Story: 5/10
The previous Wixoss shows were these high-stakes games where if you win you get a wish granted and if you lose it's reversed and your miserable. Despite the clunky explanations they gave it was still a clever and intimidating, the consequences mattered to the characters enough that the stakes were high. Lostorage changes it around so their memories are at stake, and while the downside is losing your memories and becoming an entirely different person, the upside is... the ability to change one of your memories.
How incredibly situational. In fact, if you want to change one of your memories you can just do that, that's how memory works. On top of that, the major conflict between the main characters feels incredibly forced.
Art and Sound: 6
I am a whelp and don't generally notice the art and sound in anime. The environment the battles take place in is pretty cool but gets old quickly. Nothing else popped out at me.
Characters: 3
This is where Lostorage really falls flat.
Homura Suzuko - Suzuko is the "main character" of Lostorage but she really doesn't feel like it. We don't really get into her headspace all that much past the first few episodes and because of how the show works by not really explaining the card game much, it's difficult to see her growth. If anything, it seems like rather than improving at the game like Ruko from Selector, she learned how to make up rules as she goes along.
Hanna Mikage - Hanna is a weird mix of the cute small character due to her hands always being in her sleeves and the cold analytical character due to her personality. While Hanna as the best reason for wanting to win the game, regaining the memories of what happened to her late little brother, she also has the most obnoxious speech quirk of stating a word that summarizes her sentences before saying them. An example would be a sentence like "Suspicion. What are you doing here?" which would be ok for a minor character, but she ends up becoming a major character in the story and it is incredibly grating.
Shohei Shirai - Is a nice guy. This is pretty much the extent to his personality, he's just really nice and wants to get some memories back about soccer or something. He refuses to fight battles early on even though the rules this time around impose a time limit that needs to be upheld by battles, so I don't know what he thought the outcome would be. His effect in the story is basically just to make one character question her actions but not actually do anything.
Chinatsu Morikawa - She's the secondary main character, or arguably even the main character in this show, but I saved her til now because holy crap does this character suck. I hope it's not a spoiler since it happens pretty early on that she effectively becomes a villain for most of the show. The issue with this is that her reasons are absolutely absurd. She wants to forget her memories of her childhood with Suzuko in order to "become stronger." It gets to the point where she has effectively killed people for this and she becomes completely irredeemable. I hate this character, she is an awful person for no reason.
Kou Satomi - Here is the only good character. Satomi has a reasonably interesting backstory and is entertaining and expressive enough to be fun to watch.
Unlike in Selector, the LRIGs are barely even characters. I guess it comes from them being a manifestation of their selectors' memories rather than existing people with their own names and personalities, but there is no emotional connection there, no matter what the ending tries to dredge up.
Enjoyment: 4
I kept trying to like this show. I thought at the beginning that the concept was interesting, but that was because I thought that the winner of the battles got to change their opponents' memories, which could have led to an interesting plot whereby the characters don't know what's real or and maybe we would have gotten an unreliable narrator. Instead the premise just makes the battles feel like more of a chore than anything. I like how Satomi abused the system for his own amusement, and I suppose it makes sense for the time limit to be there in that case, but the incentive to winning is mostly just not having to play the game anymore, which makes the show just feel empty, like the characters aren't really working toward anything, they just want it to be over.
Overall: 4
Lostorage is not a very good show, which is disappointing because I thought Selector was great. It got to the point where the intricacies of the game really should have been explained better. The coin betting mechanic they introduce was cool and made every player seem unique, but without a knowledge of Wixoss as a game it doesn't make a lot of sense. The final episode is full of cop-outs too and while I do like the ending scene, a lot of the emotional moments feel profoundly undeserved.
