My Hero Academia: The Final Season

Short Synopsis: The final season of My Hero Academia, you know what this is at this point.

Lenlo: Ah My Hero Academia, so we finally come to your swan song. Let’s be real, you know by this point if you enjoy My Hero Academia or not, we’re like… 8 seasons in. No one is watching this that isn’t invested in seeing it through to the end. The real question is, what do I think of the ending and the content being adapted? Personally? It’s… Alright. Muddied, a clear vision executed sloppily that the anime has a chance to fix but probably won’t. Luckily it’s still good enough that I want to finish it, and I hope BONES gives it the animation it needs to shine, because it’s going to be non-stop battles from here until the end.
Potential: 60%

Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota

Short Synopsis: An overly emotional middle school boy tries and fails to prank his stoic female classmate.

Wooper: I have to call it like I see it – this is just a retread of Komi-san Can’t Communicate. Sure, the male lead has more of a personality (“pissed off for no reason”), which changes his dynamic with the female lead, but in nearly every other way it’s a clone. It uses on-screen text and a female narrator to clue us into what the silent Kashiwada is thinking, its soundtrack is piano-heavy, the side characters’ lives revolve entirely around the main duo – the similarities are uncanny. That last point especially is taken to the extreme here, with multiple classroom scenes arranged so that Kashiwada and Oota are in the center of the room, and everybody else stands on the periphery, observing them as though they’re the only people that matter. The only moments of visual interest are exterior shots of birds in a nest outside their second-floor classroom, which are meant to symbolize the show’s central relationship but somehow end up overshadowing it, despite constituting less than one percent of this episode’s runtime. This won’t go down as fall’s worst premiere, but it’s the worst one I’ve seen at this early stage.
Potential: 5%

Sanda

Short Synopsis: Two middle schoolers, one descended from Santa Claus and the other willing to do anything to get his help, set out to discover what happened to one of their classmates. Did I mention she stabs him in the first 10 minutes?

Lenlo: What the fuck did I just watch. Paru Itagaki, author of Beastars, what the hell have you created? Why did our lead just stab a kid to turn him into Santa Claus? Why is Santa Claus buff as hell? Why are we blowing up a school?! I have absolutely no idea what is happening or where this is going to go. Will it become some kind of battle shounen between the various holidays? Or is Santa Claus going to become a domestic terrorist to find a lost little girl? I honestly don’t know. But it looks good, the character designs are sharp, the art style stands out, and there’s just enough sanity that I want to watch more and see what other crazy shit it does. Besides, Fuyumura is kinda cute.
Potential: 60%

Pass the Monster Meat, Milady

Short Synopsis: Royal girl who loves eating monsters + awkward knight who loves killing monsters = great success! Easy!

Amun: Disclaimer: I love wild meat. I would trade all the domestic beef and chicken in the world if I could eat wild meat every day. In short, I agree strongly with our heroine – and while I haven’t been shunned by royal society, I have gotten a few funny looks. And, like our heroine, I’m not a great hunter – so if someone came along who could decapitate a future meal, yeah I’d swoon too. Take away my obvious bias, and this is a show about two people who are a bit outside the norm finding love and acceptance with each other – plus a bit of a wild game gourmet gimmick. Some of the character designs are quite triangular (makes me feel like I’m watching a 20 year old anime sometimes), but I’m generally onboard with the chemistry of the leads and the different avenues the story can take us. I do think the animation could fall apart in the back half, but that’s a problem for future me. Sign me up for another course!
Potential: 85%

Mario: I’ll be frank, the title turned me off at first. It sounds more like a bad pun of an ecchi anime, but instead, this is a show about a girl who loves meat and a boy who loves hunting. The trend in anime about eating monsters sure is fascinating, but unlike Delicious in Dungeon which is interested in the art of cooking, here it’s more about the enjoyment of eating. Doesn’t matter, as the episode instead focuses on two misfits who find something in common, and it is adorable. Their exchanges are actually very natural (except occasionally when they get shy) and you can easily see how they are drawn into each other. Just this alone makes this a worthy show for anyone looking for a neat romance, but we also have the wild meat as the seasoning on top. I can also see that the production might be a big issue later on, given that during the scene where our girl runs away from the monster, the animation looks really awkward.
Potential: 40%

Shabake

Short Synopsis: A sick boy who can talk to yokai tries to solve a mysterious murder incident during the Edo period.

