Manga / Girls' Last Tour

"At the end of our world, their journey begins"

— Sentai Filmworks' description of Girls' Last Tour

Girls' Last Tour (Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou) is a slice-of-life/post-apocalyptic manga written and illustrated by Tsukumizu.

In an industrial world struck by a vague apocalyptic event, two people mange to survive.

Chito and Yuuri are two young girls still alive in the mostly empty world. Chito is a dutiful and serious bookworm, while Yuuri cares little about anything but when their next mealtime is.

As the two trudge on through the populace-devoid landscape, they keep each other company, enjoy what little creature comforts they come across, and shoot the occasional philosophical question at each other.

The two have no huge reason or motivation to keep on. They survive for survival's sake, going on a last tour of a world long gone.

The series was adapted into an anime by White Fox for the Fall 2017 season. Yen Press released the manga in English while Sentai Filmworks has licensed the anime for an English release. The manga ran from February 21, 2014 to January 12, 2018 and was collected in six volumes. The TV series covered about 3/5 of it.

It was followed by Tkmiz's next series, Shimeji Simulation, which was serialized from January 2019 to November 2023 by Comic Cune, while a third manga by Tkmiz is currently in development.

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Girls' Last Tropes:

Tropes #-M

• 1-Dimensional Thinking: When the girls come across a conveyor belt, Yuuri activates it while Chito is standing on it. Chito runs against the conveyor until Yuuri shuts it off. Then Yuuri turns it on again and repeats the process. When Chito expresses her annoyance at this, Yuuri notes that all Chito had to do was run sideways.
• Adaptational Expansion: The flashback about the ancient civilisation is considerably expanded in the anime compared to the manga.
• After the End: The series is set after an event that rendered the world almost totally devoid of life.
• All for Nothing: Three instances.
  • The cartographer Kanazawa lost all of the hand-drawn maps he made during his entire journey, after the elevator tilted.
  • Ishii, despite creating a plane with Chito and Yuuri's help to escape the megacity, had her efforts gone to waste, after her plane broke just 40 seconds when it took-off.
  • Chito and Yuuri's entire venture to the megacity and the highest layer turned out to be for nothing, as they are instead greeted with an empty stretch of snowy land with just a black cube.
• The Alleged Car: The Kettenkrad the girls ride in. Though rugged and capable of hauling the two girls and all their cargo, it is very old design and breaks down several times over the course of the story. It finally gives up the ghost for good in Chapter 40 of the manga, when one of the tracks shatters and Chito discovers that several components in the engine are also shot. She spends a day trying to fix it, but ultimately concludes that it's hopeless and converts it into a bath for one last soak. As she and Yuuri get in, she breaks down in tears.
• Alternative Foreign Theme Song: The Arabic dub of the anime comes with its own theme song.
• And the Adventure Continues: The anime concludes with Chito and Yuuri resolving to see what's at the very top of the city and continuing their ascent. The manga seemingly ends on this note as well. See No Ending below.
• Apocalypse How: A Class-3. Humankind is on its way out, as its levels are simply too low to repopulate. Episode 12 of the anime declares Chito and Yuuri are the last humans still alive in the city. While this information comes from the mysterious, mushroom-like "cats" that have been consuming all electronics, ammunition, and organic remains left in the city, there is no indication that the creatures are omniscient (Kanazawa and Ishii may be alive and well still), and one "cat" specifically says they have not explored the city's highest level. Even so, from this point on in the manga, Chito and Yuuri do not encounter any other humans or living organisms whatsoever, and the highest level turns out to be even more barren than the rest of the city's ruins.
• Apocalyptic Log: The camera given to the girls by Kanazawa turns out to be one of these when the girls are exploring a submarine. A lot of pictures are revealed to them of how people lived in the past, including some video of high school girls around their age.
• Art-Style Dissonance: Cutesy designs against a post-apocalyptic setting.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: The girls run into a gigantic maintenance robot in episode 9. Though it's merely doing what it was programmed to do, dismantling unused sections to conserve resources, its dismantling of the aquarium does end up destroying large portions before the girls stop it with explosives. They also later run into a Humongous Mecha that falls in front of them.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: A large Spider Tank the girls encounter in an old aquarium definitely gives them quite the scare. Luckily, the smaller one is polite and is able to communicate with them.
