Are You Lost?

Are You Lost?

Are You Lost? anime series cover art
Are You Lost?

Overview

Are You Lost? (Sounan Desu ka? / ソウナンですか?) was one of the two half-length series I watched this season — the other being Magical Sempai. Unfortunately, Are You Lost? isn’t as good as Magical Sempai is. But, it’s not as if it was one of the worst anime of the season.

This anime is also made by a new studio, Ezόla. It’s only their second anime, with the first being Happy Sugar Life — which I never ended up watching despite planning to.

Honestly, this series was pretty refreshing. It wasn’t set in a high school or a fantasy world; instead, it took place on a deserted island. The story follows four girls who wind up stranded in the middle of the ocean — I forget how — and we watch them survive day to day.

But it’s not as if these are just four random high school girls who have gotten stranded. Sure, three of them are, but the fourth happens to be a survival expert who has trekked and lived off the land just about everywhere on Earth.

The girls being chased by a shark from the anime series Are You Lost?
The girls being chased by a shark

If you couldn’t tell by now, this is a comedy. It’s also adventure and seinen, but the primary focus of the series is on the comedy. This is both good and bad. It’s good because when there is actual comedy, it’s fairly funny. But the rest of the content doesn’t have much substance — unless you’re talking about the “plot.”

Oddly enough, despite the large number of scenes in which the girls are shirtless or solely in their underwear, this isn’t actually an ecchi series. The anime doesn’t go out of its way to sexualize the girls aside from a few gags, but they’re mostly there to showcase absurd ways to survive on a deserted island.

Characters

The main character of the series is Homare Onishima. She’s easily the best character of the anime on account of her being the survival expert. I mentioned that she’s traveled all across the globe, and the reason she did this is because her father brought her along with him. He’s some sort of ex-military, survival guy.

Most of the comedic scenes in the series involve Homare bluntly suggesting some sort of survival tactic and the other girls recoiling out of disgust. An example is the picture of Homare squeezing the blood out of a fish to acquire liquid to drink, found later on in this review.

Asuka Suzumori is the girl with brown hair but without glasses. She’s considered the “sporty” girl of the bunch, but unless the sport she plays is rugby, I don’t see it. What I’m trying to say is that she’s a pretty thick girl, even after being stranded on an island for what I assume was a couple of months.

Next is Mutsu Amatani, the brown-haired girl with glasses. True to her appearance, Mutsu is the “nerd” of the group, meaning she’s automatically low-tier. But to be fair, all the girls other than Homare are low-tier, so she doesn’t stand out in that regard.

The last girl is Shion Kujou, who I can on only assume is a member of the Joestar bloodline due to her last name. She’s the spoiled, rich girl of the group who always wants to eat French cuisine, not smashed fish guts. Though to be fair, that’s probably French cuisine.

Survival Tips

In my review of How Heavy are the Dumbbells You Lift? I mentioned that the series is interspersed with little tips about exercises you can do at home. The same is true for Laid-Back Camp, but with Winter camping tips. Are You Lost? isn’t quite like those two series.

It doesn’t pause the show to explain survival tips like those others do. Instead, the survival tips mainly come in the form of Homare explaining them to the other girls. Sometimes we’ll also get them as flashbacks to Homare’s father teaching the survival tips to her.

But here’s the thing, many of the survival tips aren’t exactly things you would do, even in a survival situation. I mean sure, some people might, but I think it’s safe to say most of us would take the “L” and die.

The other girls watching Homare drink blood from the anime series Are You Lost?
The other girls watching Homare drink blood

That’s not to say that the survival tips showcased in this series are wrong though. And in fact, even the more crazy ones may save your life one day. It’s just that there’s a big difference between doing something like using a glass bottle to help you see underwater and using your mouth to help your friend drink contaminated water in the “opposite direction,” if you know what I mean.

But at the same time, that’s where the comedy of this series came from. For those other two series the tips were more like additional content. For Are You Lost? the tips are the main content because they’re the main source of entertainment.

Conclusion

Are You Lost? is a 5/10 for me. I think I would have rather watched a prequel series all about Homare’s adventures with her father because it would have actually been interesting. Aside from the occasional comedy, this series doesn’t have anything going for it.

What little plot there is was mediocre at best, 75% of the characters are boring, and it surprisingly didn’t even have a good OP or ED despite everything else this season being stacked in those departments. This isn’t a series I would suggest going out of your way to watch.

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