User blog comment:Miskos3/Spring 2017 - FT Wiki in Anime/@comment-7418318-20170722113006

I don't know if this anime was from the spring season or later, but whatever.

I just recently finished a series with the nice and compact title: "Shuumatsu nani shitemasu ka? Isogashii desu ka? Sukutte moratte ii desu ka?" / "WorldEnd: What do you do at the end of the world? Are you busy? Will you save us?" ... or as most people call it SukaSuka.

Even though some people might consider this a spoiler, I think this sentence still needs to be said right away:

If you like happy endings, go watch another series!

Now with that being out of the way, let's start with the vague, not too spoilerish stuff.

The series has only 12 episodes, so occasionally the paceing can be a bit fast, especially with the main romance, but it's only a minor problem.

Something I really like is how unlike with many other Light Novel adaptations the characters act like actual people and not a collection of unrealistic tropes. When the main character is accused of being a lolicon by a 14 (or so) year old girl, he doesn't get flustered and starts to stammer a denial that only makes him seem guilty, but just laughs it off. When children make advances on him, he doesn't take them seriously, because to him they are only children and not women.

Thanks in no small part to this mindset (and the anime staying away from scenes that sexualise underaged girls) that also results in an MC that is surrounded by 10-15 year old girls without it devolving into a harem series.

He's just the big brother/foster father figure and nothing more and it's seen that way from both sides. Even though the older ones occasinally make some innuendo-laden jokes, everyone involved knows that it's just harmless teasing for the sake of fun and carries no deeper meaning.

Well... except for the very oldest one of the girls, who does quickly develop a huge crush on Willem (the main character who's 18 or 19 years old), though much to her frustration he still only treats her as a child.

The only one who manages to really fluster Willem is the only other adult person around who's a 21 year old and very beautiful... troll... yeah, an actual troll who would (if it weren't forbidden by law) eat Humanoids for dinner, but don't let that fool you, her appearance is almost entirely Human, except for the fangs.

Speaking of species, this is a fantasy world with lots of animal-human hybrids. We have Humanoid dogs, cats, deer, frogs and different species of bird, there are borgles which are just renamed goblins and things that look like Pacman with arms and legs.

Oh by the way, there is a lot of prejudice and sometimes outright raceism against all the "disfeatured" or "markless", which are all the races who have no distinct animal or demon-like features like horns, fur, feathers or tails... i.e. Humans and those looking like them.

The main male character is Willem Kumesh. He's basically your average shounen protagonist in a nutshell. Totally average guy with no outstanding talent? check. Wants to be a hero? Check. Everyone told him he'll never make it? Check. Through sheer effort and extremely hard work he still ended up a hero and managed to slay the evil god? Check. BUT! Unlike with your average shounen series, this isn't the story, but the backstory.

This story plays after Willem defeated the evil god and now his body is so messed up he can no longer fight without collapsing and puking up blood within minutes.

So instead of having a series about an energetic youth going off to battle, we have a story about a disenchanted veteran caring for the next generation of warriors and having to deal with the "wife worries" of war (Are they save? Are they even alive? When will they return? Will they return at all?) and his own inability to help in the fight against the evil monsters, as well as some traumata from his past.

Now on to spoiler terretory.

The first episode seems quite nice, almost like a slice-of-life series with Willem saving the main female chateracter Chtholly (or Kutori, as the LN fan-translation spelled her name) running into each other by chance and have a small tour through the city... then the ending played followed by something a flashback starting with "527 years earlier"... oO the fuck?

Then we see a just slightly younger Willem... okay... what the fuck again? Anyway, it is revealed that was told to go home to rest up before the final battle and he does that. In the process his "daughter" Almaria (who seem to be at most 3 years younger) convinces him to make some kind of promise so he has a better reason to return alive and they promise each other that she'll bake him enough cake to give him heartburn.

Then we get the first true bomb-shell of the series in form of a short and really underplayed text-message considering the enormity of the message: "One year later Humanity went extinct. The young man couldn't keep his promise" WHAT THE FUCK?!?!

As we later learn, 527 years before the start of the series mysterious beasts appeared and wiped out Humanity (as well we Elves, Dragons and this world's equivalent of Dwarfs, though that's only told in the novel) and the last few survivors of various species only managed to survive because they fled to floating islands outside of the beast's reach.

The legends have it that it was the Humans who created those beasts and that's why any race that even looks like Humans (i.e. the "disfeatured" in the anime or "markless" in the book) are considered really bad luck. On some islands people are tolerant, while on others they are really hostile... not to the point of physical violence, but only barely.

I would still have a lot to say about this series, but I just saw how long the text is already, so I'll finish with my final thoughts.

This is a very good series, with interesting and realistic characters. It occasionally does some subtle fingerpointing and laughing at the "typical LN adaptation" tropes and I love that.

The humor that is in the series is funny and heartwarming and the tragedy truly heart-wrenching. And the switch between nice and tragic is done well. There wasn't a single scene where a switch between dramatic and funny was made in a way that it destroyed my immersion... quite the contrary. The scenes are combined in ways that the past dramatic stuff only makes the nice scenes all that much sweeter and the past nice scenes make you despair and sadness of the dramatic scenes all that more vivid.