• Big Sleep: Heavily implied to be the case in the manga's ending. The duo burn their diary, eat the last of their food, and then close out the series falling asleep on the rooftop while the scene zooms out. The tankoubon only makes this worse; the ending closes on their helmets, with the girls themselves nowhere near them after some unspecified amount of time passed, with their very last appearances looking up at the sky in a wheat field.
• Book Burning: Invoked near the end, when the books that Chito (who is ironically against her books being burnt) have collected, and her own diary, were burnt by her, in order to keep themselves warm before their perilous ascent.
• Book Ends: Invoked in "Art". Chito and Yuuri stumble upon a cave painting depicting hunters with animals they likely hunted. Yuuri makes a doodle of herself catching a fish and pins it right next to the cave painting, musing that what may be the first and last pieces of art in human history are about food.
• Brains and Brawn: Chito is a brainy bookworm, while Yuuri is good with a rifle but also an illiterate ditz. Chito even muses about their respective roles aloud.
• Brainy Brunette: Chito has dark hair and loves books, in contrast to Dumb Blonde Yuuri (who's also illiterate).
• Boke and Tsukkomi Routine: The main dynamic between Chito and Yuuri. Yuuri is the Boke, and Chito is the Tsukkomi.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": In episode 10 the girls run into an odd, almost featureless quadruped that can imitate human speech through radio waves. They decide that it's a cat. Well, Chi says it is not quite a cat, so they call it nuko instead of neko, and the official subtitles call it a cut or ket instead of a cat.
• Call-Back:
  • Yuu checking the direction of the wind with a licked finger and declaring direction based on that.
  • In "God", the girls stumble upon a temple celebrating an oblong-looking god with "cat" statues flanking it. "Oblivion" has the tower's AI, as it is dying, call itself a "failed god" while its system status expands far enough to resemble the shapes behind the god's statue, implying that it or one of its sisters were deified by humans at one point.
• Central Theme: Everything perishes, so enjoy the little things for as long as they last. Friendship is all that matters.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The radio that Yuuri stole during their visit to the grave drawers. where it later turns out to be their only audible guide to reach the submarine. It constantly plays a melody that is specific to the Eringi, which uses Electronic Telepathy, serving it as a compass. This item later proves to be vital, as well, as it allows Nuko to communicate with Chito and Yuuri via its transmitter, and was later stripped of its ability to communicate temporarily, when Yuuri was eaten by the pre-evolved Queen Eringi.
  • The books that Chito collected over the course of the story later saved her and Yuuri's life, albeit by burning them, during their slow ascent to the highest layer, as it provides them warmth before reaching the end of their journey.
  • The real gun of this trope comes from Kanazawa's camera. It starts off as nothing more than some ancient, average 20th-Century gadget that Chito and Yuuri used to snap random photos in their journey, until we find out in Chapter 31/Episode 12 that it is an Apocalyptic Log containing a boatload of archived photos and videos of people from different points and periods in time, including the Robot War.
• Child Soldiers: Downplayed. Chito and Yuuri both wear old, resized military uniforms with helmets and ride a military vehicle, but they have never been part of any army and received all the equipment from their grandfather. Yuuri is also a pretty good shot with her rifle, and uses military terminology from time to time, seemingly just for her own amusement.
• City Planet: Heavily implied to be one, as the girls find out there are multiple levels of all the cities they travel through. They're never seen traveling through any wilderness areas, and many of the buildings they travel through are so large they spend hours traveling through some, and end up nearly getting lost in some of them. The manga outright confirms that the structure has been built above the surface of the Earth.
• Cool Bike: The girls Kettenkrad motorbike. Serving as reliable transportation and basically their home.
• Contrasting Replacement Character: From Volumes 2 to 4, Chito and Yuuri's singular travelling companions are different from one to the other on the respective volume that they firstly appear.
