AFTERLOST grabs you in the first ten minutes with a clean action hook, then spends twelve episodes testing whether you meant it. Takuya takes a courier contract and ends up hauling Yuki, the only survivor of a city that erased its entire population, with a letter from her father as the whole map. The premise is genuinely good: a ghost town renamed Lost, a secretive organization that treats two nobodies poking around as a threat, and a story circling loss, coping, and forgiveness. The delivery is where it splits the room. Episodes lurch, the connective tissue goes missing, and Yuki and Takuya finish roughly the people they started as. Watch it for the idea rather than the execution and a few episodes land clean, which is exactly why half the people who start it never shut up about what it could have been.

A city vanishes in a single day, and Yuki is said to be the only person left alive. She teams up with Takuya, a loner who works strictly by contract as a courier and smuggler. Their only lead is a letter from Yuki's father, who is reported missing, and it points them toward the vanished town, now known as Lost. The road there is full of unexpected obstacles, and the truth hits Yuki especially hard. Along the way the two strangers meet the people the disappearance left behind, run up against a secretive organization working behind the scenes, and grow closer as they try to uncover the conspiracy behind Lost. The show is a twelve-episode sci-fi mystery thriller adapted from a smartphone game.