Friday, March 28, 2025

THE MOST ANTICIPATED ANIME OF 2025

 

THE MOST ANTICIPATED ANIME OF 2025

FROM RETURNING FAVORITES TO EXCITING ADAPTATIONS AND ORIGINAL STORIES WAITING TO SURPRISE AUDIENCES, THERE'S PLENTY TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN THE NEW YEAR.

Images from Dan Da Dan, The Apothecary Diaries, Sakamoto Days, and My Happy Marriage

(Photo by Science Saru, Crunchyroll, Netflix)

There is more new anime being made each year than ever before, and it can be quite overwhelming to even begin to narrow down what to watch during each new season. There are returning franchises with built-in fan bases, new adaptations of acclaimed manga, and plenty of original stories just waiting to shake the anime landscape. In addition, with the explosion in global popularity of the anime aesthetic, there are lots of studios outside of Japan who have been producing high-quality works heavily influenced by traditionally Japanese anime.

With all of that in mind, we’ve prepared a list of the most anticipated and noteworthy shows you should check out when they release in 2025. And this is where we’ll note that, for the sake of simplicity, we’ve limited our list to series that are produced in Japan, so while titles like Blood of ZeusCastlevania: Nocturne, and Netflix’s upcoming Devil May Cry and Witcher: Sirens of the Deep are heavily anime-inspired, we’ve opted not to include them.

Don’t see your most anticipated title on the list? Let us know what it is in the comments!


JANUARY



Solo Leveling: Season 2
Premiere Date: January 4, 2025
Platform: Crunchyroll

In a world that basically functions like an MMORPG, people with special abilities work hunting monsters in inter-dimensional dungeons, then selling the loot they get. Sung Jinwoo is considered the world’s weakest hunter until he discovers he is the only person on the planet capable of literally leveling up like he’s a video game character, thanks to a mysterious supernatural “program.” After Jinwoo discovered a terrifying new power at the end of the first season, the new season promises even more action, as well as some answers to the big mystery behind Jinwoo’s powers and the dungeon that spawned them.


Zenshu: Season 1
Premiere Date: January 5, 2025
Platform: Crunchyroll

The isekai genre (where a person is reincarnated in a fantasy world) is as popular as it is overstuffed, which means any attempt at changing the formula is a welcome change of pace. From Studio MAPPA comes an original anime about the arduous and painful work that goes into creating an anime series, which suddenly takes a turn when an animator dies from overwork and wakes up in her favorite anime — knowing it changes tone and becomes a bleak and bloody tragedy halfway through. Will the animator be able to rewrite her reality? Or is she doomed to experience the same fate as her favorite hero?



My Happy Marriage: Season 2

Premiere Date: January 6, 2025
Platform: Netflix

My Happy Marriage is back for more twists on the Cinderella formula. The first season of this adaptation of Akumi Agitogi and Tsukiho Tsukioka’s light novel series stood out by understanding the traumas of its heroine and taking inspiration from different takes on the fairy tale in order to make a unique and original story of love and magic. The first season earned rave reviews for its nuanced portrayal of a nascent relationship, and now the second season will focus on Miyo and Kiyoka as their relationship blossoms and enters a new challenge — meeting the parents.



Honey Lemon Soda: Season 1

Premiere Date: January 8, 2025
Platform: Crunchyroll

We’re starting the romance season early with J.C. STAFF producing an adaptation of Mayu Murata’s acclaimed manga Honey Lemon Soda, which follows 15-year-old Uka Ishimori, whose middle school trauma left her unable to laugh, cry, or speak. It is after meeting a popular and carefree boy who accidentally drops lemon soda on her that she finds an avenue to slowly come out of her shell, and maybe even fall in love. The manga is very popular, and it received a live-action feature film adaptation in 2020, but this remains a highly awaited anime.



The Apothecary Diaries: Season 2

Premiere Date: January 9, 2025
Platform: Crunchyroll

Everyone’s favorite medieval China-inspired Sherlock Holmes story starring a young apothecary addicted to trying out different poisons is back! The Apothecary Diaries made waves in its first season with its pseudo-historical, mystery-solving drama, which has just enough of a hint of romance to launch a lot of fan fiction and plenty of cartoonish comedy to balance the gruesome murders and crimes being investigated. Season 2 promises an even bigger mystery, new players in the Imperial Palace, and more shenanigans starring one of the best main characters in an anime.



