The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - Dusk Beyond the End of the World

Male high school student Akira entered cold sleep and woke up 200 years later to a world ravaged by war. A new unified organization called OWEL leads people, and a new system called "Elsie" (or "LC") has now replaced marriage. Appearing before Akira after he wakes is an android named Yugure, who bears a striking resemblance to his girlfriend, Towasa. Yugure immediately proposes marriage to a baffled Akira. Akira then decides to go on a journey with Yugure, as he believes Towasa must still exist in this world.

Dusk Beyond the End of the World is an original anime project by P.A. Works. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Thursdays.

It's interesting how the passage of time and the world's advancements can alter my reactions to certain subject matter. Just back in 2021, I could start up a series like Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song and be like "Sure, I'm here to explore humanity, the act of creation, and the nature of the soul through the artificial intelligence of a robot. Speculate away!" But now just four years later, Dusk Beyond the End of the World comes in with its suppositions on AI use, tech development, and relationships with humans and our own output, and I don't know if I have enough "Eff off"s to make it through the interminably long-feeling first episode.

Granted, the treatment of this material and its story bowing to the slop machine does it no favors, and I shouldn't be surprised. Dusk Beyond the End of the World was written and directed courtesy of Naokatsu Tsuda, who previously delivered the sociopolitical trolley-problem simulator (and prior personal seasonal nemesis of mine) Tokyo 24th Ward. Dusk Beyond seems to think it's every bit as clever as that show was, with even less effective strawmen to back up its position. Of course, the people who raise concerns about the use of AI aren't doing so in good faith; they are simply rival businesses trying to undercut market leaders! What kind of technological leaps will we miss out on if we adhere to silly notions like ethics? Won't someone please think of the poor, put-upon AI developers who only want to use the plagiarism machine to spread joy to humanity?

This whole exhausting prologue of a first episode is effectively an exercise in whitewashing the existence and actions of the tech billionaires who have foisted this brain-pickling garbage on us in the present day. Would you think the likes of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg were less charmless creeps if they were portrayed as a cute anime girl? What if that anime girl were your hot genius stepsister who also wanted to date you? This is the enviable position of lead character Akira at the outset, and the emotional core of the whole setup orbiting around his romance with his big sister Towa. Even ChatGPT would probably advise against dating your stepsister. It's the entirety of what this first episode has to offer: the convenience of a step-sibling romance fantasy reinforced with AI worship.

Tragically, Akira becomes the only character viewers follow forward into the actual plot, which takes place in the apparent titular "End of the World." So it's a cheap twist premise show on top of everything else, and there's no way to guess where it'll actually go after this first episode—save for the fact that its tone so far. The production abilities of P.A. Works, which are lending the show some decent looks, to be sure, deserve better than this. I don't need to waste my time on an anime that would argue I'd be better off just asking ChatGPT to summarize it for me.

As Dusk Beyond the End of the World gets "properly" under way, I'll admit that the production is absolutely singing. The attention to detail from P.A. Works is admirable, both in the green growth covering the reborn world that serves as the broad backdrop, and the smaller details on the individual characters. Akira still has the bullet holes visible in him as he wakes up from his indeterminately timed nap—that'd be impressive detail if they didn't also chicken out on drawing his essential male nipples. For real though, it's a nice-lookin' show, and it really springs to life in the climax. Introduced android Yugure has some moves in this dazzling action sequence, showing off her specific kind of speed alongside the simple spectacle of watching her cut up a bunch of fascists real good. It's complemented by a nice score, even. As an animated series, this show is selling itself.

Unfortunately, said setpiece action sequence is capped off by Yugure revealing herself to look exactly like Akira's MIA sister and enthusiastically declaring her desire to marry him. So at the end, as with everything leading up to this, Dusk Beyond the End of the World is bookended by trips to stupidville. It does mostly leave the AI proselytizing behind (though Yugure is an android and thus some other kind of AI and so I am obligated to hate her), but that's just so it can get broader and dumber with any of its shallow attempts at flash-forward social commentary. To start: the oppressive organization that controls freedom of information in this world is called OWEL, pronounced "Orwell." At one point Akira openly wonders if they might be censoring information. I can see how Towasa was the thinker in their couple/sibling relationship.

It's the broadest possible way to draw up an oppressive future society, and absent any clarity about what it could be standing in for (unlike the prologue episode's ripped-from-the-headlines AI discourse) it means I can't tell you what this show is "about" at this point. But given aside comments from Akira and the general tenor of the storytelling, I can't say I'm looking forward to it. It's hard not to flinch at the posited threat of a globalized regime that prevents people from having their own countries. And that's before Akira's curious regarding of a futurized marriage-like ritual that encompasses same-sex and polyamorous partnerships, remarking as he doesthat it feels "unnatural." Darkly humorous coming from the guy who was hooking up with his step-sister.

