YMMV / Girls' Last Tour

• Angst? What Angst?: Despite her plane not lasting 20 seconds and being stuck parachuting to the lowest levels of the city, Ishii takes everything in pretty good stride. The same is generally true for the main characters. You see later on that it's just repressed. Both girls are very scared of what lies ahead of them, and rely on each other for comfort.
• Awesome Music: Considering its simplistic visual style, the series has some absolutely gorgeous musical themes.
  • Main Theme, which opens up the series invokes a sense of hope in dark places.
  • Owari no Uta (The Song of Ending), which is vaguely heard through the radio in the later episodes and eventually sung in its full glory by the "cats" is a melancholy, yet gentle tune of the ending of the world.
  • Amadare no Uta (The Sound of Rain) is a more carefree, yet still beautiful song inspired by the falling of raindrops on echoing surfaces.
• Belated Happy Ending: While the original final chapter is quite bleak, the girls are given a small reprieve thanks to Shimeji Simulation, where it's revealed that the pair were uploaded to the simulation after the series finished. The girls no longer have to live in a doomed, frozen world, and finally made it to the warm paradise they longed for.
• Cult Classic: Its original run in the mid-to-late 2010s went largely unnoticed and its anime adaptation was left unfinished due to its commercial failure, but in the years since its release, it has been fondly remembered as an underrated classic, and considered one of the highest rated manga of the 21st century.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Fans of the series often and endearingly refer to Chito and Yuuri as "potatoes" due to the round, pillowy shape of their heads.
  • "Kluski" in Poland, after Polish soft (and easy to overcook) dumplings.
• Faux Symbolism: Numerous reviews point out the series is in fact a tongue-in-cheek take on all the staple philosophical musings of post-apocalyptic fiction. Content that could fill an entire run of several different shows is presented in short conversations, any pretence of deeper meaning tossed out the window when the characters just chat about the "important" subjects. There is a lot of talking about afterlife, meaning of life, meaning of continuing to live After the End, humanity being a bunch of bastards... but it's all a bunch of filler, with all the flaws of different concepts quickly being pointed out.
• Fix Fic: This, of a sort.
• Fridge Horror:
  • In episode 12, Yuuri is Swallowed Whole by a giant cat creature. She actually turns out to be okay, as the giant cat creature says they don't eat living people. But it makes you wonder, what happened to all the dead bodies? The scale of the city highly suggests there must have been tens of thousands, if not millions, of people living in this place, yet the girls never see lots of dead bodies laying around. While many people probably died peacefully, as seen in one of the videos in episode 12, there are also scenes that suggests warfare also occurred. If a person survived but others around them died, seeing one of those cat creatures showing up and eating the dead body, or at least carrying it off, must've no doubt been a terrifying experience, perhaps enough for them to be Driven to Suicide, especially if it eats someone that person had a strong connection to. On the other hand, since we see the "cats" commemorated as nearly divine creatures in statues around the city, it's possible that feeding your dead to them was in fact the burial custom of choice during the last civilization; it would explain why even the supposed graves only contain objects of personal significance, instead of the actual dead bodies.
  • Kanazawa and Ishii's fate after they leave. He travels on foot, while she slowly descends back down via parachute to a lower level after her plane explodes well before she reaches her destination. While it's implied they might be okay, the audience is left to wonder what happened to them. Did they starve to death? Or get injured and subsequently became too weak to find food/medicine? Or were they perhaps Driven to Suicide due to being alone and getting a extreme case of Cabin Fever? One would hope that they at least died a peaceful death, content with what they've accomplished with their lives. At least Chito and Yuuri had each other to talk to and keep company.
• Genius Bonus:
  • In the opening and in most scenes where the Girls and the Kettenkrad cross from one side of the screen to the other they will be moving from right to left. Those with an astronomical bent know that the Earth rotates to the east - that is, left to right. Just like it says in the opening: So with a 1,2,3 start walking ...in the opposite direction the world is turning.
  • Late in the manga, the girls come across an art museum, filled with paintings and other artistic creations from across the various eras of history. Chito and Yuuri eventually decide to add their own picture to the collection, making a drawing of themselves and putting it up on the wall. However, as the shot zooms out, we see that the spot they chose to hang their drawing is right next to a depiction of the Altamira Cave paintings, which were the first ever discovery of prehistoric artwork and some of the oldest known human art that survives today. This leads to a rather poignant shot of humanity's first artwork hanging side by side with humanity's last artwork.
