English Dub Season Review: AfterLost Season One

All the apocalypse brings is a waste of time.

Our Take:

This was such a painfully mediocre show, I can’t believe I had to sit through the whole thing.

Regarding the story, I feel like it’s pretty clear just how uninteresting the plot was from the fact that I don’t really remember anyone’s names. I remember Takuya, Yuki, and Geek– and I only remember Taiyou’s name at the very last episode. I don’t even remember the name of the evil corporation that Taiyou runs, just that it’s there and evil. That the majority of the cast, even people who I met in the first episode and are recurring characters, just end up being that forgettable says a lot about the story and how memorable it is. It’s just not interesting beyond the main cast, and the main cast isn’t even that interesting themselves.

Yuki and Takuya were– well, they were alright. Geek was alright too. I didn’t really feel much for them beyond the fact that I was forced to follow their plights as they are the main characters. They seemed more there to push the plot forward. When I can’t feel for the characters, not even some mild curiosity about what they do outside of what I’ve seen shown on screen, then that’s not engaging. They’re just vessels for the story, and not something worth being curious about. If I felt this about the main cast, then I felt double this for the side characters. Some of the side characters like the magician crew, the secretary at the evil company, even some of Takuya’s allies, they have some possible interesting bits, but that’s all squandered. I just didn’t care– and I felt that way up until the end.

The story is also incredibly rushed. This itself doesn’t surprise me so much, after learning that this series was originally a visual novel. As I’ve said in previous reviews, visual novels are tricky to adapt, and I’m hard pressed to find an anime adaptation of a visual novel that I liked more than the original. This could not be truer here; there’s a lot of story with a lot of intrigues and a lot of lore, but it feels like half the lore is missing, and everything is kind of jumbled together. I haven’t read the original, so some of the poorer story aspects could have just been part of the information that the animation studio was given, but I think that they’re adapting a highly condensed story is the real issue. Yuki can somehow unite dimensions just by being a singularity? The magical powers? Half of the side characters getting fleshed out? All dropped for the sake of time. It’s understandable, but that doesn’t make the watching experience any good.

It’s times like these that I remember just how stretched thin the anime industry is. If they don’t put out a title every other season, then they’ll fall off the radar. Sometimes, with how rushed each episode’s schedule is for production, the animation teams that end up being hired (or likely, outsourced) don’t have enough time to animate things properly, and so the animation ends up looking really bad, even during the key shots. Boy does that show here. I doubt that this was granted the budget to be extremely well-animated, but it doesn’t seem like it has much of anything. It’s passable, but passable isn’t worth a watch these days.

It’s absolutely not worth it; it’s not like some shows, where the dubbing is hilariously cut, or the animation is so shoddy that it makes watching it an enjoyable experience. This one just feels like a slog, and was definitely tedious to get through. Overall, definitely not worth it, even if you want to watch something bad. Go rewatch the Devilman dub if you want something with a ridiculous premise that’s still relatively enjoyable.

Visual novels just don’t make good anime adaptations.