SHUUMATSU NO HAREM

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA EcchiShuumatsu no Harem

REVIEWS

• 

  Feedtheducks27

  20/100
  Wasnt expecting much, but it turned out worse than expected

  This review will have some spoilers.

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  This was honestly really bad. It had a horrible story, which was completely made up of weird fetishes and ideas. Like there could have been a little more effort put into this to at least make it enjoyable.

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  __Story__ It really was so stupid. The whole I idea that a disease is going to wipe out half of the human population is understandable, and in a different setting, might have actually made for a good story. But no, apparently a million men, of which 5 are in Japan, survive, these 5 are referred to as “The Numbers”(1-5). They were all put into a sleep-like state due to medical conditions and they awoke in the midst of the epidemic. And they somehow developed an immunity to the disease, the _'Man Killer Virus'_ during this sleep. And obliviously these men are tasked with repopulating the world. Its obliviously something aimed at teenage guys who dream about that sorta thing in my opinion. It failed to create something interesting and created something that was more disgusting and just weird to watch. It was on the border of being hentai, considering they couldnt find anything else to focus on besides the sexual repopulation part. Its world-building was pretty bad as we really didnt know what was going on in the rest of the world until the end. And even in the end you only heard about the US, it could have been a tad bit more interesting if the rest of the world was included and showed what problems had arisen because of the MK Virus. This would have given a more varied perspective about the virus and could’ve added a lot more to the story. And either way most anime are normally always set in Japan, but I feel that if they changed it up, it could have been a lot better. The pacing was really bad too, it was slow in some parts but fast in others. At the beginning, it was slow and helped you understand what was going on but it flew through the end leaving lots of questions that might be there to suggest another season, still annoying though.

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  __Characters__ They all sucked, besides one dude who was kinda funny. Out of the 5 men, it mainly focused on two of them. These two were Reito Mizuhara, and Shouta Doi. Reito was the one guy that refused to “mate” because he had a childhood crush. While I guess this made the story a bit more interesting, because this man refuses to reproduce even when the world might end. But it was just so stupid, and he was basically useless all the way through. I dont get why he is the MC considering it was boring to watch everything he did, and they just started adding stupid stuff for him to do. The other guy, Shouta Doi however was the exact opposite. I’d say he had four stages, first he was hesitant, second he just went at with every girl, third he backed away and didnt do anything and fourth, he went insane and just went at it with basically everyone. He did sort of develop an attachment to one of the girls which affected him through those said stages. His ‘stages’ were the only funny parts to him. Because you basically just watched him commit crime after crime after crime, which just felt kinda weirdish to watch. There were multiple main side characters (if that makes sense) such as Reito and Shouta’s assistants. They managed everything from their daily life to the girls they got with, not to much to say about them. Since Reito wasnt focused on reproducing he focused on finding a cure instead, as well as his long lost crush. Towards the end he gathered a few girls to help him with the cure and they kinda made the show a lot better. They brought some actual fairly good humor which was good. But overall the characters were really bad and couldve been done a lot better.

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  __Final Thoughts__ I’m basically just gonna repeat myself but it really did fail. No one was really expecting it to be good, but it couldve been better than what it was. A stupid story with a bad cast and ending, nothing much more to it.
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• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  60/100
  If you don't mind watching garbage, this is some damn good garbage.

  Imagine being the only man in a world full of women. For many, this situation would be a dream come true... And for the first man awoken from cryo sleep, it is. But for Reito Mizuhara, the second man chosen to awaken into this new world, it’s nothing short of a nightmare. Five years ago, Reito was one of five Japanese men who were cryogenically frozen so that their rare disease, cellular sclerosis, could lay dormant within them until a cure is found. Now, five years later, Reito is informed that while he was frozen, a deadly epidemic swept the planet, killing the entire male population, and as such earning the name The MK Virus. Because something about the Cellular Sclerosis treatment rendered Reito and the others immune to this virus, it’s now their job to mate with as many women as possible to prevent the extinction of the species. But even with the opportunity of a lifetime landing directly in his lap, Reito refuses to go along with it, as the only woman for him... Elisa Tachibana, his college sweetheart... Went missing while he was under the ice, and as he relentlessly investigates her disappearance, he’ll wind up peeling back layer after layer of a grand conspiracy that may just reveal the startling truth behind this dystopian orgy.