  • Volume 2 introduces Kanazawa, a cartographer/mapmaker, whose first encounter with the duo was rather in poor taste at first. He was actually with his female travelling companion whose fate was completely unknown before going on his own when his bike broke down. In the final chapter of Volume 1, he internally grieves after losing all of his hand-drawn maps from a rickety elevator ride with Chito and Yuuri, yet he still is in high spirits and gives him his camera to them.
  • Volume 3 introduces Ishii, who is a contrast to Kanazawa in many ways. While both are black-haired and bespectacled, their entire character is heavily different to each other. Unlike Kanazawa who is a cartographer who wants to chart the entire megacity and heavily does it practically, Ishii is a mechanic whose goal is to escape the megacity and uses past knowledge. As mentioned above, Kanazawa's first encounter with the travelling duo started off with a poor taste, while Ishii's encounter with them firstly started with a sense of amicability. Their final fates are different. In Kanazawa's case, he loses every single maps he had drawn, and was internally in dismay; by contrast, Ishii was much more relieved of her failure to escape the megacity after her plane immediately breaks down in 40 seconds.
  • Volume 4 introduces Nuko, who is far more different than Kanazawa and Ishii in many aspects. Unlike Kanazawa and Ishii who were both humans in flesh and blood, Nuko is an Eringii who is a Talking Animal. He's also not burdened by a major problem, but instead wanting to join the duo so he can reunite with the rest of his kind, unlike the previous two who only joined Chito and Yuuri to complete their respective goal while also burdened by the seeming flaws of their goal. Nuko is more technologically proficient than the rudimentary Kanazawa and Ishii.
• Cosy Catastrophe: The world may be ending, but Chito and Yuuri seem content and don't seem to struggle much with finding supplies and shelter (at least at first).
• Crapsack World: Despite how calm the two girls are, they are some of the last surviving humans in what appears to be a gigantic city that also consists of several levels. It's also slowly falling apart, and the girls often run into situations where falling debris or a blocked path becomes a hazard for them. Considering how many buildings they pass by and go through, and how large many of them are, one has to wonder exactly how many people were living in those places.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Yuuri is pretty childish and extremely Book Dumb, often being more of a hinderance than a help. She is poorly educated, but it's worth noting that when Chito is compromised (normally by her fear of heights) and they're legitimately in danger she will suddenly become a lot more focused and serious, and the few times violence has been necessary she's been highly competent.
• Cryptic Background Reference: Chito sometimes makes vague references to how the world used to be.
• Cue the Sun: The girls arrive at the highest stratum just before daybreak, so they get to watch their first sunrise together above the city. This is also just after Yuuri gives a big speech about living life to the fullest even without knowing what's ahead of them.
• Darkest Hour:
  • When the girls are exploring the temple, lights go out. Chi gets lost, Yuu is left alone in pitch-black darkness, in a huge, unmapped building, without any source of light. It turns out Chito is just messing with her and was there all the time.
  • In the final episode, Yuuri is swallowed by a huge "cat". Chito has to rescue her, all the while terrified out of her mind that she'll fail and be left on her own. Especially scary since Chito is a firmly established non-fighter, and simply tired besides.
  • Their real darkest hour is at the very end, where the Kettenkrad breaks down. From then on it's a slow, uphill climb to the highest stratum, with them using up everything important to them along the way. Chito even looks more and more upset as they climb.
• Dateless Grave: One chapter has the girls stumble upon an area with rows and rows of large black shelves near a "cat" statue. It's only at the end of the chapter that they realize it was a graveyard, as all of the shelves have a name on each drawer and most of the open ones have some inanimate object as a memento. This makes them accidental Grave Robbers, since Yuuri steals a radio from one of the drawers.
