Train to the End of the World Ep 1 Review - We’re in for a Wild Ride.
Written by Rei Caldombra 4/2/2024 Video version: https://youtu.be/92jZFs5IKIM
Next Next Train to the End Post: https://www.blogunderalog.com/blog-collection/train-to-the-end-of-the-world-ep-2-and-3-review-tracks-and-mushrooms
We’ve got a new anime original this season and it’s off to a great start! Anime originals have been doing great lately, two recent bangers being Buddy Daddies and Lycoris Recoil.
First I’ll give a quick summary of my thoughts that don’t spoil the episode for anyone who may be reading this to see if it sounds interesting. Out the gate it has a wacky and interesting premise along with solid comedy and presentation. This looks to be a dystopian cute girls do cute things slice of life kind of show that seems like it will have a focus on social and philosophical commentary alongside comedy and character focus. I’m super into this based on the first episode and highly recommend giving it a shot.
Ok now for the actual episode. We start off getting right into things with Youka getting kidnapped from a train station and thrust into a ceremony hosted by the Spread 7G Worldwide Committee. They prompt her to activate 7G across the world, a network far surpassing previous networks in Japan and across the world regardless of the opposition. It’s crazy amazing and will revolutionize the world according to them. After pressing the 7G button, the world becomes warped.
She presses it again after witnessing this, the world forming back but different, until she presses it again and the warping resumes. The world concludes being super deformed while the humans remain intact as far as we can tell. I want to emphasize that the button is pressed twice, this may become important later and could be easy to forget. This very well could be a factor into the specifics of how the world ended up. Maybe she stopped it from getting worse, or maybe it would’ve been fine if she had not pressed the button again.
Then we get into how the world has changed after 2 years. In our main character's hometown of Agano, (almost) everyone becomes animals with (mostly) human sentience when they turn or are already above 21 years and 3 months old. They bring up how this has changed things, with the fall of traditional society bringing both positives and negatives. Many facets of reality appear to have been changed, from how distance works to the different kinds of food that can grow. We don’t have a clear picture of the outside world yet, but we know it's bad when the last remaining delivery company has trucks that look like they’re from a zombie movie and other parts of Japan are referred to as settlements rather than towns and cities.
Our main character Shizuru wants nothing more than to find Youka again, who she had a rough last meeting with after they parted ways soon after the 7G incident. After returning a hat to local weird old man Zenjirou, she learns that she can drive a train to get to Ikebukuro where Youka was last cited. With her friends ditching school and boarding her adventure, they head on a journey to Ikebukuro. Apparently the way traversing the world works is completely altered so who knows how going 30 stops will actually play out.
I really appreciate how fast this show gets into things. It has the confidence to throw you right into the wild plot they know will hook you. Which I think is a much better start than if they had started with introducing the main cast beforehand like traditional cute girls do cute things and/or slice of life shows tend to do. I think it did a great job presenting its main premise along with the tone we can expect within this first episode. We already got so many quick quips about modern societal topics like the race to improve technology, fake news, escapism, bureaucracy, etc. We get that alongside philosophical topics like how people adapt, change and how to view one’s place in the universe (I doubt that focus on space in the opening is just to look cool). One example of this and the wackiness already being viewed as normal is Reimi and Akira having a normal catfight over the idea that being turned into a guinea pig has drastically reduced the lifespan of Youka’s grandmother. I’m hoping that we’ll get into some good commentary here in a funny but also substantive way. These are some heavy topics that have been brought up in silly ways, so I am excited to see how they are expanded upon.
I won’t speak much on the characters yet because I want to get more time with them before drawing conclusions. Their basic personality traits are clear and I’m sure we will explore them more as we explore this world. It is hard to glean much from Shizuru and Youka’s parting but I assume Youka’s hand in the 7G incident is the cause of their disagreement, with some words being exchanged reflecting how they see each other as people (actually upon looking back im not 100% sure if it happened before or after the incident based on the visuals, keep that in mind. Please correct me if I’m wrong and I’ll include that in later reviews if that’s the case). We’ll have to see how these cutesy styled girls react to the wacky and seemingly dangerous world around them.
It’s hard to make predictions on how the world is, but I’ll go with the world basically having a randomize sort of effect put on it, with weirdness extending to the entire world (like 7G was suppose to do) and had a less severe impact the further away the world was from the epicenter of the incident (sort of like how data waves travel outward from the source). The world has been “connected” in that everything was meshed together. I really hope this world goes full wacky while having a grounded base for contemplation.
This is exactly my type of show. I love exploring interesting worlds, CGDCT and well done social and philosophical commentary. I’m getting serious Girls Last Tour and Shimeji Simulation vibes from this show, which makes me ecstatic. This feels like Girls Last Tour’s general structure with the plot and theming of Shimeji Simulation. But maybe I’m jumping the shark a bit out of excitement. We’ll see if it continues to feel this way going forward but it definitely seems like it'll be going in the direction I’m predicting. I'm pretty confident that this was inspired by Tsukumizu’s work, but maybe that’s just me being a fanboy. Regardless of potential Tsukumizu inspiration, I love everything I've been presented with here. I’m super excited to see where this show goes, to the point that I went straight to writing about it after seeing the first episode. I’ll keep doing posts on it as long as it gives giving me lots to excitedly talk about, so stick around for that. Thanks for reading!
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Next Train to the End Post: https://www.blogunderalog.com/blog-collection/train-to-the-end-of-the-world-ep-2-and-3-review-tracks-and-mushrooms
