarts Ryan’s plans to implant Sayoko’s memories into her using the ANOTHER, a machine created to alter memories, and confronts Ryan about what he has done. Unlike his original iteration, Ryan is immediately repentant upon learning that Sayoko had built a failsafe to prevent the ANOTHER from being exploited and helped her daughter retain her memories. His dialogue and body language show great sadness and grief, expressing his wishes to see Sayoko and realizing that this will never happen. After Ashley asks Ryan to explain why he tried to revive Sayoko in her body, he gives a cryptic farewell and quickly vanishes before her eyes. And yet, despite only being a room apart and being able to see clearly through the connecting window, Ryan was still completely invisible to Richard and Rex while this exchange took place.

As was the case in A Journey into Lost Memories, Ryan’s backstory and motivations are soon revealed. Just like in the original game, Ryan was originally the son of Judd Fitzgerald and witnessed his mother die after she protected him, which led to him being so consumed by grief that he stopped expressing himself and became entirely non-verbal. Unsure of what to do, Judd decided that entirely removing Ryan’s memories would be the best method to help “bring [his son] back”. From here, Recollection adds two major variations to this version of Ryan’s backstory. The first change is that Judd used the prototype version of ANOTHER to extract his memories, with the assistance of two of his mentees, Sayoko and Rex, and had those memories stored in “liquid memory” developed in the J.C. Valley labs. The second, and most devastating, change is that, unlike the original game, the experiment was a catastrophic failure, and Ryan Fitzgerald died.

Shortly after Ryan’s death, Sayoko observed a strange phenomenon in the liquid memory extracted from him; instead of remaining static, the memories began to change and form new recollections. In other words, a new consciousness was being formed from the late Ryan Fitzgerald’s memories, which, combined with said mind becoming integrated with J.C. Valley’s computer system, gradually led to the creation of the person we now know as Ryan Gray.  Sayoko tried to relay this finding to Judd, but he dismissed her findings as nonsense, making her one of the only people who knew of Ryan’s existence. Ryan’s “physical” appearances were optical illusions created by highjacking the security cameras connected to the ANOTHER machine, temporarily impacting specific people’s perception to suit his purposes, thus making it seem like he is present in a space. Ryan’s goals were motivated by an existential desire to find a purpose in his existence, and to meet with the one person who truly knew him one last time, before his physical form of liquid memory completely dissolves.  

Among these diverse changes from the source material, the most striking is that Ryan is painted as a morally complex character in Recollection rather than the unambiguous villain he was in A Journey into Lost Memories. Ashley calls him out on his actions and methods but is also sympathetic to him and willing to learn why he pursued the path he did to meet Sayoko again.  After a long discussion, Ashley promises Ryan that she won’t forget him, fulfilling his deepest wish to have someone in the world remember him before he finally passes on. Ashley’s view and treatment of Ryan by the end of the game are starkly different from the original, and the audience is invited to share her care and sympathy for him. Ryan’s neurodivergent coding is also not vilified in this game. While he is still notably “different” from the rest of the cast of characters, it is clear that these differences are not something to fear, but are just a part of Ryan’s personality and the unique circumstances of his existence.

Recollection also shifts the narrative from sympathizing with Judd’s perspective to focusing on Ryan’s thoughts and feelings on his father. Instead of sepia-toned sentimental photographs, the recollections are almost like something out of a horror movie, with dark shades of purple and slightly distorted visuals painting a picture of a man so determined to “fix” his child at any cost that he ended up killing him. This version of the game’s narrative makes the parallels to conversion therapy feel even more visceral, showing how parents of neurodivergent children may go through extreme actions to “save” their children from something they perceive as “wrong” when the reality is considerably more complex. With this process framed so horrifyingly, the audience’s sympathy now lies with Ryan, and Judd’s rejection of his child’s autonomy is presented as truly villainous. 

A sign of change

When I originally completed Another Code: Recollection, my feelings about Ryan Gray were complicated. He was a flawed and multilayered character, whose actions were indefensible in many ways, and yet he was still treated with compassion and kindness by Ashley. Learning about how much Ryan has changed since his original appearance in A Journey into Lost Memories has caused me to reframe my viewpoint on the character in various ways, with the greatest takeaway being appreciation for those changes.

Throughout my life, I have seen the ways narratives, both fiction and non-fiction, vilify neurodivergence in numerous ways, reinforcing myths and stereotypes of our community being dangerous and untrustworthy in comparison to our neurotypical counterparts. Seeing the creators of the original Another Code games go back and radically rewrite a character who, whether intentionally or not, was written into the stereotypes of a neurodivergent villain, is something rare and remarkable in many ways. While I would not go as far as to say that the new Ryan Gray is a “good” example of representation—as noted above, it’s difficult to know if he was intentionally written as a neurodivergent character, and one could make the argument that he dies twice in the game—he is still leaps and bounds a much better character now than he was fifteen years ago.

These changes make me hope that, however gradually, people’s perceptions of neurodiversity are slowly changing for the better. Writers may be reflecting on the neurodivergent characters they had written in the past, and considering how they would change or re-approach them with their current knowledge. I won’t assume Suzuki Rika, and the rest of the Another Code: Recollection story team, had these thoughts and feelings in mind when developing the game, but it is still heartening to know that they willingly made these changes and that modern players will be able to experience this version of the story. I can only hope this is a sign of things to come, with more stories that treat neurodivergent characters with empathy and nuance rather than fear and scorn.