Dr. Stone Science Future
Premiere Date: January 9, 2025
Platform: Crunchyroll

The single best sci-fi comedy adventure about the smartest guy in the world trying to bring back humanity thousands of years after a cataclysmic event turned everyone to stone is back for the start of its final adventure. For three seasons, Dr. Stone has mixed thrilling adventures with a true love of humanity and science, making for a surprisingly educational show about the history and the making of some of the biggest discoveries and inventions in history, but always with a focus on how much fun science brings us. In its final season, Senku and his Kingdom of Science are determined to go to space to find a way to revive all of humanity, but before they can do that, the crew heads to the USA, where they’ll face their biggest challenge — an even more technologically advanced civilization who wants to take them out.



Sakamoto Days: Season 1
Premiere Date: January 11, 2025
Platform: Netflix

This is one of the most highly anticipated anime series of the entire year, an adaptation of one of the most popular current manga, and it’s easy to see why. What if John Wick didn’t just fall in love and get married, but had a kid and grew overweight? Skip the dead dog and you get Sakamoto Days, a hilarious, action-packed anime about a humble convenience store owner and great family man constantly plagued by hitmen trying to collect the huge bounty on his head.


APRIL



One Piece: Egghead Island Arc, Part 2

Premiere Date: April 6, 2025
Platform: Netflix, Crunchyroll

One Piece is rightfully one of the biggest anime of the moment, and after a six-month break, the show is finally back with new episodes, continuing the epic tale of the Egghead Island Arc. The first half of the season had some of the best visuals in the entire 25-year-old anime, and plenty of anticipated and thrilling fights, but the second half promises to up the stakes and bring about some of the most heartbreaking scenes in the story — if manga readers are to be believed. Luffy may not be King of the Pirates just yet, but this saga is approaching its final act.


My Hero Academia: Vigilantes
Premiere Date: April 2025
Platform: TBA

As My Hero Academia comes to an end, it was recently announced that the show is getting a spin-off series with Vigilantes. This prequel series takes place five years before the start of the main series and follows a young man who — despite not having a Hero license — decides to use his Quirk to help others as a vigilante. Studio Bones is back to produce this anime, which has a distinct look, more comic book-inspired than the main series, with onomatopoeia effects showing on-screen during fight scenes. It’s sure to be a must-watch for fans of superhero anime and My Hero Academia in particular.



Fire Force: Season 3
Premiere Date: April 2025
Platform: Crunchyroll

Fire Force is finally back for a third season, and it’s bringing the heat. The anime follows a young man with pyrokinetic abilities who joins the titular Fire Force, a group of people who fight fire-themed monsters that threaten to destroy Tokyo, the last remaining city in a world consumed by flames. Season 3 promises some answers about the truth of the world, great fight scenes, and perhaps even a connection between the show and Soul Eater, the popular anime from the same creator of Fire Force that is supposedly set in the same universe.


JULY



Kaiju No. 8: Season 2

Premiere Date: July 2025
Platform: Crunchyroll

Kaiju No. 8 can feel like just another big action anime about the power of friendship and being an optimist who trains to be the very best. But what makes this a special and unique show is that its protagonist is not some spiky-haired wide-eyed high schooler, but a 32-year-old who is far from physically fit, and who had long given up on his dream of being an elite soldier in the fight against the kaiju that terrorize Japan.



Dan Da Dan: Season 2

Premiere Date: July 2025
Platform: Netflix, Crunchyroll

Dan Da Dan managed to surpass its rather high expectations and deliver one of the finest anime series of 2024. Studio Science Saru elevated the source material with a sense of loose, kinetic animation that makes every scene feel maximalist, with vibrant and colorful action scenes that are as thrilling as they are hilariously weird. Indeed, this is the most bizarre and cuckoo bananas anime in years, one that’s about a boy and a girl embarking on a quest to battle aliens and demons in order to find the boy’s missing balls (really). A show where aliens are obsessed with ABBA songs, and fight scenes feel like something out of Ren & Stimpy. But it is also a very sentimental and poignant story, with a well told romance to boot. Season 2 promises even more hijinks and shenanigans.