It means that despite this having an impressive enough climax that I can see why it got pushed as the proper "episode 1", there's not much to evaluate Dusk Beyond the End of the World on apart from vibes. And those vibes are iffy. Given the "pedigree" of the creator it's coming from and the raw simplistic stupidity of the basic Orwellian commentary it's already offered up, I frankly don't trust it not to fall on its face in whatever it tries to say. That's before the consideration that what it says won't be poorly informed reactionary weirdness. But hey, that last fight looks pretty cool. Just check out and enjoy that, right? Thinking too hard about all this clearly isn't something the writer has done so far. I hope.

I'm sure someone thought that this was The Moment to bring this story to the screen. Please allow me to emphatically disagree that a show about an AI-promoting company that seems willfully blind to the damage such tech can cause with a little bonus political violence thrown in ought to exist in this cultural moment. Even if this was conceived years ago, there was still plenty of information about how destructive AI and powering it can be, to say nothing of out-of-touch, megalomaniacal tech billionaires. Suffice it to say that I would have been one of the protesters against Towasa were I in this story.

The willful blindness of the protagonists is the greatest strike against this first episode. (Well, that and the completely predictable direction the story goes in; is there any greater death flag than a proposal of future marriage?) At one point Towasa says that AI and humans are the same because human “souls” are just a collection of electrical impulses from the organs. That's perhaps not technically incorrect, but it also shows a remarkably inhuman outlook on life, one that fails to understand the difference between machines and people. But by painting Towasa as the one “in the right,” the episode makes everyone against her look anti-science and anti-progress, which is a bit disingenuous. There's no need to bring religion or even bad-faith business interests into it; secular people can have an issue with her goals, too.

A large part of the problem here is that the episode seems to think that it's terribly clever. It's unaware that it's simply whitewashing real life and using tired old anime tropes to do so. The only way this could possibly have been less creative would be if Akira were isekai'd by the trucks that killed his parents; him waking up in the apparently distant future may as well be a form of isekai anyway, given the apocalyptic changes he notices. There is a chance that all of my complaints about this episode will be sidelined by the fact that Akira is more or less in a new world at the end; there's space for the main plot to go in an entirely different direction. That doesn't change the fact that this episode is equal parts dull and frustrating, unfortunately, dragging its way along in a way that doesn't convince me that a flashback wouldn't have been the better way to handle Akira and Towasa's relationship. I can't say I'm looking forward to more, lovely animation notwithstanding.

I wish this series had opened with episode one rather than episode zero. I understand the thinking – episode zero does lay out the groundwork for Akira's story. But I don't think we actually needed it. Things would have been much more compelling if we were just hurled into his awakening in a post-apocalyptic world, desperately trying to figure out what's going on. I might even have been more invested in his relationship with Towasa if it had been handled this way, not because of the adopted sibling thing (I really don't care about that), but because it wouldn't feel so rote. Although I probably would have found Yugure's shift from killing machine to marriage proposal annoying either way.

Still, this is a more interesting start to the story. With Akira's awakening in an undisclosed-how-distant future, we're introduced to a dystopia that feels alarmingly familiar, where people in power seek to keep the masses ignorant. It's perhaps only marginally more subtle than the pro-AI angle of episode zero, but it's at least more interesting. It's easier to get on the side of the oppressed peasantry than the tech moguls, because the former feels like they're being genuinely harmed. After all, Towasa's plans probably wouldn't have called for wiping out an entire village.

Caniss, on the other hand, is a scenery-chewing madman. He's cartoonishly evil, filled with megalomaniacal glee as he delights in tasing a guy directly in the bullet wound he just gave him. I hope his name isn't a reference to the Latin word for dog (canis), because if it is, it's an insult to pups everywhere. He's mad with greed and power, and he stands in sharp contrast to the villagers Akira meets, and not just in the color of his skin. That's another element of the episode that's a little too neat for my taste – all of the peasants have dark skin, while the elites in OWEL have light skin. It may well be intended to show that the common folk work outside, but it's still not great. It adds to the feeling that this may be drawing a little too heavily from reality. If it makes a genuine point, that's one thing. But if it's being used as cheap window dressing, that's another entirely.

Although I'm mildly more impressed with this second episode, it's still not really working for me. There's some neat worldbuilding, particularly with how marriage now works, but other elements just feel ripped from other works – the way the world mostly functions feels like The People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau. It's better, but not enough to tempt me to keep watching.

