The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - Touring After the Apocalypse

All alone after the end of days, two girls bike through the empty ruins of Japan—and they're not about to let the collapse of civilization get in the way of sightseeing. Even when the world ends, their journey goes on.

Touring After the Apocalypse is based on the manga series by Sakae Saitō. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

To be clear, I'm not one of those people who enjoy tourism shows—or those about outdoor hobbies like camping or hiking. So it'd be a safe bet that I wouldn't be anything but bored watching a show about two girls traveling Japan on a motorcycle, checking out all the big tourist spots.

...Well, not without one hell of a twist, anyway.

This, of course, brings us to Touring After the Apocalypse. While it is a show about two cute girls visiting Japanese tourism spots (spots I've actually been to in the case of this episode), it has another layer to it—a sci-fi layer.

As it says in the title, this show takes place post-apocalypse. Yoko and Airi are traveling in a Japan seemingly devoid of human life other than themselves. They are following the SNS timeline of Yoko's sister (likely a cache copy on her old phone) and retracing her pre-apocalypse journey. And, given the state of the world, they are only able to do so thanks to an electric-powered motorcycle (and solar charging unit) and any food they are able to scavenge. Of course, this all leads to the main mystery of the show: What the hell happened?

While the show could ignore the mystery or tease us with a scant bit of information each episode, that doesn't appear to be what this anime is doing. There are tons of hints throughout this first episode. Given the overgrowth, we're only a couple of decades past the end of the world. We see that Mt. Fuji has erupted (or been struck by a missile/meteor) and there are craters across the landscape. The army was mobilized with both weapons and relief supplies. The AI tank that the girls accidentally reactivate in this episode talks about dangerously high radiation levels. Yoko and Airi mention escaping from a shelter. When Yoko looks up at the night sky, she sees an incredible density of satellites (or maybe space stations). We even see something orbiting the planet that suddenly changes speed and direction—marking it as a spaceship. And on top of all that is the reveal that Airi, if not an android, is at least a cyborg (and who knows if Yoko is one too).

How does all of this fit together? We have no way of knowing. But it's great to be overloaded with puzzle pieces rather than be starved for them. The closer you watch each scen,e the more you have. The girl's travelogue works double as a vehicle for gaining information about the apocalypse. It makes the entire show deeply interesting. Now, will I be watching the full season? I'm not sure. But I am happy at least to be tuning in next week.

Part of me was worried about where things would go after the first episode. Can these two girls and a series of post-apocalyptic tourist spots really be enough to carry an entire season? And the answer is no, but neither is it trying to do so. This episode bucks the barely existent status quo by having Yoko and Airi arrive at Yokohama—only to discover that all the tourist spots they wanted to visit are underwater.

Not only does this show us how our pair deals with disappointment (they aren't really all that bothered), but it also gives us some more hints about the end of the world. Sea levels have risen—meaning that either the environmental damage caused by mankind was irreversible even without their continued existence, or that the apocalypse itself altered the global climate.

Then we get the other big hints of the episode. In Ichiro's memories of his last moments, we see what looks like a nuclear weapon being dropped on the Yokosuka Naval base. Moreover, in the prologue, Yoko's sister claims the world outside the bunker is dangerous. Is this related to radiation? Leftover AI weapons from the war? Or perhaps a biological weapon that spread the “endocrine disruptors” which caused the orca to mutate? We don't know, but we have more than a few pieces to add to the puzzle.

The other part I really liked about this episode was that it showed us how Yoko and Airi perceive robotic life. Both see humans and AI as “people”. However, they are aware of the difference between them. Then we get Ichiro, who is called a cyborg but appears to be a full-body conversion with no biological components left. However, both girls view him as if he were as human as Yoko.

The episode ends on a related philosophical note that gives us even more insight into our heroines. While the girls part with Ichiro on a happy note, the nature of the conversation the girls have on the road shows that they know what's going to happen to him—that he's going to die and wants that to happen. Yoko even asks the immortal Airi what she would do if “alone”. And Airi's answer seems to be no different than Ichiro's. She wants to forever be with Yoko, like Ichiro wants to be with his family—be that in this life or whatever comes next.

The year is 2050. The world is in a state of economic and environmental collapse thanks to decades of terrible leadership and a population that has offloaded all cognitive function to energy-inefficient AI models. As I collapse to my knees, dying of thirst and hunger, I murmur to myself, “At least… in a hundred years… anime girls will live a life of beautiful simplicity while exploring the ruins…” It is the last thing I ever say.

Anime girls exploring the ruins of our collapsed civilization isn't a huge genre, but there's enough out there that I can think of two or three series that I can compare Touring the Apocalypse to. I understand the appeal of the idea that even after something terrible happens, life will continue. It will be different, but things will be okay for everyone but millions who lost their lives. Yoko and Airi wander through verdant landscapes of a Japan reclaimed by nature after some untold disaster. The tone shifts between cheerful and melancholic as they encounter the remains of civilization—from decaying tourist sites to an AI-powered tank whose human crew has long since rotted away into skeletons.

I'll stop dancing around the comparison—most people are going to see this and think of Girls' Last Tour, another series about two girls riding around a ruined world on their motorcycle. However, while Girls' Last Tour was a meditation about what it means to live when everything has collapsed, Touring the Apocalypse thinks more about connecting with the past. Yoko and Airi can be enjoying scavenged military rations one moment and dodging tank fire the next, the slight sense of danger giving the series a much-needed edge to keep the story from getting a bit too saccharine. There are also some tantalizing mysteries—who is this big sister Yoko keeps chasing? Why does Yoko get visions of tourist sites back when they were whole and bustling? (Other than the Doylist interpretation that they're promoting tourism, of course.)

