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[Train to the End of the World]
AKA: Shuumatsu Torein Doko e Iku?, 終末トレインどこへいく? (Japanese)
Genre: Travel comedy / drama / sci-fi
Length: Television series, 12 episodes, 23 minutes each
Distributor: Currently streaming on crunchyroll
Content Rating: 13+ (violence, subtitled language, smoking)
Related Series: N/A
Also Recommended: Girls und Panzer (a much better show from this director)
Notes:
Rating:

Train to the End of the World

Synopsis

7G is a new invention, which can send data directly to people's brains at speeds never reached before. High school girl Yoka Nakaotomi is the 77,777 customer to walk into a 7G building. She is pressured into pressing the 7G button by the head of the Spread 7G Worldwide Committee, Posion Pontaro, to celebrate such an occasion. After pressing the button, though, the whole world begins to warp around her, and Yoka presses the button several times more in fear. As a result, the entire world has been frozen and warped: distances between places have extended far out, people have turned into animals/objects/made smaller, landscapes have warped, and electronics are now almost completely worthless, with no more TV or Internet at all.

Two years later, in the town of Agano, where all the adults have turned into animals, Yoka's childhood friend/classmate Shizuru sets out to find Yoka, who ran away from Agano after the two had a fight. She embarks on a train she dubs Apogee with a dog named Pochi, followed along by three of her friends: Nadeshiko, Reimi, and Akira. Their goal is to get to Ikebukuro, which Yoka ran away to. But the effects of 7G have made the distance between the stations much, much longer, and each stop holds various surprises.


Review

NOTE: I am going to spoil the entire series in this review, as many of the points I make are in regards to the overall story of the anime. You have been warned.

I'll just get straight to the point; I hated Train to the End of the World. It never shuts up, it feels both too short and too long at the same time, and it has a lead who I would happy to see run over by a train herself. Beautiful background art and decent animation are wasted on a script whose humor is awful, its drama overdone, and its sad scenes manipulative. What could've been a decent "cute girls save the day" series turns into one of the hardest anime watches I've done for a review for T.H.E.M. Anime in years.

And what sucks most is I initially didn't hate this series. The idea itself has plenty of potential, with the 7G-affected world offering lots of interesting locales. One town, like I mentioned earlier, has everyone toy-size, another has a trio of mangaka who have the ability to transform people into things with a magical pen, and another has the town infected with mushrooms that turn them into blissful happy husks. Even the first episode, which is mostly spent in Agano with talking animals, was kind of fun, even reminding me a bit of Polar Bear Cafe.

The fundamental problem with Train to the End of the World at its core is Shizuru is an awful lead, and her suckiness drags down the series with her. I never really liked her, but I found her vaguely tolerable until episode six. This is the episode that follows up on her fight with Yoka from episode one, and reveals why Yoka ran away. Yoka revealed to Shizuru how she wanted to work on planetary probes and space stations, and is planning to enter university to follow her dream of space exploration. And how does Shizuru respond? By laughing in her face and telling her she has no chance of getting into space, suggesting that she should settle for a more "normal" goal as she is so normal. When Yoka runs away in tears, Shizuru yells to her she doesn't care about her anymore. And when Shizuru confesses about their breakup to her other friends, she still has the gall to pin the blame on Yoka. ("Isn't Yoka just as bad for leaving without so much as a word?")

While Shiziuru's breakup with Yoka was hinted at earlier in the series, episode six was the point where I stopped liking Shizuru overall as a character. Reimi and Akira (who you can summarize as "pretentious reader" and "loud-mouthed kogal") are very annoying, yeah, but they still care for each other in their own weird comedy duo way. And by the end of episode five both Akira and Reimi have helped out their fellow friends at least once in the series. Shizuru, though? When she isn't scolding her current friends or calling them dead weight, we can now add that she also actively mocks other's dreams and ideals as well. All I could think of after that episode was, "Why should I care about Shizuru and Yoka getting back together? Or, hell, why should I care for SHIZURU overall?". Episode six is when Train to the End of the World goes from "disappointing" to "awful", and it only gets worse from here.

Slightly less annoying are the side characters, as few as there are. The most recurring character is Zenjiro, the only adult in Agano who stayed human. However, he's only cognizant for three minutes a day, and then he reverts back to an old man who babbles to himself and goes "choo choo". Not only does this happen at inopportune times every time, but the fact they turn a man's mental regression into an ongoing joke is quite frankly tasteless. (Spoiler, this won't be the only tasteless character I'll be talking about in this review.) Other supporting characters are so minor they're barely worth talking about (such as Swan Hermit, a loud man who rows a swan boat and gives the girls a map of the various changed locales), or are so annoying I don't want to talk about (Kuroki, the pre-teen "queen" of a horde of zombies she rules over).

And then there's the villain Pontaro, the one who pressured Yoka to press the button in the first place. He's a selfish, constantly pissy man who uses Yoka to go on a power trip and has zero redeeming character traits. He's also a coward who will use violence to get what he wants, up to threatning our high school leads with said violence. In the final episode we also learn he's been using Yoka to keep Ikebukuro alive with 7G energy, at the cost of decreasing her lifespan. (As Akira notes, 7G created Yoka the Witch Queen, and Yoka created the world of 7G.) He's the worst example of the show's "loud = comedy" shtick, and I cringed every time he appeared on-screen.

And Yoka herself? Well, outside of flashbacks, she mostly just sits/stands and frowns, force fed lies upon lies from Pontaro. Episode ten reveals she's been helping other towns' residents with her newfound Witch Queen powers, and has been suppliyng some of the villains of earlier episodes their powers, most notably the trio of mangaka and the dog lab-coat villain of episode eight. She's also brainwashed by Pontaro for his own selfish purposes, having gained incredible powers as the result of 7G (along with really long hair and big boobs for some reason), denying other's criticism of her actions and turning them into egg custard, who Pontaro eats afterwards. She's not so much a character as a plot device for our "heroines" to save.