The problem with the whole concept of anime “Episode 0s” is similar to the same issues you see with the lengthy “Prologue” chapters that bog down fantasy novels and the like, which is that they often feel like superfluous signs of the story's lack of confidence in its own telling. It's all well and good to establish the setting, introduce some key characters, and perhaps even hint at the larger conflicts that are to come, but why not incorporate all of those details into the actual plot and allow the story to start building momentum from page one? Good prologues exist, of course, but all too often the audience ends up with the distinct impression that the writer didn't trust them to follow along and begin with the material that is directly relevant to the overall experience.

Case in point is this “Episode 0” of Dusk Beyond the End of the World. In the twenty-ish minutes of screentime it has to work with, we are introduced to our hero Akira and his adoptive-sister-and-also-crush Towasa, who just so happens to be a genius prodigy at the head of the world's controversial Artificial Intelligence technology movement. I should probably note that Dusk's version of the A.I./Humanity conflict is the still very fictional variety that involves computers and androids who can actually think, process, and replicate the processes of human cognition. This makes the premise go down a lot easier for yours truly, even if the show insists on tackily mirroring some of the discourse that surrounds the glorified auto-fill algorithms that are sucking up the planet's limited water resources so people can justify their self-indulgent laziness and drown in a sea of misinformation and robotic hallucinations. The way that Dusk Beyond the End of the World treats A.I. is basically identical to the way it treats the quasi-incestuous romance between Akira and Towa, which is to say it is simply standard genre window dressing that gets the story to the post-apocalyptic setting and inciting incidents that are required by the plot.

And that setting of the table is all that Episode 0 does. I suppose this might be acceptable for a 10-page prologue to a slightly bloated science-fiction book, but it makes for a very uninteresting episode of television. Because Akira and Towa are far too simplistic and blandly pleasant to function as compelling characters in their own right at this stage in the story, the only source of genuine dramatic interest comes from the fact that we all know that their silly little love story is going to come to some tragic end or another, what with the “End of the World” part of the title and all. The colorful visuals and decent character designs are enough to make for an episode that is fine enough to look at, but the script for this premiere is focused solely on expositing all of the info we need to know about the brewing social tensions over advancing technology while gesturing vaguely in the direction of making Akira and Towa into characters we might give a damn about.

That said, once we finally get to the opening of the proper story in the last minute of the episode, we can see that there is some potential to be had here. Post-apocalyptic stories are nothing new, but I'm still a sucker for stories that involve overgrown cityscapes in a world lost to the ravages of time. I don't think that Dusk Beyond the End of the World is going to stand up to the likes of NieR: Automata or Apocalypse Hotel, but we might still get a decent science-fiction adventure out of this show now that we actually have the chance to begin the real story.

The most important task that this second - but also technically first, I guess? - episode of Dusk Beyond the end of the World needed to accomplish was actually kickstarting Akira's journey in this post-apocalyptic wasteland and convince us that there is going to be an interesting story waiting for us every week. At the very least, I will give the show this: It was a better episode than the premiere.

Was it better enough to earn twenty minutes of my time on a weekly basis for the next few months? I am not so sure about that. My biggest issue with the story so far is that the futuristic ruins that Akira has woken up in does not feel very futuristic, or even particularly ruined. Oh, sure, the environment looks overgrown and broken down enough to be ripped straight out of a piece of Horizon: Zero Dawn concept art, but the world itself just comes across as too easygoing and familiar. Spending so much time with the overly nice and understanding family that takes Akira in gives the setting an atmosphere that is less reminiscent of a shattered society built on the ruins of the old earth and more like an extremely dedicated and long-term Renaissance Faire.

Even when the intensity picks up later on the episode with the arrival of the oppressive military forces and whatnot, it is just impossible to shake the feeling that you're watching a bunch of people prancing around an elaborate but ultimately artificial set with some elaborate costumes and props. This is honestly and impressive feat, seeing as we're dealing with a bunch of two-dimensional drawings that only exist on digital simulacrums of paper, but tell me that the villains of this episode didn't act like they were yanked right off of the cramped stage of a dusty small-town theater.

That said, it is difficult for me to argue that the show is completely without merit just because the vibes feel wrong. As a science-fiction adventure anime, I think Dusk Beyond the End of the World comes out to be perfectly fine in the wash. There's some decent action once our light-saber wielding heroine shows up, and it seems like the show has some kind of larger game plan for its worldbuilding going on. I don't feel a burning desire to stick with the series any longer, myself, but there are definitely much worse options for entertainment to be had this season.