English Dub Review: WorldEnd: What are you doing at the end of the world? Are you busy? Will you save us? “Broken Chronograph”

Possibly the longest title I’ve ever heard in an anime series ever!

The story takes place in 500 years in the future where the Earth has now become a fantasy world of floating islands and where various species of anthropomorphic animal-people (and by extension other creatures) live. Humans without animal traits such as fur, fangs, etc. are called “defeatured” and looked down upon. One such defeatured person is “Willem Kmetsch”, a man who lives his life doing shady jobs to pay off debt and get by. One day he’s offered the job to be a “caretaker” of a secret set of weapons at a military base. What he didn’t know after blindly saying yes to the job was that these “weapons” are living magical fairy girls and he’s basically set to live with them in a foster family dynamic with Willem as their only father figure since oddly enough, nobody else before him has ever taken the job.

Willem as a character is instantly likable and in a small flashback, we learn that he once had a family himself at one point but we the audience don’t know what happened to them given that this is just the first episode. The fairy-girls while colorful & childlike design-wise as aforementioned are all considered “weapons” but despite how cute they are, I’m curious how dangerous they can possibly get in later episodes.

The fairies we meet so far are “Pannibal”, “Collon”, “Tiat”, “Lakhesh” and the oldest being “Chtholly”. who Willem met earlier at the start of the plot and even gave her a large hat. There’s a comical running joke involving a ginger-troll maid named “Nygglatho” who gleefully talks about wanting to eat Willem due to being the last of his kind. The episode ends in cliffhanger fashion when Willem is told in a long exposition-dump by Chtholly everything we know so far about the young girls being “Weapons” despite the base he’s working at looks more like a lavish mansion than an armory.

Our Take

It’s refreshing to see an anime defy cliche because at first, I thought this would border on “Harem” territory but thankfully the plot doesn’t specifically make any of the fairy girls possible love interests which would be pretty damn creepy if they did. The rest of the show itself has a calm & lighthearted atmosphere but that could all change in later episodes due to the opening foreshadowing events of a potentially bloody war.