Okay, let’s try to just go over this one. And try is the operative word.
The first episode opens with disconnected scenes related to some blue-haired girl. She’s in a lab, then she’s in a city that starts to disintegrate, then she’s at the lab again, and they don’t make it clear what the relationship is because visual storytelling is for suckers who want to make good anime. Some mysterious cloaky people show up to her in the lab, only for one of their number to betray and seemingly rescue her because the bad guys never seem to catch on to the fact that face-hiding hoods aren’t a great dress code to not get infiltrated.
Blue haired girl and rescuer flee on his motorcycle… well, his scooter… and get into a hassle on the highway where they’re being followed by an attack helicopter and challenged by some kind of glowing purple monk who jumps on the handlebars and sort of surfs there until dispelled. In an underpass, a transit truck opens up for the scooter to go inside, hiding them from prying eyes.
This seems to belong to the employers of the rescuer (who identifies as a delivery man). They explain something, finally – the blue-haired girl, Yuki, is the lone survivor of a phenomenon known as Lost, which is the whole city-disintegration-thing from what was evidently flashbacks. Except the cloak dudes are victims of Lost somehow? And her father, who was in Lost, has somehow sent an encrypted message asking her to meet up in Lost (which is also how they call the place that used to be the city, as well as the phenomenon that reduced it to a puddle of unknowable non-existence) like some kind of dollar store Made in Abyss setup.
Delivery man is thus given one more delivery job to go drop Yuki off at Lost so she can have fun with dad or something. They visit his idol fan mechanic first, which prompts her to pointlessly run off on her own. While looking for her, delivery man calls some redhead lady he knows asking for a route into Lost, but it’s revealed that the Redhead is working with the Cloak Folk so that’s not going to end well.
Sure enough, it doesn’t. After delivery man finds Yuki through method not announced, and trivially convinces her to hop back on board after her pointless little field trip, they get attacked by the attack helicopter. The monk shows back up too, this time as an earthbender who clips the heli with friendly fire but also does a number on the delivery man. This goes on until Yuki starts glowing, and summons the glowing silent image of her former bodyguard who got Lost, who pulls Unlimited Gun Works on the Monk and dispatches him.
And then suddenly the scooter gets flipped by the appearance from nowhere of that little shota pain in the rear from Guilty Crown who was never explained… or at least his doppelganger. This lets team cloak recapture Yuki and seemingly axe the delivery man, with the traitorous redhead delivering the final coup de grace by handgun in a way that feels pretty final but is framed to be easily revealed as a misdirect.
Well, that was pointless.
I’m going to do my traditional pause at the end of the first episode of summary to go over some of the major malfunctions of this show. The one you’ve probably noticed is that the pacing is absolutely insane. The first episode is loaded with tons of stuff happening, but very little in the way of anything to build emotional investment in those things happening. Evidently, this was based on a game, though any information on the game is scarce and irrelevant. In a game, you can kind of get away with this sort of thing because the player is the one fighting for their life in a scenario they know nothing about. Here, we’re watching a random dude with a scooter do it without any inherent connection to said scooter man. It’s not as engaging. But whether the problem comes with the story’s origin or not, it’s not excused.
It’s not that the characters are never passionate, but when delivery man is convincing Yuki to go ahead and jump in a bottomless pit because she should believe in her dad, we have no idea where his vehemence comes from other than maybe one line about always seeing his jobs through, which shouldn’t mean belief in the ’cause’.
Second, we have no real concept for this world or anything in it. The architecture and technology looks like it was “modern Earth until something weird happened” but there are secret societies and bizarre magic cropping up everywhere. What does it mean? What did people do? How have three years since the evaporation of a major city gone? You don’t have to answer all of that, but it would help to at least get a vibe. In Coppelion, for instance, we get really quickly the general tone and tenor of how society has changed in the wake of a major disaster and, more importantly, what this whole mess means for our leads. Here, we have a guy tasked to, what, yeet some girl into a black hole? And this is hard because it’s a “restricted area” that the visual storytelling (again, lacking) seems to inform us means the government has blocked off a few roads with flimsy wooden barricades.
Third, the animation is tragic. There’s some godawful CGI blended in with more traditional work that’s still cheap and awkward. Movements are stiff and unnatural and characters don’t have a lot of personality or life. Even the intro – a place where even bad shows put in extra effort to look good because you’re going to see this animation every single episode as the show’s best foot forward – is victim to this awkwardness and clear deficit of something between budget, talent, and time. So for all the action set pieces that the first episode alone throws at us, none of them are worth watching.