• Deconstruction: Girls' Last Tour is a deconstruction of a post-apocalyptic adventure series. While there are still survivors, it's clear that they are few and far between, with Chito and Yuuri only meeting two other human beings over the course of the manga. Working to improve one's life or rebuild society is often for nothing, such as when Kanazawa loses his hand-drawn maps, which he'd stated were his only reason for living; when Ishii's plane is destroyed just seconds after takeoff, ruining her plans to escape the city and causing her to descend to even lower levels; or when Chito and Yuuri finally make it to the highest layer after losing the Kettenkrad and Chito's diary, only to discover there is nothing there. Artificial life is also not exempt from this, as seen when the aquarium robot and its last surviving fish are nearly killed by a larger robot trying to recycle their facility, or when the Tower AI tricks Chito and Yuuri into killing her.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: By Chapter 46, Chi and Yuu have had all of their possessions used or thrown away, with only each other for comfort as they ascend the steps. They hold hands in the darkness, telling each other they're afraid of death, and are there for such a long time that they feel like they've become one with everything and can no longer hear their own footsteps. Just when they've accepted this, then they see a light.
• "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: Inori Minase (Chito) and Yurika Kubo (Yuuri) perform the opening and ending themes.
• Driven to Suicide: The elevator AI the girls encounter deletes itself since it has no more purpose and the fact that it is functionally immortal is causing it to go insane. It's also heavily implied the girls' grandfather commits suicide, as he is last seen cradling a pistol after sending them away from their village as it sinks into anarchy.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Despite being the less intelligent of the main duo, Yuuri ends up being vindicated on a few occasions. It's implied that she convinced Chito to burn their books for the sake of fuel, something Chito had originally opposed. At the very end, when Chito starts to doubt whether they should have climbed all the way to the top instead of searching for food elsewhere, Yuuri shuts her up with a snowball to the face and convinces her the journey was worthwhile.
• Dumb Blonde: Yuuri is not the sharpest tool in the drawer, and has the blonde hair to match her lacking smarts. She also can't read, unlike the book-loving Chito.
• Earth All Along: The Eldritch world that Chito and Yuuri are in can be initially seen to be as an alien planet, due to how commonplace layered cities are, and with the world being totally artificial. Episode 12/Chapter 31 reveals that this is Earth set within the future, destroyed by a huge Robot War, and they are implied to be what was once Japan. Due to humanity destroying all natural life in place for mass urbanisation, Earth is so artificial that not even a single trace of natural environment is seen. The holographic map that Chito and Yuu seen in the space center confirms that this was once Earth.
• Eldritch Location: The dead world. Everything looks plausibly man-made, and things like Yuuri's rifle and the Kettenkrad are directly modeled after things in the real world, yet the environment is entirely artificial with no hint of nature. There are massive layered cities, literal and empty concrete jungles, and city-sized industrial structures. It's revealed in Episode 12 that this is Earth All Along in the future and the girls are traveling across a ruined megalopolis, implied to be a future Japan. It appears that the world's countries had completely destroyed the natural environment and urbanized everything except the ocean, which might have been made possible thanks to advances in self-maintaining and self-improving robots (explaining the "mass-produced" uniformity of much of the architecture, which appears as though it was all constructed around the same general period, rather than in gradual stages that would be defined by discernible differences in style). The location is affirmed later on in the manga, when the girls find a space center with a holographic map of the Solar System.
• The Ending Changes Everything: The very last chapter of the manga turns out to be a case of a "Shaggy Dog" Story. Despite Chito and Yuuri's arduous efforts to complete their caretaker's goal of reaching the highest layer for signs of life, the highest layer caps it off when all that was seen is an empty, featureless wasteland with just a black box and literally no human or any life is to be seen, rendering their efforts meaningless in the end.
• Establishing Series Moment: The first chapter of the manga begins with Chito and Yuuri trying to make their way out of an underground area, with Chito chiding Yuuri for being curious about the hole, as well as misinterpreting the meaning behind "I wish a hole would swallow me up." After that argument concludes, they decide to get to the surface as soon as possible, so they won't run out of food, even though there's no guarantee they'll find food or people on the surface. All this sets up the lighthearted banter that defines most of the main characters' interactions, as well as the bleak post-apocalyptic nature of the setting.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: Though the girls do run into at least two other human survivors, for the most part no one is left, presumably killed in the latest war.
