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.

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.

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.