English Dub Review: Afterlost “Lost”

Local delivery man has the worst day.

Overview:

There’s one survivor of an unnatural disaster, and everyone is after her.

Our Take:

This starts out focusing on the after lost, a cataclysmic event that wiped out the whole city. People and buildings both seem to have disintegrated, and the government has quarantined the area. The people who were caught up in the incident were declared missing, as no bodies have been found. There was only one survivor– a young girl who has no idea why this is happening to her. Because of her value as a specimen and someone who might know the secrets of the disaster, many different organizations are after her. It also seems that she has some sort of secret superpower, one that allows her to summon the people caught up in the incident.

Overall, I’m not really that hooked on the story first-thing. Even though a lot happens, and there’s no question that there is a lot of intrigue, something about the presentation just feels flat. It almost feels like they’re trying really hard to ramp up the mystery without getting us truly attached.

I think this in general, now that I’ve seen a couple of instances of this in action, is an unfortunate inevitability of being a product adapted from a visual novel. For all intents and purposes, visual novels do read like novels; they are text-heavy, and so the pace isn’t as fast. They have time to ease the reader into the world at hand, to make their story feel more believable. Also, the time spent starts to endear readers to the characters, so we get attached to them even if not much happens in the story. With anime, there isn’t any of that- each season running only goes for about 12 episodes standardly, so what would normally be a 50+ hour VN has to be heavily compressed. There isn’t enough time to set things up, because the show has to catch up to major plot beats.

As a result, I don’t really feel for any of these characters. Granted, this is the first episode, and things could change later on, but as things are right now, it’s okay. I’m more interested in what caused the after lost than the fate of any of these people, but hopefully, that will be something set up by the series long-term anyway.