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

Melancholy, philosophy, beauty, and a name that is way, WAY too long.

The world has been destroyed by monsters, and demihuman races now live in flying islands. Protecting them from these monsters is a group of girls known as Leprechauns. Created for the express purpose of wielding mystical weapons to defeat the monsters, the Leprechauns’ short lives are made even shorter if they overextend their powers. If they do this, they will explode in a massive, destructive blast. Nothing will survive. Willem Kmetsch is one of the last surviving humans, and he fought in the great battle against the monsters ages ago. Now, he pulls odd jobs. His most recent job is as caretaker for the Warehouse, a facility that houses and trains the Leprechauns. He expected that this wouldn’t be an ordinary assignment. He didn’t expect her. Chtholly, the oldest of the Leprechauns, falls head over heels for him. This is the story of their struggle to find happiness at the end of the world.

How does this sound to you? Happy-go-lucky? Big-time-action? Tons of anime fighting girl tropes flung everywhere like the body parts of monsters? Well, take all those opinions, wad them into a tiny ball, and throw them in the garbage. This show is nothing like that. WorldEnd (which is the most of this title I am willing to write without copy-pasting) will drag you through an existential mire, slap you silly with melancholic pining, give you enough laughs to think it’s safe to come up for air, then piledrive you with the crushing truth at the end. All the while, you will be thanking it for this excellent character-based story. WorldEnd is a show with a rich world. Just looking at the character names gives you a feeling like there’s some culture there. The names don’t sound like any form of language we have. These characters have heart and soul, and even when they don’t know what they want, you want them to have it. It draws you so deep into their story, you forget the opening few minutes of the first episode. All those shots are taken straight from the end of the series. They do spoil the ending. It doesn’t matter.

This show is loaded with absolutely gorgeous visuals. Its art style looks mainstream enough, but it handles eyes a bit differently. It also harnesses CG in tiny, subtle ways that keep it from going “HEY LOOK AT MY CG GUYS”. Really, we only have the flying ships and some magical effects, all of which are crafted carefully enough that they look at home in the style. The rest is traditional animation. Since the show is primarily character-based, there’s a lot of talking, so you don’t get a massive amount of high-impact animation here. What you do get is the little nuances that make the characters feel like people. When you do have action, the animation kicks it into gear, just as I like it. I can’t remember a single point in the entire series that utilized cycled animation, except for the mouth in speech. This is impressive to me.

The voice acting in this series is phenomenal. Micah Solusod (Willem), Amber Lee Connors (Chtholly), and Jamie Marchi (Nygglatho) not only bring the characters to life but pull out the deepest roots of emotion from the characters. I’m still hurting from the final episode, and the voice work done during the last scenes. Even characters that are supposed to be representing what are typically considered monsters, such as Nygglatho and Grick, have deep feelings and complicated pasts that come to play in the voice acting. I really felt for Nygglatho (the kind of name you can’t shorten) when she thought Chtholly and a couple of the other girls had been killed in a skirmish. She seems so calm and serene, even a bit dangerous. Here, though, she was barely held together, and it shows.

This series started out with scores solidly in the sevens, but after a phenomenal episode, it bounced around between eights and nines. I desperately wanted to give the final episode a perfect ten, but some ambiguity about the fates of the characters at the end, and a couple other confusing facts kept it at a nine. The average of all the scores puts WorldEnd at a solid eight points out of ten. I would definitely recommend this anime for those who are looking for something that is a bit more thoughtful and melancholy. I’m glad I could review it, but I’m sad that it’s over.