• False Camera Effects: The digital camera adds low lighting blur effects, along with some grainyness. Lens Flares also appear here and there.
• Feel No Pain: Invoked. The girls often discuss concepts of afterlife and heaven, each time coming to the same conclusion - they can't be dead if they still feel pain, cold and hunger.
• Flashback Episode: Manga. Chapter 40 focuses on Chito and Yuuri's tragic past in their town when it fell into civil war over resources, with people fighting over the last of it. The Grandfather, their caretaker, ordered the duo to escape the town through a pipe storehouse as an exit, before the duo reluctantly hurried their way out, as the war escalated to a breaking point. The Grandfather then committed suicide through a gunshot wound to the head, before the town's residents were virtually wiped out, leaving only Chito and Yuuri as the sole survivors.
• Fling a Light into the Future: The girls come across a rocket base where the previous inhabitants had launched 3 rockets in the past. Two rockets failed shortly after takeoff, but one managed to make it out of the solar system.
  • This ends up to be the core aspect of The Reveal in its Stealth Sequel Shimeji Simulation when it was revealed that the third rocket stored the supercomputer that housed the simulation inside, in order for the rest of humans prior to the Robot War to preserve humanity forever. This was corroborated by Yomikawa as to how the rocket was launched to the edge of the universe to prevent it from being destroyed.
• Foreshadowing: Chapter 10 shows Yuuri briefly scared of being separated in the dark during her and Chito's venture inside the temple, with Yuuri frantically looking for Chito herself, even though Chito is just beside her. In Chapter 46, Yuuri is later revealed to have nyctophobia, the fear of the dark, where she explained the backstory of why she was scared of being alone in that situation. It becomes a significant plot point when she and Chito ascend the stairway to the highest layer with nothing but darkness around them, while holding hands to each other.
• Four Is Death: Fittingly, Chapter 44, titled "Loss", deals with the Kettenkrad finally breaking down despite Chito's desperate efforts to save it.
• The Future: A few Freeze Frame Bonuses (Like the date on the camera and the date on the liquor the girls find) seem to indicate the series is set roughly 1213 years^note When the anime first came out in 2017 in the future. 3230, specifically.
• Gaia's Lament: The world itself is virtually stripped clean of anything natural, after humans destroyed all traces of the natural environment for many years, leading to all of the world being completely artificial. The only things that are still remotely natural are the oceans.
• Genre Deconstruction: The manga is a deconstruction of a post-apocalyptic adventure series and Iyashikei elements, with an emphasis on the life one lives during it and the consequences of such. And eventually, death.
• Hair-Contrast Duo: The girls' different hair colors help to highlight how different in personality they are. Black-haired Chito loves books, is somewhat dour and tends to take a more realistic view of their situation, while Dumb Blonde Yuuri is an illiterate ditz who's more cheerful and always finds something to be happy about.
• Hangover Sensitivity: When the girls find three bottles of old booze, they get drunk off their asses. Leaving Chito with a wicked hangover the next morning.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: While Ishii, with Chito and Yuuri's help, spent most of their time building a plane made of metal scraps that would allow her to escape the megacity, what resulted in her "hard work" is the plane breaking apart 40 seconds after taking-off, rendering all of her hard work fruitless, though she seems to comment on how she is carefree of the failure she just had.
• Head Pet: Nuko occasionally. Chito complains that it's too heavy to sit on her head though. It then gets a head pet of its own after befriending a tiny robot.
• Hero's Classic Car: Of a sort. The girls ride in a Sd.Kfz.2 "Kettenkrad" tracked motorcycle and Chito is responsible for driving it and conducting repairs as needed. Note that given the timeframe the story is set in, the Kettenkrad model is nearly 1300 years old, making it a particularly ancient variant of "classic". In the author notes it is revealed that it is a recent, modified reproduction, and that most recent vehicles were recreated from ancient documents, with new models being rare.
