English Dub Review: AfterLost “Trust”

Reused frames… all of them.

Overview:

Takuya and Yuki drive into Lost.

Our Take:

I feel like this show has finally reached a baseline of mediocrity, and okay, it’s a lot better than getting worse.

I would talk about the plot and the fact that not a lot happens for a full half hour, but most importantly, they do this one thing that makes so much of the episode practically unwatchable. I understand that anime has budget constraints, and oftentimes in anime and manga, they do a lot of small tricks to help cut costs or save time. One of these is that in flashback sequences, they often reuse clips or panels of the original scene, to make it so that they don’t have to redraw things that already happened. This is fine, because unless those scenes are showing something different, like from a different character’s perspective or something like that, then just a change in voiceover or flavor text will usually be enough of an indicator that even though this is a flashback, it isn’t necessarily the same scene. In anime, something made on a pretty short deadline, and in manga, something made week to week, these shortcuts are necessary.

So, Yuki and Takuya dive into Lost, and with the particles going haywire, they lose consciousness and start to lose themselves. In doing so, they start to flash back into crucial moments of their life, especially moments where the two of them interact. This isn’t an issue on paper, except it feels like… ten whole minutes? Maybe it isn’t actually ten minutes but it feels like ten minutes of pure flashbacks from the series with new voiceover. It feels more like a series recap more than anything else, and this is significant enough that while not the whole episode, a significant chunk of it is all flashback.

I understand that the budget in this show is practically non-existent, but it’s really, really evident when they’re just reusing scenes from the entire season to pad the runtime. It’s the second to last episode, so I guess they’re just trying really hard to get the last episodes out but… it’s such a jarring watch. It’s very noticeable in a series that’s only 12 episodes long when they’re reusing stuff. Like, this is absolutely something that you shouldn’t do in your very short series.

This series is always an adventure in the worst way.