  When you go into an anime that’s famous for being a gross fanservice fest, and you see the word ADULT spelled out in red letters on its site listing, it’s almost a given that the series in question is going to look like ass even when there’s no ass on screen. That, surprisingly, is not the case with World’s End Harem, because for the most part, this show actually looks pretty good. Not amazing by any stretch, but for the kind of show it is, it does look quite a bit above average in terms of animation and design. I think part of this is because of the combined efforts of Studio Gokumi and AXsiZ, two production studios that splintered off from Studio Gonzo in the late 2000s. Neither studio has done a ton of work, but what I have seen from them, I remember as also looking pretty damn good; I’m talking A Channel, Vending Machine Isekai, the entire Yuki Yuna franchise, and even Severing Crime Edge are some of the highlights of its resume.

  On top of that, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Studio Gokumi in particular can put out a good looking fanservice show when it both worked on Strike Witches with Gonzo, and produced Nakaimo on its own. Because yes, this is a fanservice show, and while I’m willing to bet a good chunk of the people who’ve seen it were coming in out of morbid curiosity, it would be an act of willful ignorance to suggest that most of us aren't here to see some uncensored anime tiddies, and of course a pair of studios who were birthed from the rib of Studio Gonzo would know damn well how to draw and animate a ton of booba. That’s not to say it’s ALWAYS on point, as sometimes their sizes do fluctuate and a drawing or two might look a little sloppy here or there, but at least the majority of the time the nudity is perfectly on model and well-framed, and is attached to a beautifully diverse array of character designs, and they’re presented in a good variety of different contexts, instead of just repetitive sex loops and close-ups.

  That is, if you can find the uncensored version, which is of course not available on Crunchyroll. The censored version is full of black bars that render the series almost unwatchable. The character designs are distinct and attractive, and what little character movements we get are competent enough. I don’t know how high the production budget was over-all, but for the vast majority of the series, it looks pretty generous, even if there are some cost cutting tactics that are occasionally visible on screen, and even in the worst case scenario, it is a well managed budget that doesn’t get wasted on CG at the expense of neglecting the 2D stuff. That is, until the final episode, where there must have been some kind of crash, and the visuals start to go downhill fast. The best explanation I can find is a pretty ironic one, because this is a show about the after effects of a global pandemic, and apparently the production was delayed and possibly also screwed over by covid, which played a role in pushing this 2021 anime to 2022. All that in mind, it’s kind of a miracle that this show looks as good as it does, even with its occasional visual slip-ups.

  So here we are again, TheRealKyuubey is reviewing a fanservice anime full of giant boobs, sex and debauchery, here comes the morality police... Oh no, they’re fucking, Jesus no likey! No, of course I’m not here for that. I’ve reviewed adult anime before, and while I didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about most of them, I think I was at least fair with them. I didn’t rip them apart just for being what they were. I had good reasons to tear Peter Grill and Shimoneta to shreds, and I made a lot of concessions for Sextra Credit, the only actual hentai that I’ll ever review. Hell, I couldn’t say enough good things about Prison School. But then again, I also wasn’t really planning to review this one, it’s just a random anime I picked off my planning list to act as a buffer between my Spy x Family marathon and my next planned review, so what is it about this particular adult series that inspired me to shoot from the hip and type up a review on the fly?