Mario: My main takeaway after the first episode is that Shabake is much more interested in how our main character Ichitaro interacts with yokai, rather than his fellow humans. And I guess I missed the fine details that it already explained, but why do Ichitaro’s guardians, who are yokai, age when we flash forward? That aside, the episode itself is a little slow paced at the moment. Rather than establishing the main conflict, for now it follows Ichitaro going on with his day. It makes it hard to have a better idea of what Shabake will be about further down the line, but the theme here is very clear, and mildly interesting: it’s about Ichitaro’s relationships with the yokai characters and how they support him with their own abilities. It certainly looks and feels different than the mainstream here.
Potential: 30%

Lenlo: I’ll admit, I was disappointed in how light a tone Shabake chose to take. Even with a child growing up in poor health, yokai, and a murder in the street, it still felt rather relaxed about it all. I was hoping for something a bit… stronger, I guess. Not full on Seinen murder mystery, but more than “Saturday morning cartoon”. Because of that, I was never able to really get into the episode, since as Mario says it spends more time on Ichitaro and the Pokemon Yokai he hangs around with than anything else. All in all, a tad boring.
Potential: 15%

Towa no Yuugure

Short Synopsis: A boy wakes up to find the world in ruins after a few hundred years have passed.

Mario: I think I have a thing for any show that has “the End of the World” in the title, as they’re often set in post-apocalyptic societies that have different sets of rules than our current world, and where technology has regressed instead of evolved. Towa no Yuugure scratches that itch with a young boy named Akira waking up in a society he is not familiar with. The concept of “ehlsea” (or marriage), for example, is interesting; it’s a group of people who vow to live together, instead of just two people. The backgrounds provide a perfect canvas to bring this new setting to life, as well as the noteworthy character designs. As much as I enjoy these parts of the episode, OWEL Commissioner General is the type of character written so poorly that he stands out in a really bad way. The gore doesn’t really fit this show either, and I’m not sure if I find our hero Akira or the android girl Towasa interesting enough to follow long term. It certainly has ambition, though, so I might give it a couple more episodes.
Potential: 30%

My Awkward Senpai

Short Synopsis: A clumsy office worker is assigned as a mentor for an enthusiastic new hire.

Wooper: Bukiyou na Senpai represents Japan’s quarterly attempt to convince anime fans that an ideal domestic partner awaits them so long as they join the corporate world like good boys and girls. As usual, we have a beautiful, busty office lady character in the cast, but this time the twist is that she’s… kind of awkward! Of course, that just makes her all the more endearing and approachable, which is a bonus for the earnest new recruit she’s been charged with training. Maybe I’m laying on the sarcasm a little too thick – this episode was too straightforward by half, but it wasn’t bad. The animation is far from first rate, but an effort was made to depict characters walking down stairs and along city blocks without taking shortcuts, which I appreciated. Kannawa-senpai’s monosyllabic utterances have a curt appeal to them, as contrasted with her self-critical inner thoughts, and her rosy memories of her own senpai’s helpfulness provide both a goal for Kannawa and built-in context for the latter character’s inevitable appearance. There are a few positives, then, but as far as the workplace aspect goes, I’m not expecting this series to distinguish itself in the slightest.
Potential: 20%

A Star Brighter Than the Sun

Short Synopsis: An awkward high school girl recalls her history with the guy she’s been crushing on for nearly a decade.

Wooper: Taiyou yori mo Mabushii Hoshi (TamaHoshi for short) is about as average a shoujo romance as you could imagine, with two childhood friends, an insecure girl and a popular boy, landing in the same class upon reaching high school. The on-screen text, the sparkly backgrounds, the lengthy inner monologues, the contrast between the Plain Jane female lead and her more glamorous peers – it’s all here. I don’t mind the familiarity, since the tried and true shoujo template appeals to me on a personal level, but I do have some criticisms here. This episode used way too much panning and fading, especially during its first half, which traveled all the way back to the main characters’ elementary school days. Engineering smooth transitions between the past and present is important, but those techniques were popping up even when the story was locked in flashback mode for multiple scenes in a row. Also, the fuzzy filter applied to the frame during said flashbacks wasn’t my favorite choice – hopefully it’ll be kept to a minimum now that we’ve gotten the main girl’s life story. TamaHoshi is cute, which is enough for me to give it another look in a slim anime season, but that won’t be sufficient for most fans.
Potential: 40%

Ranma ½ (2024) S2

Short Synopsis: Akane’s admirers search for Ranma’s secret weakness in an effort to break up their engagement.