TBA


My Hero Academia: Season 8
Premiere Date: Fall 2025
Platform: Crunchyroll

The popular superhero anime is coming to an end, as the final season drops in 2025. For eight seasons, My Hero Academia has explored the question of what makes a hero as it tells the story of Deku Midoriya, a young boy who enrolls in a school for superheroes as he chases his dream to become the number one hero in Japan. This is an earnest, bombastic, emotional, spectacular series that’s grown from being a sort of anime version of Sky High before eventually turning into an Avengers: Endgame-sized epic with hundreds of superpowered beings on both sides fighting it out across the country in the seventh season.


Image from Leviathan: Season 1 (2025)

(Photo by Netflix)

Leviathan: Season 1
Premiere Date: 2025
Platform: Netflix

Based on the eponymous 2009 American novel written by Scott Westerfeld and illustrated by Keith Thompson, this new series comes to us via Japanese studio Orange, who also gave us Trigun Stampede and Beastars, among others. Set in an alternate 1914 Europe, the story follows a fugitive prince and a girl in disguise as they meet aboard a bioengineered warship and attempt to change the course of history. Also worth noting is that the series will feature original music from Nobuko Toda and Kazuma Jinnouchi (Suzume) and original songs by legendary composer Joe Hisaishi, who scored several Studio Ghibli classics like Castle in the SkyPrincess Mononoke, and Spirited Away.



Nyaight of the Living Cat: Season 1

Premiere Date: TBA
Platform: Crunchyroll

Nyaight of the Living Cat sounds bonkers. This is an anime created by legendary Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike (AuditionIchi the Killer) about a mysterious virus that causes people to turn into cats when they cuddle with them, and the struggles of one person trying to resist the urge to hug a cat in this bizarre zombie-like cat world.



Witch Hat Atelier: Season 1

Premiere Date: TBA
Platform: Crunchyroll

This is one of the most highly anticipated new shows of 2025, part of a wave of popular new fantasy manga. Witch Hat Atelier promises to bring some Harry Potter whimsy but with a twist. The story follows a young girl who dreams of being a witch in a world that gatekeeps magic from ordinary people. The series explores the young witch’s journey of learning the arcane arts, as well as the repercussions of tapping into extraordinary power. The series is funny, full of adventure, and also has some fantastic world-building, and it promises to make for a stunning fantasy tale.


Best Anime of 2024

 

The BBest Anime Series of 2024

Photo-Illustrati

The year in anime got off to a running start. Three of 2024’s very best shows ran simultaneously with a bevy of lavishly animated and deeply considered high-fantasy series. That was only the beginning of some lovely bits of synchronicity. Next came several historical dramas playing with the real past and fictional alike. Later, old favorites made triumphant returns with Dragon Ball Daima and the pastel-colored remake of Ranma ½, comfortably sitting alongside a younger generation of exciting and idiosyncratic manga adaptations. As ever, there’s been so much great work this year that it’s almost impossible to narrow it down to a clear, decisive top ten, as some brilliant work still lies just outside those margins. Ultimately, it was the series that had the most creativity and depth to its fantasy world that came out on top.

10.

The Elusive Samurai (Crunchyroll)

Photo: Yusei Matsui/SHUEISHA/The Elusive Samurai Committee

The frequently goofy and energetic direction of The Elusive Samurai belies a dark story: a fictional spin on the life of the real samurai Tokiyuki Hōjō, whose family and clan is massacred by the traitorous Ashikaga Takauji in service of the Emperor dismantling the shōgunate. It displays the violence of Japan’s feudal period without so much as flinching, though it keeps a modern perspective through little meta-jokes (in the fourth episode one character frets about how a dog-shooting competition looks to the 21st-century viewer). It’s elevated by its visual craft, full of striking symbolism, while its movement is precise and detailed when it’s not playing with wildly exaggerated expressions. Not to mention it feels incredibly varied — the flourishes of action are emphasized by exciting and expressive switch-ups in art style.

As the show pivots between these stylized break-out sequences, it also switches between genuinely distressing violence to broad cartoonish high jinks enough to induce whiplash. But it’s so delightful in motion that those qualities are easy to forgive. On top of that, its joyous, rhythmic opening and ending credits are “best of the year”–worthy on their own.