  Well, I’m going to start by ripping the bandaid off and talking about what I didn’t like, the premise. What we are supposed to believe is that in the five years that Reito was asleep, a man-killing virus came out of nowhere, swept the globe and killed half the human population in only a few months, leaving the buildings and infrastructure in Japan wrecked and crumbling, and a new female only government has sprung up from the ashes. Oh, and they’ve already done a ton of research into using the cryogenically frozen men with previous cases of cellular sclerosis to repopulate the globe. Even if I could believe all of that happened in only five years, which is a stretch but not technically impossible, the outside world does not feel like only five years has gone by. The way the women of Japan react to Reito, you would think they’ve grown up and lived their entire lives without seeing a single dude, which is supposedly not the case.

  On top of that, the world just doesn’t feel hollow or sad enough for the premise to be believable. Remember, this took place over the course of five years. Every single death, which I’ll remind you is from the entire male population, happened very recently, and there should be a lot more visible signs of that. Like, remember in Avengers Endgame, five years after the snap, just how empty and depressing the world felt? How visible the scars were on those who remained? The dead cars, the empty stadiums, the monuments? This show doesn’t really do any of that. Well, at least in Endgame, people were snapped to dust, but in World’s End, there should still be a massive unresolved issue over body disposal. Covid didn’t kill nearly as many people, and that was a major issue. But more importantly, it doesn’t feel like very many people actually lost any of their loved ones.

  I don’t know, maybe I missed something here or there, but from what I remember, there are only two instances of a character acknowledging a dead loved one in this series; The first is a major plot point involving the widow of patient zero, and the second is one of Reito’s close allies lamenting the death of her brother. That second instance happens in episode ten, out of an eleven episode series. There are tons of really intense plot twists in this series, and I swear for so long I was expecting one of those reveals to be “Hah, we lied, it’s actually been fifty years!” But no, that never happened, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising given the whole “how babies are made” thing(ask your parents). All of this together meant that at no point was I able to take the premise of this anime seriously. And I know what you might be thinking, why the fuck am I putting so much thought into the plot of a borderline soft core hentai? Normally I’d say that’s a good point, but in this case? No, this show puts a TON of effort into its writing, so no, I don’t think I’m asking too much.

  I’m not going to lie, at the end of the first episode, I had to take a minute to decide if I wanted to continue with this series. Yeah the fanservice was good, but I could get that kind of thing elsewhere. Ultimately I went into episode two, and that’s where the series started to grab me. First, we met Number One, the first man to be awakened for breeding, and unlike Reito, he was actually partaking... And he didn’t seem like THAT big of an amoral douchebag either! He seemed like a more or less honest portrayal of what most men in this position would act, from his increasing wonder to the boredom of having constant instant gratification, which served as a nice counter to Reito serving as your typical abstinent lawful-good virgin that would normally star in a show like this. This told me that the series was taking more of an interesting approach to harem dynamics than I was expecting. And by the end of the episode, we had the seeds planted for an enticing mystery that, as it turns out, was very soon going to grab me by the wrist and fucking DRAG me through the series whether I wanted to or not.

  Yeah, say whatever you want about a show where a small number of dudes have to repopulate the earth, and under extremely morbid circumstances that the writing clearly doesn’t understand or repect the gravity of, that fucking mystery subplot had me by the balls. I wanted to know what was going on with Erisa. I wanted to know what the truth behind the MK Virus was, and what the lies behind the breeding program were, and I felt electrified with every single plot twist and newly revealed detail that they threw at me, call me an easy mark if you want to, this shit worked for me. And to make things even better, the third man is woken up in episode three, and while Reito may have had the more interesting plot, Doi was by far the more interesting character. Having been viciously bullied in the past, Doi is placed in an artificial highschool environment with a class of specially selected girls... I still don’t know what that means, but it sounds sinister as fuck... And his favorite teacher.