• Inferred Holocaust: Two layers of it:
  • Humanity has managed to destroy itself almost completely, to the point where a new civilization could very well begin and end among the ruins, making the setting a post-post-apo. But for the point-of-view characters this is simply normal - they've never experienced anything else.
  • The entire Mega City is so desolated the girls meet grand total of two humans while traversing several levels of it. Said humans probably never meet each other. Complete extinction of humanity is, at this point, a matter of time. Then again, for Chito and Yuuri all that matters is having each other.
• Les Yay: Chito and Yuuri's closeness lends itself well to this interpretation, with a few lines bordering on innuendo. One bit of material written by the author suggests that they'd be in an active relationship if they were in a better environment.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Volume 6's cover art is a Spoiler Cover that completely ruins the ending, which shows Chito and Yuuri standing in an empty, snowy land with black, starry skies around them. Fans who are Genre Savvy enough would immediately realise how the ending turned out: the journey was All for Nothing.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The girl's poses to the various '1-2-3' parts of the anime's OP are prime material for redraws featuring other characters in their place.
  • From the ED, Chi repeatedly bonking Yuu on the head while the later smiles has made the rounds as a popular gif, as have the various dances the girls do.
  • Chi's dead-eyed face, usually used as a reaction image.
• Moe: The girls are almost literal Moe Blobs with simple designs and endearing personalities, contrasting the detailed post-apocalyptic Mega City surrounding them.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • By episode 12 the "cats" inform the girls they are the only known living humans. This doesn't actually say anything about Kanizawa and Ishii's fates (the "cats" may very well be Unreliable Expositors), but there is barely anything left of the human race anyway.
  • Judging by the photos, Kanizawa was travelling with a woman. They seemed to be close, but he never mentions her and he's alone when meeting the girls. We never learn who she was or what happened to her.
  • Old news clips and private footage of the war are show. It consists of a different stages of a very brutal Robot War, complete with bombardments and the systemic deaths of thousands of people. It's made even worse by how they're interspersed with cute clips of the world before the war.
  • The world isn't just dying, it already died and nothing can be done about it.
• Special Effect Failure: In Episode 11 of the anime, the girls explore a dormant giant robot and find a control panel inside. When Yuuri activates it, the robot prepares to fire a laser from an apparatus on its head as a crosshair takes aim on the city. However, the text on the control panel's screen says "Lanch" in big red letters, when it's supposed to say "Launch."◊ This was fixed in the Blu-Ray version.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The ending. After all their struggles to reach the top level of the city and losing almost all their possessions, the girls find ...nothing. A big heap of nothing, leaving them to eat their last bit of food while trying to think of what to do next.
  • In Chapter 44 of the manga, the ever-reliable Kettenkrad, the girls' mode of transportation across the entire story, finally gives up the ghost. Chito makes an attempt to fix it, but soon concludes it's hopeless and decides to convert it into a bath so they can take advantage of a nearby hot-water pipe for one last soak. As she and Yuuri get in, her facade finally cracks and she breaks down crying.
  • Episode 9 of the anime. The girls find an abandoned aquarium, containing a single fish, along with the aquarium's caretaker, a small, dog-like robot who politely guides them through the facility and even lets them try swimming in one of the empty tanks. Near the end of the episode, a large construction robot begins disassembling the aquarium, following programming orders that are long out of date. The caretaker robot attempts to dissuade the construction robot from continuing, but is unable to convince him to stop, ultimately forcing Yuuri and Chito to save the fish by blowing up the robot with explosives. The entire scene has an air of sadness to it, as the girls effectively end a (robotic) life in the hopes of saving a single fish.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: It's never actually explained how the world ended apart from a few vague clues, and save for a brief flashback near the end of the manga, little is known about Chito and Yuuri's backstories, and how they ended up being some of the last humans left on Earth. The anime attempts to rectify this situation by making it more clear the cause of the destruction was nuclear war, as the war robot attests to, and showing that the camera contains memories of the Earth That Was, including Kanazawa's daughter.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Despite its relatively light-hearted tone, the story makes it clear that Chito and Yuuri are virtually the only people left on the planet wandering around in a gray and dying world; their cute back-and-forths and shenanigans might not be enough to distract some viewers from such a bleak setting. To make matters worse, the manga's conclusion can be seen as a Downer Ending by some: The girls reach the top level in the hopes of finding some kind of sanctuary, only to find absolutely nothing up there. They've used up almost all of their remaining supplies, and it seems there's nothing left for them to do but waste away.

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