• History Repeats: Between how both civilisations collapsed in this world. The first instance is ancient humans becoming militarised that they ultimately started a catastrophic Robot War that caused a mass extinction of all humanity. The second instance is when humans fight over the scarcity of resources in Chito and Yuuri's own town, causing a bloody Civil War that led to Chito and Yuuri escaping the ravaged town for good.
• Hive City: Before an unspecified apocalyptic event destroyed it, urban civilization expanded exponentially, covering most of the surface world and then building vertically upon itself. The ruined cities that the girls explore consist of multiple stacked levels as a result, often consisting of buildings so large that they spend hours traveling through some of them, and considerable time and effort is needed to cross through the multiple layers of a single city.
• Humans Are Bastards: As shown within the present state of the world, it is heavily implied that the ancient humans in the past went out of their way to raze all of Earth's natural resources to pave way for mass urbanisation across the globe, leaving Earth to be nothing more than an artificial wasteland devoid of anything natural. What also did not help is countries in the past initiated Robot War that sealed the deal of the ancient society's destruction, as well as the civil war within Chito and Yuuri's town in the post-apocalyptic era, leading to the present society that is now.
• Humongous Mecha: The girls almost get flattened by an abandoned one falling over in episode 11. When they poke around, they find its weapons are still fully operational, and wind up setting an entire city block aflame.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: The girls come across an ancient AI that has been managing one of the elevators that connects to the top level of the city. The AI tricks them into authorizing the implementation of a self deletion code, since any attempts to terminate itself requires the approval of a living human.
• Imagine Spot: When the girls spend the night in an abandoned home, they imagine what their dream home would have, like bookshelves and a bunk bed.
• Improbable Self-Maintenance: Yuuri and Chito have no issue with keeping their clothes clean and neat (apart in one single chapter) nor keeping themselves clean, even in the midst of a post-apocalyptic ruined metropolis.
• Indestructible Edible: None of the food that the girls find is spoiled, not even the actual, non-artificial chocolate that the girls come across in the final episode. This is Lampshaded on the package of said chocolate, which plainly states that it's a "non-perishable" variety.
• Innocence Lost: Subverted, if not even defied. The girls are still innocent kids, despite the world they live in and at least Yuu is completely oblivious to the horror going around.
• Intertwined Fingers: Chito and Yuuri do this from time to time.
• Is It Something You Eat?: Yuuri often asks if stuff they find along their journey is edible, like a tank and a dead fish.
• Iyashikei: Who knew a series about the end of the world could be so relaxing?
• Life's Work Ruined: This happens to Kanazawa when he loses his maps and to Ishii when her plane falls apart. In the finale, this also happens to Chito, as the diary she spent so long chronicling her journey in ends up as fire fuel on the way to the highest stratum.
• Lighter and Softer: Despite being a very relaxing series to boot, Girls' Last Tour is by all means a dark and yet depressing series as it clearly takes place in a post-apocalyptic world devoid of all life. However, it is zigzagged. The anime series is much lighthearted, except for the scenes of the (in)famous Robot War from the distant past when Chito and Yuuri interfaced the camera to the submarine, where it was clearly very heartbreaking and grim, scenes that were ambiguously seen or not even seen in the manga and it ends on a lighter note ^contextspecifically Volume 4, where the Wham Episode doesn't kick off until Volume 6 compared to the manga where its ending is considerably bittersweet and heartbreaking as their adventure to the highest layer is all for nothing at the end.
• Living Is More than Surviving: As Yuuri puts it, even if it's hopeless, nice things still happen sometimes.
• Marijuana Is LSD: Chapter 37 has the girls stumble onto a pack of cigarettes in an abandoned greenhouse. They didn't realize it at the time, but they were smoking some hallucinogenic (implied to be marijuana) and after only a few tokes they begin to hallucinate spirits.
• Military Moe: Downplayed; the girls wear military uniforms and helmets, Yuuri has a rifle and they travel in a Kettengrad motorbike, but they aren't actually a part of any military and the story mostly focuses on how they survive in a post-apocalyptic world.
• Minimalist Cast: Chito and Yuuri are the only two characters, excluding their brief companions Kanazawa, Ishii, and Ket.