  The best way I can describe Doi and his character arc is that he’s a combination of Light Yagami from Death Note and Makoto Ito from School Days. He’s a high school student with a chip on his shoulder who is gifted the ability to fulfill his wildest fantasies by a sociopathic companion who is riding his coattails for personal gain, and the more he indulges the power that he’s been blessed with, the further down the slippery slope he goes until he barely resembles the sympathetic audience surrogate he started out as. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the ability to lay pipe way above your status in life only sweetens the deal. His companion Karen, by the way, is very easily the Ryuk surrogate in my analogy, because she is a fucking demon in human skin, and the only thing about her that really breaks the comparison is that unlike Ryuk, she has some very lofty ambitions that she’s using Doi to reach, and she doesn’t even have the humanity in her to lie about it, I love her so much.

  Granted, this is also the plotline where the most objectively problematic things happen... Doi’s primary love interest is his adult teacher, while i’m pretty sure he’s still underage, and there is a very brief scene where one girl rapes him in the sports equipment room, which is noticeably worse than the somewhat questionable levels of consent that haunt the rest of his arc. Thankfully, his arc also possesses a strongly uncomfortable aura, because while the series may be throwing constant nudity and sexual situations at you, it also wants you to see Doi’s character development from downtrodden hopeless romantic as a very fucked up thing. You can call this hypocritical if you want, and you’re right, this show is definitely trying to have its cake and eat it too, by both presenting you with a dark subversion of old harem tropes, while simultaneously exploiting those tropes for fanservice, but you know what? It’s genuinely good at doing both of those things, so I give it a pass.

  For example, there is this one moment where Doi has Karen bring him one of his old high school bullies... The female one, since the male ones are all dead... And they chain her up like a pet so he can get his revenge on her. However, just when you think this scenario is about to go sharply downhill into some Redo of Healer bullshit, he doesn’t rape her. Instead, he does something that’s SO fucking clever, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I won’t spoil it, but he takes something another character once did for him out of compassion, and twists it into something cruel and vengeful, and it is just the perfect bit of symbolism for the gradual corruption of his character arc. It’s honestly kind of impressive that Reito’s story arc can hold its ground in comparison, but yes, it can, the mystery he’s uncovering never stops being interesting, even if nearly two episodes of Doi’s story occur within the cut of one Reito scene, yeah that was some fucking weird pacing. And I guess I should conclude by saying that the series ends with a lot of loose ends left untied, including the actual reason any of this non-fuckery happened in the first place, but that’s what second seasons are for.

  Like I said earlier, if you’re watching World’s End Harem, it’s either a nasty case of morbid curiosity, like you really just wanted to see if this series was as bad as you’ve heard, or you just wanted to see some uncensored anime tiddies, because you’re sick of seeing all these “mature” anime where characters are constantly naked but the animators go miles out of their way to avoid letting the audience see any nipples. I came into this series for both of those reasons, and I came out of it with so much more than I was ever expecting from it. I wouldn’t argue with anyone who called this series garbage, as it does have its fair share of huge glaring flaws, red flags and problematic elements, but it would also be disingenuous of me to say that I didn’t get sucked into the story and have a blast watching it.

  World’s End Harem is available for streaming from Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime, but the Bluray is out of print and hard to find for a decent price. If you want to see the uncensored version, you’ll probably have to resort to secondhand copies or malaysian bootlegs from ebay, or good old piracy. The original manga by Link, and its various spin-offs, are available stateside from Ghost Ship.

  A couple of years ago, in my review of School Days, I stated a belief that I still hold to this day: There can be beauty at the bottom of the barrel. Just because an anime is trash, that doesn’t mean it can’t use its trashiness to tell a genuinely compelling story, even if you never expected to find any semblance of a coherent narrative. This show in particular has a lot of obvious problems... The premise is poorly thought out, the first episode is honestly pretty bad, and when you combine that with the kind of creepy idea of harems being used for breeding purposes, I can understand why so many people drop it early on. Still, if you stick with it, it gets a lot better really quickly, and you don’t have to dig very far to start seeing a diamond in the rough. The fanservice is excellent, the plot is genuinely gripping, and through it all there is some unforgettable character writing. If you don’t mind watching garbage, this is some pretty damn good garbage.

  I give World’s End Harem a 6/10

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