Wooper: Its title may read 2024, but the Ranma reboot is still going strong in ‘25, and will likely continue to do so on an annual basis, given Rumiko Takahashi’s multigenerational reputation as the Queen of Romcoms. This episode served as a fine comeback, if not a particularly disruptive one for the show’s status quo, introducing a (very) minor romantic rival in Gosunkugi, voiced with a nice blend of harmless creepiness by Akira Ishida. The whole plot about his quest to discover Ranma’s Achilles heel, which turned out to be a debilitating fear of cats, was mildly amusing – the bits I liked the best were art and animation-related, as is often the case for me with this series. More than the content of this episode, I was fixated on the OP to see which new faces we might expect to make their debut this cour. Two of them jumped out at me, and one of them I knew by sight even without being a fan of the source material: Happosai, one of manga’s preeminent perverted sage characters, reviled by many a Ranma fan (English-speaking ones, at any rate). The other was Ukyo, apparently a crowd favorite, so perhaps the two will balance each other out; if not, I’ll finally get to experience the scene-ruining essence that Happosai apparently brings to the table.
Potential: ½

Cat’s Eye (2025)

Short Synopsis: Three moonlighting art thieves repeatedly steal priceless treasures out from under the nose of a clueless cop.

Wooper: I’ve seen the first few episodes of the original Cat’s Eye adaptation, and I have to say, this one suffers by comparison. The animation is better here (especially during the opening paraglider scene), but for character and color design, and even storyboarding, you’re going to want the 80s version. I was surprised by the remake’s poor performance in that last category, but perform poorly it did, botching an early “dodge the motion-detecting lasers” scene and occasionally placing the Cat’s Eye girls way too close to the cops for them to plausibly elude detection. Not that plausibility should be a major factor when deciding whether to watch this show, since it features the dumbest detective in animanga history, Toshio Utsumi. This poor schmuck somehow can’t make the connection between the three sisters running his favorite cafe (Cat’s Eye) and the identically named trio of art thieves responsible for his professional humiliation. On the plus side, modern touches like Toshio and Hitomi going on a rock climbing date or Ai’s use of her smartphone fit neatly within the context of the episode; if anything, the premise of Cat’s Eye makes more sense in our internet-enabled future than it ever did four decades ago.
Potential: 20%

Yano-kun’s Ordinary Days

Short Synopsis: A girl who loves to take care of people meets a boy who is accident-prone.

Mario: While this slice-of-life romcom overall offers a pleasant enough time, in the long run I am unsure if this show has enough legs to expand on this simple premise. In fact, this premiere feels longer than it actually is, as it pads out Yano’s situation and Yoshida’s feelings for him too thin. The animation is a bit of a mixed bag too given it can be expressive at one moment but totally lacking at others. I do enjoy how it mixes its usual art with a cartoonish style to signal how Yoshida is thinking of Yano. Other than that, the episode goes where you expect it would go, and the lack of slapstick moments makes it less snappy and much more conventional than other anime in the genre. If you have a thing for romance shows, this one fits the bill. Others will find it watchable but boring.
Potential: 20%

This Monster Wants to Eat Me

Short Synopsis: A depressed teenage orphan pins her hopes for death on her class’s mermaid transfer student.

Wooper: What’s an author to do when the market for vampire fiction is fully saturated, yet they can’t help but throw their hat into the ring anyway? Why, write a vampire and call it a mermaid, of course! This Monster Wants to Eat Me (Watashi wo Tabetai, Hitodenashi) traffics in many of the tropes you’d expect from such a swap, including a sad girl protagonist and her mermaid protector who vows to eat her only once she’s reached maximum ripeness. Unlike the absurd Baban Baban Ban Vampire from earlier this year, This Monster plays its supernatural grooming aspect totally straight, which doesn’t offend me so much as it makes me doubt its story could offer anything novel. That’s fine, though, because based on the direction of this premiere, it’s going for atmosphere over plot. There are a couple long stretches of silence near the start to help us acclimate to the main character’s despondent aura, and the episode has a habit of transforming school scenes into underwater ones without cutting, showing fish swimming past previously sunny windows to represent Hinako’s mood. Those are just two facets of a consistent approach that I think will please audiences looking for a moodier-than-average supernatural anime (even if I’m not among them).
Potential: 35%