9.

Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction (Crunchyroll)

Photo: Inio Asano/Shogakukan/DeDeDeDe Committee

Though I’m resisting the urge to place this series higher in the list for the alliterative potential of pairing it with No. 3 (Dan Da Dan)Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction is one of the finest and most underrated series of the year. The first of manga author Inio Asano’s works to be adapted to anime; it’s a darkly funny — and often just dark — visualization of how we might react to the end times.

Aliens suddenly appear over Tokyo, and the world reacts with the expected hostility and xenophobia, but after that initial chaos, that terrifying anomaly simply becomes a part of everyday living. It’s a particularly incisive show about living digitally: One character arc is a case study in radicalization through fringe online pundits. Because of that constant access to morbid and often false information, Kadode, her best friend, Ouran, and the rest of the principal cast of teenage girls both live with and live apart from the paranoia the alien ship provokes. They live like they always have but also don’t dare to think about the future, because they know they might not have one. The frenzied xenophobia and general slide into reactionary attitudes is an unsettling mirror to the real-world cultural trends festering in the 2020s. This series (dededede)deserves more attention.

8.

Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! (Crunchyroll)

Photo: Takibi Amamori/Shogakukan/Losing Heroine Cheering Committee

Anime isn’t lacking for lovestruck teenagers acting like morons, but Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! feels like it sets the gold standard for likable doofuses making bad decisions in the name of romance. As the title suggests, the show takes interest in the losers of love triangles, untangling the complicated feelings of lifelong friendships and rivals, the humiliations of being unlucky in love, and how to move on from this rejection.

The show is empathetic and funny as it bears witness to this emotional anguish. Its main character, Kazuhiko Nukumizu, serves as a reluctant counselor to the rejected lovers. He’s all too happy to fade into the background, but this show finds its hook in how he gets swept up in everybody’s drama, whether he likes it or not. This continues to pile up throughout the season, building an ensemble cast of endearing agents of chaos who are reeling from the sting of unreciprocated love . Where Makeine’s contemporaries (like Shoshimin, which is on our longlist) searched for little moments of beauty in the halcyon days of high-school environs, Makeine runs headlong into its indignities — Nukumizu’s awareness of rom-com clichés doing little to insulate him from his weirdo high-school peers who can’t help but instigate them.

7.

 Sound! Euphonium, season three (Crunchyroll)

Photo: Crunchyroll

Though moments in its story have been bridged by feature films (including the phenomenal Naoko Yamada spinoff, Liz and the Blue Bird) and an OVA, Sound! Euphonium hasn’t been released in weekly episodic form since 2016. The wait for season three proved worth it, however — from its very opening, the Kyoto Animation production is as lovely as ever. The instruments of its big band gleam with resplendent light, rendered in breathtaking detail bordering on photographic but without sacrificing expressivity for rigid realism. Its direction is well-considered — paying close attention to expressions both broad and minute, physical and facial gestures alike.

In this season, Kumiko is now the president of the Kitauiji High School band and coming to grips with leading the club that she was once just finding her footing in. Even with that new authority, the goal of winning gold in a competition comes with an emotional cost. The banter may be cute, but the show threads anxieties throughout its ensemble cast, like the nagging stress of feeling replaceable, with the pressure that there’s always someone just as (if not more) talented than you waiting in the wings. Not only that, but there are episodes that find a fascinating and delicate balance between idealism and pragmatism, between finding competitive fire without compromising the joy of actually playing. It’s a gentle show, but one grounded in believable uncertainties, tying a passion for music together with the growing pains of adolescence.

6.

Brave Bang Bravern (Crunchyroll)

Photo: Brave Bang Bravern! Partners

Three words: gay giant robot. From industry legend Masami Ōbari comes Brave Bang Bravern!, which not only has a flashy super-robot invading the military setup of a “real robot” anime but also has that same super-robot be in love with his pilot. The boisterous sentient alien mech named Bravern comes crashing into the lives of pilots Isami and Lewis Smith, quickly forming an attachment to the reluctant Isami, leading to a man-on-robot romance for the ages.

