Dusk Beyond the End of the World – Episodes 0-1

Content Warning: Blood, gun violence, partial nudity

What’s it about? When high school student Akira wakes up 200 years in the future in a world ravaged by war, the last thing he expects is to meet an android named Yugure, who happens to bear a very striking resemblance to his girlfriend. More surprising is that Yugure proposes to Akira, setting in motion an adventure to figure out what this means and to find his lost Lenore, Towasa.

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Episode 0 starts in 2029 with Akira crying over his long lost parents while his family friend, Towasa, embraces him. Torn apart by a car accident, Akira was the sole survivor, taken in by his father’s best friend instead of blood relatives on either side of his parent’s families. It sets a somewhat somber tone on a brightly technological world, which gets explored further in the first half.

This is a Japan not too dissimilar to ours, including when the story skips ahead to 2038. In fact, this world is just forty minutes in the future with high tech that’s been steadily overtaken by AI—seemingly malicious AI. It has some of the automation we have, just more polished. It also has some of the more frightening aspects of tech that humanity fears.

But hard cut to Akira having an…amorous  dream in bed about Towasa, his found family and definitely his crush, who is also something of a teenage genius. Akira wants to upgrade from “family” to “boyfriend” but like so many people, he finds himself unworthy. Tech fades to the background with him: instead, we get the life of a young man in love.

That is, until the plot kicks in and things go very, very wrong, leading viewers into the destroyed cityscape of Akira’s Japan in episode 1 as well as introducing a familiar, long lost face…

It’s interesting to watch a series like this in 2025. I don’t believe AI is inherently malicious as a lifeform, but it is malicious within the grasp of money-hungry companies and billionaires. But this is seemingly a world where that’s not something people ponder. Instead, AI is a vehicle for crime, mirroring the presence of robotics as a staple in even a seemingly middle class home.

However, I kind of immediately saw it as a veneer of sorts: we get tastes of a world that has problem and struggles with androids and AI, but unlike, say Akudama Drive, that’s not the focus. It’s touched on by the Pope as a condemnable form of life due to the question of a soul, but unlike even Vivy -Flourite Eye’s Song–, there’s no sense of humanity or grandeur to it. Instead, it’s all about how Akira is deadset on dating his stepsister, though I question if he’ll fall in love with the android in the course of his quest.

Rather than being a foundation for a larger story, technology is a vehicle to a story that seems to be centered around Akira’s lifelong crush. It’s not even a motivating force once the story moves into its second half, at least not when tech isn’t being linked to Towasa. All the potential for a story where tech and its ability to slide across the D&D alignment chart just doesn’t have space to exist.

This unfortunately, for me, continued into Episode 1, which while an improvement, just really still was tainted by that episode 0 premiere.

Truth be told, after a two episode viewing, Dusk Beyond felt continually aimless. Anything Akira does to advance his skills is to benefit him being a good enough guy to date his stepsister versus…I don’t know, being an interesting human? You think I’d be okay with that just being what it is by this point but it kind of ticked me off given I’d like, just once, for a series with this type of relationship to actually be compelling. 

Perhaps this could have been fixed by integrating both episodes into a forty-five minute premiere versus this episode 0 and episode 1 mess? Yeah, that’s likely, but that’s not what happened, and it certainly isn’t on me to do a Catwell Cut to make a better opening to a story. It would be better if this original project already had its legs beneath it: instead, I feel like I’m looking at a kicked Boston Robotics dogbot, sans the militarization.

While asking out a step-sibling isn’t my cup of tea, I’d at least like it to be interesting, and while there’s aspects that are charming enough, none of the elements of Akira and Towasa’s blooming relationship as two young people on a date feels even the slightest romantic. They just feel like friends, which is bad if this is meant to be a sci-fi romance.

Worse, none of this feels clever: it just feels contrived and rote. You could remove the sci-fi, high-tech elements and still have the same series, which I think is a failure when the forty minutes into the future science society of it all is kind of the point. But then it would jar with what I think episode 1 is attempting to do: tell a story about a young man carrying memories of a pre-war world in a future where everything is so dynamically different, including the linguistic drift.

I think I knew from the start that Dusk Beyond the End of the World wouldn’t necessarily be something I was immediately invested in, and having sat with my thoughts, I think that’s okay. I’m on the fence on whether or not I’ll return to this: I rarely flex my HiDive membership outside of premieres and maybe one or two series. I may circle back to this, but at this moment, if we gave out stars here at Anime Feminist, this would be a solid (and collective) 1.25 from me, because it’s just so uninspired and really, really predictably boring. It feels like someone threw a bunch of tropes into a blender then hit 16x speed until it was a textureless mush. Everything happens too fast, too choppily, too messily. Even the plot twist feels contrived, when you think about Towasa’s place in the world as a creator and Akira’s role as the only remnant of humanity’s former society.

Yet even that’s not to say I hate this: in fact, I don’t. I’m just severely disappointed because it could be something that’s so much more than what it is. And that’s even with some genuinely interesting aspects: the linguistic drift displayed in episode 1 is tantalizing, as is Akira’s curious role as something of a deity in human flesh. The feudal nature of society is also compelling, especially backset against the remnants of a highly technological future that, for me, has yet to come. But these are just parts that the whole isn’t invested in, and that’s just peace I have to make in my heart, even if I kind of don’t want to. It’s not a profound message anime filled with social issues concerning androids, AI, and the inorganic lifeforms we’re creating. I’m not sure I’ll stick around to see if it ever will be. I suppose this is all the fault of Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow: it set my expectations for a sci-fi where peasant past meets high tech present too high.

As an original series with no source other than this premiere, Dusk Beyond the End of the World leaves something of the smell of gasoline in summer to me: nostalgia that doesn’t quite make up for the present, leaving me feeling hollow and wanting. In truth, those halcyon days are gone, and while there’s so much that could be good here, the plot just doesn’t feel committed to being anything more than average in trying to tether Akira’s nostalgic past to his seemingly brutal future.