Tropes N-Z

• Never Learned to Read: Yuuri is almost totally illiterate.
• No Body Left Behind: Whatever ended the world left nary a corpse or skeleton behind. Justified in Episode 12, as it's implied that dead bodies are recycled by "cats".
• No Ending: Chito and Yuuri finally reach the top of the city...only to find there's nothing there apart from a plain stone block. They walk around the completely barren landscape and talk for a time, then decide to have a meal and a rest before they decide on what to do next. The end. However, Chito and Yuuri have completely run out of resources and equipment at this point, the meal they had is their last package of food.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: The Kettenkrad breaks apart in Chapter 44 as Chito and Yuuri are ascending through the penultimate layer of the megacity. While the Kettenkrad has showed signs of breaking apart in previous chapters, this chapter shatters the entire status quo of the manga permanently as the Kettenkrad itself was beyond fixable despite Chito's hard efforts to fix it.
• Odd Couple: Chito and Yuuri couldn't be more different. Chito being a mildly dour bookworm, and Yuu being an off-kilter goofball.
• Past Experience Nightmare: Chito has a brief one in the first episode, a memory of their last moments with their grandfather. She and Yuuri are told to escape while a battle rages on, and then drive away in their little Kettenkrad as gunfire echoes in the background. A chapter of the manga explores Chito and Yuuri's last days back with their grandfather, expanding upon the dream. They lived in a relatively populated village, but it was on the verge of failing. In one scene, a group of uniformed men are seen glaring at Yuuri before Chito leads her away, possibly angry over the girls getting rations like everyone else despite only being children. Their grandfather gave them their cut-down uniforms, the Kettenkrad, and some supplies before sending them away from the village; he specifically tells them to seek the higher levels, not the lower ones, likely because the lower levels have long been picked clean. As Chito and Yuuri depart, the village apparently collapses into a final anarchic fight over the last resources, and their grandfather is seen holding a pistol as if preparing himself for suicide.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Though the ruins are stated to be centuries old, they still contain working elevators, water pipes that pump out hot water and streetlights are functioning in some levels of the Layered Metropolis. Partially justified in Episode 9, as A.I.s are maintaining some parts of the city — though it's still quite amazing that the ancient digital camera and radio that the girls receive apparently function indefinitely without repairs or charging, in spite of being centuries old. This is Lampshaded by the "cats", who imply that such objects contain incredibly powerful energy sources for their size.
• The Reveal: Chapter 31/Episode 12 invokes this trope, where Kanazawa's camera is revealed to be filled with various photos and videos throughout many time periods, chronicling what life was in the past Just Before the End.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Yuuri is red and Chito is blue.
• Robot War: One of the videos stored on the camera shows the final stage of war, where massive walkers burn everything with lasers. Also a Shout-Out to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
• Ruins of the Modern Age: Some of the places Chito and Yuuri visit look like this.
• Saharan Shipwreck: On one of the high levels the girls find a submarine. There is no explanation provided for it, but it was most definitely in service, whenever it got there.
• Scavenger World: The girls trek through an endless city that hasn't been inhabited in centuries, and spend most of their time scavenging for food, fuel, and water.
• Scenery Gorn: Particularly in the 2017 anime adaptation. Detail is lavished on devastated urban scenery and abandoned tools of war. Some overlap with Scenery Porn, as these environments occasionally have their own sort of desolate beauty.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • In the end, the girls' journey to the top level of the city means very little. They finally reach the top only to discover there's nothing there for them, just a featureless concrete plain covered in snow with a large stone block in the middle. The girls use up the last of their food, too, and while they don't sink into despair over their seemingly hopeless situation, it's very uncertain things will end well for them since they have nowhere to go but back the way they came.
  • Discussed: Two of the recurring themes of the story is to "cope with despair" and "achieve something without regrets". Kanazawa and Ishii both achieved their own goals to a degree (though both failed at the end) and were forced to abandon the duo, but there's little sadness shown from them; in the end the girls reached their goal, and though things presumably won't end well, they are at least fulfilled.
• Slice of Life: There's no grand adventure or despair here - the series is all about two girl and their daily life among the ruins of civilization.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Despite the mostly lighthearted nature of the story, the narrative is deeply cynical, something best exemplified by the ending. Despite this, the story makes it clear on multiple occasions that living for the sake of living, or living to accomplish one's goals, are both perfectly valid reasons to continue being alive, and that one should treasure the time they have on this earth and not spend moments thinking of what-could-have-beens.
• Snow Means Death: Fitting for an apocalyptic desolation, the weather makes it feel even more empty and lifeless. For the entire story, we get blizzards and the girls get cold enough to justify wearing fur-lined winter jackets. Assuming the date on the camera is true, it's late August and mid September.
• Spider Tank: The girls come across two in a functioning aquarium - a polite little one that somehow manages to move despite stick-thin legs, and a larger one whose purpose is dismantling. A more literal one (albeit broken down) serves them as a shelter during the rain chapter earlier.
• Spoiler Cover:
  • Chapter 30/31/32's cover shows Chito and Yuuri glancing at the holograms of what look like images. It spoils the main plot point where they uncovered the montages of the past inside the submarine.
  • Chapter 44, titled Loss, shows the cover of what looked like the destroyed Kettenkrad. This spoils the Wham Episode, as it exactly shows the Kettenkrad finally breaking apart from its long journey.
  • Chapter 45, titled Sleep, shows Chito and Yuuri holding hands with no gloves to each other, along with a stairway at the background. It spoils a plot point where Chito and Yuuri begin their ascent to the highest layer via the same stairway in the next chapter.
