Okay, so let's lay out the basics here. Mayoiga, or The Lost Village, is a Psychological Thriller Anime Directed by Tsutomu Mizushiha. The reason I say that is because that director's name is synonymous with lots of other anime that i consider GREAT, Another, Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, and Crayon Shin-chan, among others. It's an original series which means they get to play a little fast and loose with the composition and storylines, though I feel like they should not have. But more on that later.
STORY: 4
The Premise is pretty simple. It's about the villagers being attacked by horrific creatures that only they can see. I can accept that as a premise because it's vague enough to take a lot of different places, especially when you address that this is a Horror series. That said, why don't they? this series is filled with bad exposition dumps. they spend so much time building character backdrops and backstory mid-event (one particular event is explaining why a certain character loves guns as she's being chased by a giant hornet) and in VERY LATE (as late as episode 11 of 12) episodes, that at times, I just kind of felt like i was jarred and ripped straight out of the story. Let's not forget that exposition dumps are a supremely bad idea when you have 12 episodes and 30 characters. Let's hit that after the next part, which is:
Art & Sound: 7
The Art is fine. It's not beautifully animated, but it's not as though the staff worked like they were underpaid. it's about your standard par-for-the-course animation. that is, until we get to the 3D animation. i don't know what it is about studios nowadays, but i feel like most anime viewers unilaterally agree that most 3D rendered animation just looks... bad. The sound however, was great. The voice acting was pretty all over the place, but the audio mixing and use of really good pieces to set the background tone was excellent. Coming from a sound engineer and a Foley artist standpoint, it was immersive enough that nothing broke the story or pulled me out of the experience. hence, both of these receive a 7.
CHARACTER: 3
There were too many of them. Flat-out. Full stop. This anime was 12 episodes long. there are 30 characters. there were so many, and the plot was so all over the place, that upwards of ten characters could have their entire story summarized in one sentence, e.g; "the fat guy eats, sleeps and is lazy" "the couple that elope act like any other lovey-dovey couple" "the one bitchy girl and her extremely unremarkable friends", to name a few. there wasn't even a real reason for half of them to be there, and some characters that seemed like their stories would be extremely interesting get almost no scree-time at all. The most frustrating bit of it is that some of these backstories were positively fascinating, but were completely arbitrary in that they flesh out the character but don't even lead to any real satisfactory conclusions.
ENJOYMENT: 6
Despite the anime's many pratfalls, when they pulled off explosive events, or revealed twists in the story, it did them incredibly right. Certain storyline twists felt truly unexpected (save for one) and I appreciated that the direction was ballsy enough to lay its cards on the table early in terms of leaving a suspicion available for the viewer to take, and then revealing the suspicion to be completely correct, which I found refreshing, seeing as horror very often presents misdirection as a main selling point. It's not a masterfully crafted chain of events, but the parts it does get right, it pulls off very well.
OVERALL: 5
For every one thing I liked about this series, I seemed to find two to dislike. I'm not even saying this wasn't entertaining or that I didn't enjoy it overall. I'm simply saying that from a standpoint of what anyone should expect from a good Horror or a well-crafted Psychological Thriller, This anime met you with confusing narrative, an overly ambitious character cast that ended up becoming mostly background decoration after a while, and a truly, truly confusing story line with terrible pacing that seemed to give you the relevant information far past the mark of when you asked for it. It was a very strange experience to see an anime that could have been so good just be so... not.