Bravern stands out for its knowing but earnest absurdity, creating gags that could only come from an immense love for the conventions of the genre. To everyone’s bemusement, Bravern insists on yelling all of his attack moves while hilarious cutaways reveal that he plays his own theme music and projects his own logo behind him when he transforms. The show gets a lot of mileage out of its quirky giant robot that’s also a mecha otaku, passing time by building model kits in the basement and thinking of something cool to do on his next fight. (He also knows things that a giant alien robot shouldn’t: like plot devices from James Cameron’s The Abyss).

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the sorts of shows Ōbari is parodying here, it’s hilarious to see Bravern guiding the reluctant, taciturn Isami through the etiquette of being a super-robot pilot. It also boasts one of the most spectacular end-credit sequences of the year, which really should be seen rather than described. So crack open that ice-cold Kona Big Wave, and enjoy.

5.

The Apothecary Diaries (Crunchyroll)

Photo: Hyuganatsu, Imagica Infos/“The Apothecary Diaries”Project

In its second part, The Apothecary Diaries continued to impress with the depth of intrigue and world building of its clever medical mysteries. The series takes the joys of a procedural and supplants them into a faux-feudal Chinese pavilion, its main character, a young apothecary named MaoMao, working as a poison taster, then lady-in-waiting in a palace annex reserved for the emperor’s concubines.

The analytical detachment of the medical enigmas in the first part of The Apothecary Diaries take a turn for the more personal in this year’s episodes, as MaoMao’s familial ties to the palace are gradually revealed. It’s through the complications of those relationships that a new, overarching mystery is built. It’s anchored by some excellent character work; MaoMao’s process and intuition is satisfying to see in motion. The pragmatic observations that she makes connect the big picture to the personal lives of the people who are sequestered away in the pavilion, the concubines locked in a gilded cage. It’s not all so serious; the show finds levity in the playful friction between MaoMao and her supervisor Jinshi, both oddballs in their own way. For a show about medicine and poison, it sure does go down easy.

4.

 Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (Crunchyroll)

Photo: Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe/Shogakukan/“Frieren” Project

Much like the title elf herself, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End stayed as spritely as ever throughout a rather long (28 episodes!) but captivating season. Where the first half of the season was split into smaller quests, the second expands into a longer arc. It turns out that Frieren, in her centuries-old age, doesn’t have any kind of government-supplied proof of her aptitude for magic. Frieren and her longtime protégé, Fern, sign up for the test and meet a host of colorful new characters.

In its first part, Frieren was one of the most beautifully made anime series of 2023, and it continues to be in its second, even if it feels as though it drifts toward more standard fantasy. This half lost some of the melancholy of the first, which perhaps makes the series fall short of the uniqueness factor of Delicious in Dungeon (see below), but its more traditional adventuring still proved winsome. Under the eye of series director, Keiichirō Saitō (Bocchi the Rock!), the visual presentation is immaculate, with painterly backgrounds and articulate character animation, as well as a delightful score from Evan Call with sounds that feel ripped from the past: fitting for a show about a bookworm who is over 1,000 years old.

There’s a healthy split between quiet introspection and kinetic, smartly choreographed action spectacle. The new arc leans into this excitement with a renewed focus on mage combat, with fights that unfold like hyper-mobile battleships moving against each other, spells unleashed with sudden explosive power. Watching these psychos size one another up is fun, yet the show never feels taken over by blunt force and spectacle. At its core, Frieren is still a show about time threatening to leave you behind, something it tackles in ways both small and frighteningly big.

3.

Dan Da Dan (NetflixCrunchyroll)

Photo: Yukinobu Tatsu/SHUEISHA, DANDADAN Production Committee

A show that’s horror-meets-sci-fi-meets-action-meets-romantic-comedy, Dan Da Dan is a lot. But it handles its many digressions with grace, both on the page and in Science Saru’s adaptation. Each episode tackles the paranormal with an irreverent and raunchy sense of humor, utilizing Saru’s typically loose animation style, bold color choices, and art direction as it adapts Yukinobu Tatsu’s hit Shonen Jump comic. With its interests in the arcane, its pulsing score from Kensuke Ushio (who at one point pulls out an astonishingly funny dance remix of Rossini’s “March of the Swiss Soldiers”) and a character with the demonic power of running really fast, it overlaps a little with the studio’s Devilman Crybaby. Still, Dan Da Dan combines so many things — actual folklore with a long list of cultural obsessions beginning with Ultraman and acting legend Ken Takakura — to the point that it feels completely one of a kind.

