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Train to the End of the World continues to be loads of fun in its second episode, and I love how the story has been presented thus far. Continuing from where episode one left off, the girls are on the train journeying towards their lost friend. The majority of the episode is mostly them talking with each other on the train and it’s never boring.

Shizuru is who we were mostly following in the first episode; we already know she’s headstrong and can be a bit one-minded towards one goal. However, we also learn more about her friends here, which could introduce further drama, or it might just be here for establishing the relationship; either way, it works great. Akira and Reimi, while close friends, definitely have some problems with each other, with their argument in this one slightly more dramatic than the small talk in episode one. Nadeshiko breaking them up and calming everyone down was something that stood a bit out to me. In fact, Nadeshiko seems to be the glue holding the friend group together, as she also confronts Shizuru on her own selfishness at times. I’m very curious to see if there’s going to be a point in time in the story in which Nadeshiko will be separated from everyone else. I feel like the group dynamics would just completely go downhill, and I would love to see each of them individually deal with it.

This episode, while appearing to be more of a low-key character establishment moment, introduced a lot of interesting worldbuilding in the same style as its debut and allows you to be the one to pay attention, rather than simply spoon-feeding it to you. We meet a nameless eccentric man who, while appearing crazy, seems to know more about what’s going on in the world than his comedic appearance suggests (he literally arrives on a swan boat). The way the show presents itself is so uniquely wacky that I can’t help but love every bit of it.

More importantly, he gives us some insanely useful pieces of info that continue to make this series so much more interesting. He suggests that every other place in the world has disappeared except everything along the Seibu Ikebukuro line, and he provides a map that looks like nonsense to the cast. While he is a bit of an unreliable speaker, as he seems to have gone a bit mad, we are led to believe his statements to some extent due to the map he provided actually proving itself to be reality by the end of the episode.

The map has accurately depicted this mushroom location and confirms to us that the train will be traveling in a completely linear path with no detours. There are many interesting visuals here like a wolf, a kappa, someone throwing up, and just ramen. It’s going to be very curious if we’re going to see everything here in full because as far as we know, this show seems to be the regular 12-13 episodes.

The world of this show just keeps getting more exciting. We also saw Aztec-like markings on the ground on their way to this mushroom. There are so many questions and this has been an incredibly fun start. I hope the rest of the show will be able to keep up and manage all the different things they have introduced all the way to the end.

I talked about the story quite a bit, didn’t I? A bit of a departure for me, considering we focus more on production and visual aspects around here. So let’s talk about the production. This episode only had three animators. You heard me right. There weren’t a lot of Animation Directors either. Yet, the quality throughout the episode was consistently good. It seems like they have compensated for the lack of key animators with a ton of in-between animators. I’m very curious to see their workflow, but either way, it just proves how solid the production of the show is and how long it likely has been in the works, with an episode with only three animators not having any notable drop in animation quality.

I’m having a great time with this series, and I hope you are too. I hope to continue discussing this series for weeks to come.