Unfortunately, Nexus is just not up to the task of bringing this vision of the world to life. The animation is fuzzy, glowy, and too bright, making it literally painful to look at. I wanted to enjoy the beauty of Hakone reclaimed by nature, but the greens were unnaturally vivid in a way that made it feel like I needed to adjust the colors on my TV screen. Nature is beautiful enough! We don't need to crank up the contrast to make it pop better! On multiple occasions, a transition involved the screen fading into white, blasting my eyeballs into oblivion and re-triggering the migraine I've been trying to fight off all day. There's some awkward CG as well.

I didn't fall in love with Touring After the Apocalypse, but that's okay. I'm sure it'll hit just right for quite a lot of people! Let's just hope that when next week rolls around, my brain will hurt a bit less.

I wasn't sure Touring After the Apocalypse would have the juice after the first episode, but episode two may have just proven me wrong. When Airi dragged half of a robot over to Yoko calling it a “person,” I thought we were going to once again have a conversation about what defines personhood and whether artificially intelligent robots can ever be considered full people rather than something responding to input according to their programming, etc. When it turned out he was, in fact, a human man who had been put into a robotic body, the episode took a much more poignant turn.

Through the course of the episode, the show proves it's ready to tackle much more weighty subjects; not what is humanity, but what is life? Scwar-chan can be reawakened with a simple battery charge, but everyone and everything he's ever known has long since been destroyed by both disasters and the passage of time. His wife and daughters, whose picture he hangs around his neck, passed on long ago, but his robotic body made it possible for him to survive. Meanwhile, we get glimpses of Yoko growing up alone in a bunker with Airi and a stream of her “big sister” teaching her. Their framework for what it means to live in the world is vastly different, even as they face a brief moment of connection.

I just wish it weren't so difficult to look at. Even if the content of the episode packs more of an emotional punch, the animation is just as over-bright and glowy as before. It's hard for me to appreciate the blueness of the sea as it rises over what used to be coastline and the verdant decay of the crumbling buildings when they have the color palette of a bag of Jolly Ranchers. The segments where we see Yoko standing among the tourism sites as we know them are hard to even look at for more than a few seconds at a time.

There have been numerous shows this season that seem to struggle with balancing the art of providing the audience with information while also leaving enough room for an ongoing narrative to unfold. So far, I think Touring After the Apocalypse rides that line beautifully. Not only does this premiere hold back on giving everything away, but it also has an amazing sense of atmosphere, a solid sense of pacing, and a surprising amount of action for something that starts with such a laid-back tone. The idea of two happy-go-lucky girls just touring the countryside after a clear cataclysmic event is fascinating and seems like an easy setup for feeding the audience information on what might've happened to this land as they travel to new places. Even though nothing really happens for the first ten minutes of the episode, it was enjoyable just watching these two girls ride their motorbike to scavenge for food. I want to know more about this world that seems to be moving on from something horrific.

There's a little bit of personal motivation with one of our leads looking for their sister, or at the very least, trying to revisit a lot of the places that she did previously. I like many of the stylistic additions, particularly the camera work, which shows that there is actual intention behind everything we are seeing. That makes many of the more supernatural elements a bit easier to swallow than I originally anticipated. At first, it felt like the show was taking a tough turn, with at least one of the girls seemingly being an android that could fire lasers from her hands. Still, there's just something about the way that the characters interact both before and after that sequence that feels very casual in a believable way. Not to mention that there appears to be an issue with one of the girls regarding her interaction with past events or her ability to remember them. The show is very vague about it, but in a way that actually sparks intrigue instead of just baiting us without any real payoff.

In many ways, this episode also felt like an independent short film, which I think is the ideal standard that many premieres should strive for. It's well animated, sows plenty of seeds, but also gives us enough that the episode feels satisfactory in some ways. I wasn't really expecting much when I first read the description of this show, but now it might be one of the strongest premieres I've watched so far, and I am thoroughly looking forward to seeing what else the show has in store. Fingers crossed it doesn't go to the opposite extreme and overcomplicates itself.

Wow, I was not expecting to nearly cry at the end of episode two. When it comes to dealing with post apocalyptic stories, you always expect there to be some kind of sadness or dramatic beat. This is especially true when it comes to stories that seem to be all about recounting memories or slowly piecing together what exactly happened that left the world in such a state. We were already sort of priming that up with the reveal that our two leads lived in isolation for a good chunk of their lives. It isn't until we come across our little robotic companion that the real emotional arc of the episode starts settling in. In a lot of ways, this episode follows a similar structure to the last one where we spend the first half of the episode just touring a new location and the second half of the episode is about our two leads coming across some kind of machine that gives us more direct context to how the previous world worked. Last week it was a tank, today it's a quirky little robot Dad.

I was fully expecting this guy to either be a new member of the cast or I was expecting some kind of dark twist like he was a military android that would start attacking them. No, turns out he was just a dad that had been in an accident and thus had a lot of his organic parts replaced with robotic ones. I love how expressive his face is and how the screen on his face is utilized both as a mirror to the landscape, but also as a way of showcasing who is on the inside. The episode is already tugging at my heartstrings and when we got that reflection of his human face in the robot head, after he said that he wanted to be left behind, I already knew where things were going.

Given this setting, it makes sense that people would be separated or would've ended up all alone. He was brought back to life just long enough so that he could regain his memories and he was able to “return home” to his family by letting his battery die. It's really sad and if this is just a taste of what the rest of the series is gonna look like, then I am all for it. Give me my weekly dose of depression, please.