  • Volume 6's cover doesn't even bother hiding the fact that it spoils the ending where Chito and Yuuri have finally reached the highest layer at the Grand Finale. The empety snowy land, the starry skies and the rotating stair gives you the clue outright why their journey is All for Nothing, thus completely spoiling the ending as a whole.
• The Stinger: Most episodes of the anime have a brief post-credits scene that follows up on what was going on at the end of the episode.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Episode 6/the end of Volume 2 naturally shows that a plane made of scrap metal, and constructed by three people with little knowledge of aviation wasn't going to get very far. The setting itself can also be considered a decontruction of Blame!'s: After the fall of human civilization robots continiue to build and maintain the cities, but achieve meager results before also dying out.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: When Chito asks Yuuri if she's thinking about eating Ket, Yuuri says, "I'm not thinking that. And I don't think it's white, squishy and looks good" while drooling.
• Swallowed Whole: Yuuri is apparently Eaten Alive by a giant cat they encounter in the submarine in episode 12. Chito chases after it with Yuuri's rifle, but it turns out the cats actually don't eat living people.
• Tempting Fate:
  • In episode 3, Chito asks if the elevator is stable. Kanazawa also mentions that he'd probably be Driven to Suicide if he ever lost his maps. So naturally something goes wrong with the elevator, and during that moment, Kanazawa's bag falls off as well. He is encouraged to live on however, and goes his separate way to draw new maps.
  • In episode 11, Yuuri asks Chito why they're wearing helmets when there's no one shooting at them. A giant screw immediately falls on Chito's head, and moments later, one falls on Yuuri's as well. They then find that there's a lot of falling debris from a Humongous Mecha that collapses right in front of them.
• Three Shorts: Each episode contains three linked-together stories, each roughly one chapter of the manga.
• Trailers Always Spoil: While some of its title art covers are known to reveal key plot points, the summaries in the back covers of its two volumes are conspicuously bad in spoiling them. And they're shameless of showing them outright.
  • A part of Volume 4's summary states "When they finally reach the surface of this new layer of battered city, they discover a mysterious creature that can learn human languages." Guess who this "mysterious creature" is? It's none other than Nuko. The summary fragment exactly depicts the whole events of "Capture": Chito and Yuuri firstly encountered Nuko in the same layer they were in, where he has his ability to speak in human language, spoiling the point of his surprise first appearance.
  • Volume 6's summary is so shameless that it essentially reveals the outcome of their journey in just a single sentence. It reads "Chito and Yuuri have arrived at the highest stratum, but their journey will not be over until they reach the very top of the city." The cover also immediately tells everything that their journey to the highest layer is a Foregone Conclusion of it meaning little to begin with, in spite of what the summary says.
• Transhuman Aliens: Though not directly stated, it's implied that the "cats" either descend from human-created artificial lifeforms, or were purposefully made to clear up the mess that humans had made of the planet.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: During the war, society got progressively more militarized, complete with "the glorious leader" giving rallying speeches.
• Twist Ending: The highest layer that Chito and Yuuri sought after for in their adventure turns out to be just... a snowy, empty wasteland with just a black cube on it.
• Unspecified Apocalypse: The precise reason for the collapse of civilization is never explained because it isn't the point of the story. However, Episode 12 provides some fragmentary details. The country that contained Chito and Yuuri's mega-city, implied to be a future Japan, declared war on the "neighboring states". One side eventually declared victory after inflicting over 50 million casualties on the other ("neighbouring state"), but at some point later an unspecified party deployed EMP bombs worldwide, which disabled most electronics and isolated the mega-city's levels from each other. As the world had already become completely urbanized and people relied on machines to provide everything that they needed, losing all of that infrastructure overnight probably caused a sudden population collapse and the end of that civilization. Sometime later, the survivors built a second civilization amidst the ruins that managed to reach the equivalent of a WWII-level of technology (or at least learned how to replicate or restore WWII weapons and vehicles) before it, too, collapsed into a war over dwindling resources. A century on from that, Chito and Yuuri are two of the last living remnants of humanity. It is implied later in the manga that the village Chito and Yuuri lived in with their grandfather was one of the last inhabited settlements (if not the very last one), and their grandfather sent them in search of the highest level because the food was running out and the people were turning against each other. The "Art" chapter implies that the Guernica-like painting was toppled over depicts things that happened during the apocalypse.
• Unsuspectingly Soused: The girls try some strange amber liquid they found in an abandoned home. Turns out it was beer and they end up drunk and dancing together under the moonlight.
• Walking the Earth: Chito and Yuuri have no set destination in mind, and their main focus is living day-to-day.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Kanazawa and Ishii aren't seen again after their brief time with the girls. While it's implied they're probably okay, one can only guess as to how many resources they are able to find considering much of it was already stripped clean, particularly on the lower levels. Additionally, the camera Kanazawa gave the girls reveals he had someone else traveling with him at some point, yet he's alone when the girls first run into him. However, it's implied they both died during the girls' travels, since the Eiringi state they haven't found any other living humans on the lower levels.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 44, where the Kettenkrad breaks down. As it was the biggest, if not the only reason the girls were able to make as much ground as they did, this event kickstarts the endgame and makes Yuuri joke a lot less than usual.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Flashbacks show that something terrible happened to Chito's and Yuuri's home, which is why they set out on their journey.

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