Mayoiga is about a group of 30 some odd people who want to escape their current lives by essentially running away to a hidden village and start life anew. With that in mind the show isn't about all 30 characters. The reality is that the core cast revolves around a group of around 5 or so. With the key characters being Mitsumune and Masaki.
The rest of the cast is more or less stereotyped cardboard cut out character types. For the most part it isn't a bad thing here because there simply is no way they could've properly conveyed all the characters motives and backgrounds with out using such a method.
The real shame here is that that large casts potential is never used.
The show initially begins as a fairly dark, brooding, and moody fair. People are clearly putting on facades to their new co-habitors and there is something more sinister lying beneath the surface. It doesn't take long before characters are butting heads and they are already starting to distrust each other. A fact made worse once they find and enter the lost village.
Everything until this point is fairly interesting and engaging, and this is what kept me watching all the way through. It was like watching an elaborate chess game where each type of piece interacted with other pieces on the board. The only problem is that were a chess game involves characters being taken out and removed (killed off) Mayoiga ends up being incredibly tame.
With it's mystery, drama, supernatural elements, and large cast you would've thought you have the perfect opportunity to push the show into a mystery genre who done it or even better all out survival horror show down with the characters slowly killing each other off, all while a monster is loose in the surrounding village.
Unfortunately this is where the show absolutely falls apart. It simply isn't daring enough to do something exciting with these characters, and ultimately we get a very fluffy and tame resolution to all the issues the characters bring to the table, and half realized ideas. It doesn't commit to anything and the large casts potential is completely wasted. In the end there are some characters that felt like they were going to end up being important, but in the end never did (one such character is Lion, but oh well).
Aside from all of that it also looked like the animation dipped off half way through as well. Early episodes were visually more interesting and engaging, and later episodes also introduced some pretty poor CGI monster things. It just becomes a sloppy mess as it goes on.
It's certainly not the worst thing you can watch, I've watched a lot worse (Glasslip ... oh dear God, why were you so terrible). Still it's not a show I could ever properly recommend to any sort of genre fan.