Of the entire cast, the only character I ended up liking from beginning to end was Nadeko, the Team Mom. She's the only one who doesn't shout or whine all the time and keeps a cool head. I did also like the tiny scientist girl Makoto from the tiny town, but she's so secondary I can't really count her as a positive. Props to Yuka Iguchi for doing a different voice for once, though.

Another problem I have Train to the End of the World? Most of the humor fell flat to me. This series follows the Doki Doki School Hours rule that everyone shouting and being mean to each other equals comedy. Or, when that fails, go for the lowest common denominator of humor. For example, Kuroki's zombies literally explode when they see female flesh, or are read erotic stories (the latter used as a plot point). This hampers what could otherwise be fun little stories, like Shizuru and Reimi saving a tiny town from its "giant" ruler, or an episodes where the girls fight a trio of manga artists, changing their very face styles during so. It's like every time the series has a neat idea or a good concept for a joke, it needs to immediately ruin it after.

The series' overall poor attempts at humor are magnified multiple times fold in episode 8, the series' worst episode, where Shizuru and co. go to Oizumi-gakuen. 7G has transformed its citizens into characters based on an in-universe anime called Alice in Nerima-land. Said series' cast consist of such idiotic things as a man in an iron maiden (who gets off in torturing people apparently; the show's words, not mine), an opium poppy (no, seriously), a magical girl who looks 10 and wears little more than a bra and panties, and Man-Cow (with big cow titties to natch). But by far the most tasteless character in the show is a girl named Su-chan, and I'll quote the series itself for this character:

"Highly suicidial girl. Keeps a noose around her neck to die at any time as part of her personal identity. Goes into a panic and faints when then noose is taken off. She says it feels like walking around public naked. Averse to hardship and adversity, she always complains with 'Dying, dying!' When something happens to her, she gets angry with 'Are you trying to kill me?' Sings a weird song when she feels happy. Wants to visit Sugamo Prison someday. It's gone, girl."

So...yeah.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this script was from series' director Tsutomu Mizushima, who also directed the equally tasteless Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan. (Thankfully, this is the only episode of this anime he wrote.)

The rest of episode 8 deals with Shizuru and her friends helping out the town, which has now been captured by the series' villain Chaos, a lab coat wearing dog, and his army of shogi piece henchmen. (Who have captured the town's citizens, a group of pig people, and displayed them as lamp post lights, in a rather gruesome visual.) With all of the heroines except Su having died fighting Chaos, the girls must dress up as the heroes and stop him themselves, in a rather not funny magical girl/sentai set-up that made me long for Magical Project S. It's loud, it's tasteless (defiling graves, Nodaka's outfit as Alice barely keeping her clothed, seeing Su-chan hung by the neck and then die after she transforms into a star and falls in a pot, Shizuru and her friends leaving the still taken over town's citizens to fend for themselves at episode's end), and somehow this is all even worse than the little I saw of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan. At least in that series the tone was consistent, if nothing else.

Of the 12 episodes of Train to the End of the World, I liked exactly one; the third episode. Our heroines enter a town with really nice people, who just happen to have little mushrooms on their heads, which is dramatically cutting off their life spans. All the main girls except Akira get affected by the mushrooms, and she must save the day in what amounts to the only time in the series she's kinda useful. The whole episode has an eerie horror vibe, and it's much quieter than the typical shout fest the series usually is. It even has a plot twist that the townsfold allowed themselves to become affected; they'd rather live short, blissful lives than stay alive for decades with the effects of 7G. It's a piece of commentary about the new world the girls live in that's not really brought up much in the series, and I really wish the show did more stuff like this.

...Then it turns out Akira herself DID get affected in an arc that takes up multiple episodes, leading to her getting mushrooms stuck in of all places her ass, and the girls having to pull them out in a rather crude scene. (And then Reimi having to cure Akira by stuffing pages from a book into her mouth, because comedy.) Thank you for dumping on the only episode of the show I liked, Train to the End of the World.

So what did I mean earlier about Train to the End of the World being both too short and too long at the same time? In the former's case, this could've been shrunken down to a two-hour live-action movie about a girl saving her friend far away and barely miss a beat. In the latter's case, this series could've easily been as long as 52 episodes, where Shizuru and her friends stop at each station and encounter things along the way. Then we could've had 2-3 episode arcs, more time to flesh out the characters (especially Reimi), and shown off more of the towns in greater detail. (The episode with Kuroki doesn't even take place IN a town, but a boring forest.) As it is, its basic premise is too long for us to care about Shizuru's plight, and too short for us to see more of the 7G-changed places in greater detail.

But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how pretty a show is, or how bad the comedy is at times. If I don't like the characters, none of that matters. Train to the End of the world could've been the least funny anime I've ever seen, but if Shizuru was likable and Akira and Reimi weren't so annoying, I likely wouldn't have reviewed this. But these three just suck any potential fun out of this show, and the bad humor and forced drama/tearjerking moments just add extra salt. I honestly regret finishing this by myself when Stig and I bailed on the synchro sessions for it halfway through.

Stay far, far away from this trainwreck of a show.

Stop this train ride, I want off!Tim Jones

Recommended Audience: There's some weird stuff in this show. It can get kinda violent at times, and of course there's Kuroki's zombies, who literally explode when read erotica or see female flesh. There's also some light smoking and some subtitled language. Young teens and up.



Version(s) Viewed: Digital stream on Crunchyroll, Japanese with English subtitles
Review Status: Full (12/12)
Train to the End of the World © 2024 apogeego / "Train to the End of the World" Production Committee
 
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