527 years ago, the world essentially ended. Living creatures of all races abandoned the surface to live on floating islands and even to this day they are constantly worried about the beasts that roam the surface. The beasts, created by the now-extinct emnetwiht race, can only be slain by the emnetwihts’ greatest weapons which in turn can only be wielded by emnetwihts.
And so, Williem, an emnetwiht who was petrified for hundreds of years and only released recently, finds himself on the outskirts of an unfamiliar world with a group of the last people who can keep the world safe.
While not unheard of, given current publishing trends it’s still a bit uncommon to find a fantasy LN that doesn’t make use of any video-game-esque details (like levels or statuses) or one that isn’t an isekai at all. In fact, there’s a chance that WorldEnd could be set above a very distant future Earth (“emnetwihts” are heavily implied to be the regular human race) but that part doesn’t really matter to the story. What you need to know is that, as far as everyone is concerned, they are basically living in the twilight of the end of the world, with a very perilous balance keeping the world in the sky.
Williem may be the last emnetwiht in the world and the other races may despise the long-dead race for the disaster they brought upon the world, but the fact remains that they still need people who can wield their strongest weapons to keep the beasts from killing them all. Which is how Williem comes to the “faerie warehouse” and discovers, with a bit of horror, that the surviving races figured out a way to artificially create leprechauns, a type of fairy originally born from the souls of children who were too young to understand their own deaths, as a kind of emnetwiht replacement, and that these young girls are fated to live their lives in isolation from the rest of the world and to die young protecting it.
As such, the story quickly reveals its cards as a more melancholy tale than usual; these faerie soldiers will never live long as they are fated to either die in battle to protect the world or they will fall prey to the tenuous, unstable magic that gave birth to them in the first place. I really liked the story when it focused more on this aspect. It made the story into something different and provides a lot of material for the characters to face and grow up against. It managed to strike the right tone of being somber without needing to kill off half of its cast in the process, although some of this “tragedy” is played up for the sake of the burgeoning romance between Williem and the leprechaun Chtholly.
Incidentally, all of the leprechauns are girls, and I believe it was implied that the soul they are using as a basis for creating them was female and that’s why; you can certainly still see it playing into any number of “man tries to protect women/man has seemingly-magical skills that the women do not” but I did think that the story tried hard to make these elements be a natural outcome of the setting/characters and not merely a trope for tropes sake.
And yet, ironically this quiet and distinctive tone may have been the series real-world downfall. Even in the afterword of volume two the author mentions that the sales for the first volume were dismal and they were unsure if a volume three would even be coming (this first series wrapped up quite quickly with five volumes plus one volume of side stories, although there is a sequel series currently being published that is up to six volumes). This does make it a bit curious that the series got an anime adaptation at all, which is how I was first introduced to it, and it should be noted that both the anime and the first light novel volume are tagged as top sellers on RightStuf.
With all of that in mind, I am curious if Akira Kareno initially planned for the “generic anime wackiness” moments (along the lines of “jokes about Williem being attracted to the faeries because they look like young girls,” faces getting slapped, Chtholly being rather tsun, etc) from the very start or if these much more stereotypical anime moments at the beginning of the second volume were inserted in a bid to try and retain readers. The second volume is much more uneven from the first, and you can think of it being split into two parts. The first half which wraps up the conflict in the first volume (where the “generic anime wacky” set-ups happen) and the second half is where Williem has 500+ years worth of exposition dumped on him at once. The exposition plays out better than you think but overall, based on my recollections, I think the story worked a bit better in animated form than light novel.
A lot of WorldEnd is told from the internal perspective of various characters, and light novel internal monologues almost always come off as clunky to me no matter who the translator is or what the source material is, and I think it’s simply a stylistic trait I’m not that fond of. Anime, in general, tends to have less of this, which is a plus in my book, and in the case of WorldEnd I felt like the switches between these more subdued sections of the book and the more “traditional anime wacky” just worked better in the anime than they did here. I do hope that volume 3 is a bit more evenly balanced than volume 2, especially since it should be the beginning of a new arc, and I plan to stick around to find out.