It’s worth noting that the studio behind this show is Madhouse, and when you start to look through their filmography asking if they’re to blame it seems like they might be one of the most outright schizophrenic studios, where sometimes they deliver absolute gold and sometimes they decide that they’re not going to try with this show. Most of the time their titles that have less conventionally gorgeous animation at least have a defined style, though, leading to them having a corpus that is, on the whole, impressive. Afterlost, on the other hand, was clearly a throwaway project, featuring all the budget-on-the-screen of Sonny Boy (incidentally another one of theirs) without the talent. Or, to compare to a different Madhouse video game sourced anime that I’ve reviewed, a team giving a fraction of the time and effort that they’d go on to give to Takt Op. Destiny.
That established, on with the show.
Anyway, it proves that the gunshot and flash with the effects out of frame were the redhead shooting the cloak guy with her. She and her underling thus betray “the Agency” and rescue Yuki and delivery man Takuya. The two of them are taken to a safehouse in the exclusion zone and then, because security is tight, attempt to escape the exclusion zone by subway tunnel. There, they’re ambushed by Agency cloak men with piddling little batons and some lady. Redhead sends the other three off and faces down against the lady, getting another offscreen shooting for her trouble. When we cut back it seems like she got grazed and she proclaims her love for Takuya before getting offscreened again.
As the trio flee they end up going up some stairs when a knife sprouts from the NPC’s back. Never mind that he’d been in front. Continuity? What’s that? The knife seems to come from a white-haired cloak man who very slowly walks up the stairs after them, giving Takuya and Yuki all the time in the world to flee while NPC man writhes in pain. White hair stops, reclaims his knife, and starts very slowly cleaning it (you know, rather than chasing the primary target) while the NPC draws his gun and fires – again, showing us only a flash so Haruhi alone knows what actually happened.
They get out, Yuki angsts, and then knife man shows up again. This time his knife misses thanks to some quick thinking from Takuya. They watch him slowly walk forward, then evaporate, only to teleport to his knife right behind them.
Unfortunately, he’s still far too ponderous to actually take advantage of a moment of surprise. The wota mechanic shows with Takuya’s bike, resulting in a little chase where Takuya tries to be the diversion only for Yuki to throw herself in after him. This results in her once again calling her glowing bodyguard, who proves that bringing a gun to a knife fight is a winning play.
Also we’re shown that redhead gets to live. Somehow.
We then throw Takuya, Yuki, and the Geek into a time-space loop that just sort of happens near the exclusion zone and just happens to be centered around the Oshi for the geek (and Yuki) who, like the rest of the idol unit, got Lost.
We are at least informed what the people who sometimes glow – called Tama-shi – appear to be; the lingering will or emotions of those who were Lost, like the bodyguard’s will to protect Yuki or the idol’s regrets about the day that everyone got stuck in.
Unfortunately, this does little when the little boy shows up again, revealed to be Yuki’s younger brother and surprisingly cogent compared to the Tama-shi we’ve seen. He starts twisting Takuya into a pretzel like a certain much more memorable antagonist would do (albeit with much less effectiveness), and Yuki… gets a tad upset and makes a wee little bit of a mess.
Yeah, she can just glow white and turn a fair chunk of city into a smoking crater now. What even is the idea behind her inconsistent weird powers?
Anyway, this puts Takuya in the hospital. The redhead who was shot? Totally fine. Her little minion is disappeared rather than confirmed dead as well. She also appears to have been xeroxed, because there’s a cop in this episode, who most of the episode is spent on, who looks just like her. The cop digs too deep and gets stabbed to death, though, so we’ll still only have one redhead moving forward.
We then launch into another arc that seems to be disconnected, concerning a magician who wants to find his long-lost brother who has been doing the phantom thief act. This vaguely ties back to the Agency through the newly-introduced concept of Artifacts: objects (mostly priceless jewelry, it seems) that can amplify superpowers. Which apparently have been around unconnected to Lost.
Long story short, this does draw out Yuki’s brother for reasons basically disconnected from why they thought it would and gets him beaten and taken in by team Yuki. Also, way too many characters seem to have backstories tied to this one orphanage that may or may not have been a front for evil experimentation and that now lies in the exclusion zone.
Visiting it in the present to look for clues, Takuya (with a couple extras) gets thrown into the past when he worked there (as a cover to investigate abuse) and maybe had a thing with the sweet lady who upkept the place and wasn’t 100% on board with evil science experiments despite being kind of brainwashed. By way of out of order and disjointed nonsense between flashbacks, storytelling, and the time slip, we get the full picture of Takuya, his old flame (like he needed another), and the investigation getting shut down at a bad time before old flame and the kids got Lost at the circus.