The series starts with two teenagers, Momo Ayase and Ken “Okarun” Takakura arguing over whose occult belief is real. It turns out they both are, as one gets abducted by a yokai and the other by aliens. Once that wild prologue is over however, Dan Da Dan turns its (evil) eye to a story just as unhinged: Poor Okarun finds out after his paranormal encounter that his balls are missing, and so the hunt begins to get them back. If this all sounds juvenile, that’s because it is, and willfully so. But there are things that Dan Da Dan treats seriously and with sincerity like its tender central relationship, which is where Dan Da Dan gets its real fire; the friendship between Momo and “Okarun” has the beginnings of a genuinely sweet romance. A standout seventh episode demonstrated the show has higher ambitions still: using a unique perspective to explore the morbid tragedies of ghost stories, interested in the friction between folklore and the modern day. All this from a show about incomprehensible forces preventing a teenage boy from getting his balls back.

2.

Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master (Crunchyroll)

Photo: Chisato Abe/Bungeishunju/NHK,NEP,Pierrot

There may be more visually sumptuous animes this year, but Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master is almost unrivaled as far as writing goes. It begins like a fable: A boy and his ailing brother are rescued by a man who can turn into a giant golden raven, only for the boy to forget it ever happened though they’re fated to meet again. But this is also the beginning of the series’ various tonal and narrative twists, as it quickly turns from that idyllic setting to a cold war for succession, with various people around the palace and its less affluent surroundings caught in the crossfire. Yatagarasu patiently and deliberately creates a compelling court drama in which the ritual, ceremony, and propriety are covers for the same ugly human impulses that are anywhere else.

The series is set in Yamauchi, a country split into four houses with a mountain palace unifying them in the middle. Ruling over it is a hereditary monarchy, the descendants of Yatagarasu, mystical three-legged ravens (named for the Shinto god) that could turn into humans, ones that built the lands their descendants now squabble over. The monarch is always the k’inu, a golden raven. Everyone else jostles for whatever power they can grab. That push and pull is shown with propulsive momentum, each episode a revelation about the truth of the fictional world being built, simple conversations and monologues transforming into edge-of-the-seat thrills.

1.

Delicious in Dungeon (Netflix)

Photo: Netflix

This adaptation of the excellent Ryoko Kui manga from Studio Trigger (Cyberpunk Edgerunners) and director Yoshihiro Miyajima quite literally makes a meal out of the logistics of tabletop fantasy RPGs, with its main cast learning how to cook monsters in order to survive a trip down to the lowest depths of an incomprehensibly large dungeon. After a disastrous encounter with a dragon that results in his sister being eaten alive, the human Laios, the elven mage Marcille, and the halfling Chilchuck venture back into the dungeon to rescue their comrade with the assistance of the dwarven cook and forager Senshi.

What follows is part traditional fantasy adventure, part cooking anime as each episode — titled after whatever meal they’re having — follows the gang through the unique environment of each new level of the dungeon. The show’s second half, however, is where the real meat of the series is: While still structured around culinary antics, it includes compelling and expansive fantasy world building as the party stumbles across long dormant mysteries about the foundation of this underground world.

It has such a strong and unique sense of identity, one that stands out even as it juggles action, comedy, and horror — all of the food groups! — not to mention a sense of genuine wonder in the exploration of each layer of the dungeon. It’s the same appeal as Kui’s manga, in which every chapter is artful and funny and brings something new and exciting, brought to life expressively both in its artwork and in its dynamic, laugh-out-loud voice performances in its subbed and dubbed versions alike. It arrived early in 2024, but there’s no other show that reached the hilarity, creativity or depth of the five-course anime meal that is Delicious in Dungeon.

THE MOST ANTICIPATED ANIME OF 2025

  THE MOST ANTICIPATED ANIME OF 2025 FROM RETURNING FAVORITES TO EXCITING ADAPTATIONS AND ORIGINAL STORIES WAITING TO SURPRISE AUDIENCES, TH...