What we have here is an example of how a show can be interesting and original but not necessarily well done. We start with a bunch of shady characters riding a tour bus into a mysterious supernatural town where they intend to restart their lives. If there is one thing Mayoiga does right, it's a premise that gets you hooked and interested in what is going to happen next. Unfortunately, what happens next is somewhat of a let down.
The first issue is the characters themselves. Only a small handful of them are ever really fleshed out in detail. The majority of them are one dimensional, with hardly any backstory given. This is a case where Mayoiga would have actually been better with fewer characters. It goes the "Quantity over quality" route, where instead of a good story with a few well done individuals we get a massive cast of random people with most of them doomed to sit in the backseat throughout the show. The characters that it does focus on are fun enough to be entertaining, but it still feels like something is missing.
*Note: The rest of this review contains minor spoilers as it is difficult to explain the further problems of Mayoiga without doing so.*
The second and bigger issue is Mayoiga isn't exactly sure what kind of anime it wants to be. Is it a comedy? Is it a horror? Is it a serious psychological drama? Mayoiga tries to be a little bit of each without really showing mastery of any one of them. Again, the same mistake of quantity over quality is made. For the first few episodes it seems like Mayoiga wants to be a horror comedy, leading the viewer into expecting that the minor background characters will start being killed one by one in a wonderful trainwreck of gore and madness. The sad thing is, Mayoiga would have actually been a better show if that happened. At least then it could have became a cult classic among fans of the macabre. The reality is ...no one dies. This is not a gore flick. Mayoiga comes close to pushing itself in that direction but then never does.
Instead of forming a coherent plot and sticking with it, Mayoiga stumbles from genre to genre and then suddenly decides it wants to have a serious story about psychological trauma in the end. The result is that nothing Mayoiga does is particularly good. It never really goes anywhere and in the final scene as the characters hop back into their tour bus to ride home it's hard to really care about what you just watched.
