Lost Universe Review
ロスト・ユニバース

Since the Community Anime Reviews site has had lots of problems of late, I’m republishing some of my OG reviews from there. I have corrected obvious spelling errors though. I will add new notes in parenthesis, labeled “ANB  note.”  😅 I won’t count these as part of the “Back to the Vaults” series as I have not rewatched them.

–> Buy Lost Universe DVD Collection on Amazon.com!

Community Anime Review of Lost Universe

(ANB note: This series was originally reviewed on 27-July-2004.)

Officially, Lost Universe takes place in the multi-verse created by Hajime-sensei of which the Slayers titles are also a part. Specifically, Lost Universe is supposed to take place in Dark Star’s universe, but sadly, the writers failed to link this series with the Slayers franchise. OK, the name Dark Star is the same but beyond that, there was little linkage. Why? It wouldn’t have taken that much effort to link the two series. Then fans of Slayers Try, where Dark Star played a major part, would have had more to enjoy. As it is, Lost Universe has to be watched as a separate item since events in Slayers Try don’t jive with those in this series.

The Review

That aside, a little over the first half of the 26 episode TV series is dedicated to little adventure stories. We learn very little about the overall story and very little about the characters during this time. There are some minor hints at stuff to come, but precious little. This was another problem I had with the series. The adventures stories weren’t a problem for me. Indeed, episodes like “Toilet Fears” were an absolute riot! However, the writers decided to put off giving the audience any information until the series began to draw to a close, including information about character’s past. They did this with the idea of keeping the audience in wonder, but they went overboard. The series would have been MUCH better had the writers given us more information about Kain, Canel, Millie, and the others.

That said, I did enjoy the series. As I said, episode 9 was extremely funny! There is good seiyuu work here with many seiyuu from the various Slayers titles having roles in Lost Universe. HAYASHIBARA Megumi does nice work again. I was afraid she might play Canel as Lina Inverse, but she doesn’t. When her character gets upset, she doesn’t go into Lina mode and that was great. She played it as a computer unit might — even keeled. Canel was my favorite character.

There are some issues with the art and animation. The CGI doesn’t fit well with the regular art and animation. But then the medium was in its early days when Lost Universe came about. The music wasn’t bad, but not anything to write home about (IMO).

Bottom line:

This had the potential to be so much more, but instead, the series went for the average. Still, it is worth a rent for Slayers fans, HAYASHIBARA Megumi fans, and those who like sci-fi titles.

Additional (28-January-2008)

Since my previous update in May 2005, I have learned that the Lost Universe novels by Hajime-sensei, while having characters previously mentioned in his Slayers novels, is in fact apparently not related to Slayers. According to KanzakaDex, he apparently just reused names like “Dark Star” and the others because he liked them, not because he was showing what was going on in the world of Dark Star that he gave a glimpse of in the Slayers novels. So I guess the anime writers can be forgiven for not linking this series to Slayers. ^_^;