They do at least get away with the financial books proving ties to an Agency front company, which the Magician (having been a former student there) can try to go public with, and a hint that the old principal may be deeper in Agency nonsense than anyone knew.
They decide to deliver this in the most asinine over-dramatic fashion (I guess that’s what you get including a stage magician), with no insurance for when the police who they know are corrupt have elements at the top immediately bury the situation. But, before you can even finish figuring out where that’s coming from, we get another completely unpresaged crisis.
That crisis is all about the little brother. He was in a coma after being beaten and we got a few cuts to him twitching like he was going to wake up, but instead he spontaneously chooses the big night to mutate into some kind of magic monster and threaten to make another Lost happen with his mere existence.
We do get a reason, that evidently he was being stabilized by Yuki’s presence and went off when she stepped out to help with the needless livestream from inside the front company, but we still have no reason why any of this is the way it is, the villains just know stuff and we occasionally eavesdrop on them.
Fortunately, rather than just causing a new Lost, he spends some time firing off city-divoting lasers. This affords Yuki a chance to get close. Unfortunately, he’s a house-sized flesh blob by that point so he gets to disintegrate rather than being saved or going off full force.
The following episode addresses none of this. It’s a needed episode where we finally get some answers about our antagonists, learning that they’re travelers from a parallel reality who are trying to open a new portal to save lives in their universe… or at least, they were. One of them falls for the lunch lady and starts to question the morality of indiscriminately slaughtering people just to extract expatriates from their dying universe. This, it turns out, is Yuki’s dad and mom, meaning that she’s a hybrid who belongs fully to neither dimension. The Lost event was the fallout of dad and the main antagonists struggling over the portal he built for them.
Back to the aftermath of the present, naturally their whole reveal the truth campaign did bupkis. I guess the redhead’s partner who got stabbed presumably to death early on turns back up to save the day, but they lingered on the fact that he was MIA so sure, whatever, lame twist is lame.
In any case, we are told at this juncture that Lost is expanding. At the current rate it will be decades until it reaches full size (which is a slightly larger chunk of city) but the bad guys realize that Yuki’s dad, on the inside, is what’s stopping it from finishing its growth and being a portal now. Also, the space evidently emanates weird memory-messer-upper particles that we are to be concerned about until we aren’t. Yuki is resolved to go see dad, the enemy boss wants to dive into Lost to go kill him, and Takuya is there too.
Of course, the heroes have to do soul-searching and the villains murderous research. The big bad, who had probably less than a minute of cumulative screen-time before the flashback not ominously playing the piano, even offs his henchwoman from home with an obvious crush for no good reason just to prove how evil he is.
As he goes to lost, his other henchwoman backstabs him and gets fatally shot offscreen. Takuya and Yuki head out. While the bad guy has particle-blocking medication made by killing off countless test subjects they have earpieces their friends can scream at them through. It doesn’t seem to work, and they force us to have a huge chunk of flashbacks that save money on animation.
Eventually though, the power of friendship or something lets them come out of memory hell to the bottom of Lost where dad is there as code and the invincible super antagonist is just kind of choking him. They have a lame little confrontation, dad tells Yuki she can choose any possible timeline, getting us a long scene of what could have been if Lost never happened. Yuki refuses to do this, villain comes back for a last hit, and after being taken down in as lame a manner as he arrives, Yuki and Takuya get vomited back into the timeline the show took place in.
We then get a short tail where Yuki doesn’t have more than phantom memories of Takuya and Takuya may or may not exist. The end, I guess.
So, if it wasn’t clear enough from the summary, this show has a lot of problems. It’s got weak animation, poor choreography, no sense of macro-scale pacing, no talent for telling emotional stories, and a convoluted plot that’s delivered in such an asinine fashion that by the time you’ve worked out who’s doing what and why you don’t really care.
Honestly, I’m heavily reminded of RErideD, which was similarly lousy on technical quality and lousy with stupid twists and turns that never mattered nor really made you feel. That should also serve as a reminder that it takes a lot of factors to actually put out a good anime, where even talented people returning to roles in which they’d previously made gold far from guarantees success. Afterlost’s crew isn’t quite as star studded, but I can’t find a clear at-fault either. The animation was off, the direction was off, the script was mediocre and the composition was bad, but who knows if the head men of those offices were really the problem here. It could have been anything from them to the source material or rights-holder to the intern.
Well, it could have been, but with a flop as complete as Afterlost, I tend to be led to one particular conclusion: they just didn’t care.
Often times, I find a silver lining in shows. However, when something is not just bad but uncaringly bad, it gets really hard. This isn’t the worst watch I’ve had, but I’ve had some real stinkers since I’ve got to stick these things through in order to review them. Afterlost belongs in the bin with them – it gets a Fail.