The thing where you watch a bunch of first anime episodes and talk about them - Summer 2025
I haven’t done one of these in a long time, and I don’t want to commit myself to it on a regular basis because it often takes time I could be talking about more interesting stuff— like actual finished series which I could give a proper review to— but today I was kind of in the mood to look at the anime season.
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Heads-up: Crunchyroll is no longer a prestige streaming destination
I want to note that the major series this season aren’t on Crunchyroll. There was a long period during which Crunchyroll used to make sure that every anime from the smallest two-minute gag show to the biggest blockbuster was subtitled in English on their website, and that era has ended.
It’s been like this for a while, but it’s particularly noticeable this season after a major Gundam series went to Amazon, and now the new Panty and Stocking and CITY are on Amazon as well. HIDIVE has also been quietly hosting quality series CR doesn’t feel like paying for, and of course there’s Netflix for really major titles like Delicious in Dungeon and Baki. (This season it’s The Summer Hikaru Died.)
We need to face this sooner rather than later: after acquiring a near-monopoly on streaming TV anime, Crunchyroll no longer pays up for major seasonal series that aren’t produced by its owners at Sony. They’re quickly becoming a service for B-level series, especially when there isn’t a big Shonen Jump or Aniplex (Sony) title running.
But don’t worry, every single isekai RPG power fantasy, no matter how self-indulgent, is on Crunchy. The weird part is they’re not only a glut but also heavily promoted: I guess Aniplex puts out a lot of this stuff. You have to fish through mountains of "My Skill Was Bad And Everyone Laughed At Me But I'm Actually The Strongest And I'll Show Them"-type series on the CR homepage to get to anything good. Again, it’s been like this for a while now and I must point it out, especially as word regularly leaks out from former employees that current CR management does not care about anime at all.
There’s gonna come a point where it all falls apart, and with the amount of bad press Crunchy draws, I think a lot of people are starting to expect it if not cheer it on.
CITY
This season’s front-runner. Animation heaven from Kyoto Animation and Keiichi Arawi. Shockingly gorgeous even for a top studio; lots of people put mountains of work into making it look exactly like Arawi’s drawings are somehow moving around in front of you. My eyes can’t tell whether a lot of this is hand-drawn or CG, and I stared real hard.
As for the actual content of the show, it’s gently surreal comedy as in Arawi’s own Nichijou. Anime’s definition of “comedy” can be shaky— I find more often than not it’s “isn’t this girl cute? Don’t you wish she was your wife?”— but I want to assure you that CITY features actual jokes. Remember comic timing? It has that! You will actually laugh from your belly and mean it! Long live comedy anime: we don’t get it that often.
(Back when it ran, I almost wrote here about how disappointed I was by the Nokotan anime. Whoever adapted the material was completely clueless about comic timing and how a punchline works, and instead tried to adapt the series into Youtube bait, ruining every single punchline by playing it in slow motion and zooming in to characters’ “:O” reaction faces.)
Panty And Stocking S2
There are a lot of continuing seasons in this batch of shows but as far as I’m concerned, Panty and Stocking is the most important one. If you’re not familiar, this is studio Trigger and Hiroyuki Imiashi’s filthy double-middle-fingered tribute to 1990s Cartoon Network shows like Dexter’s Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls. The first season hit about ten years ago when the Trigger gang were still part of Gainax, and recently Trigger got back the rights and got back to work on the angels.
The original Panty and Stocking series has technically had us on a cliffhanger for the past decade, though I don’t think too many people suspected anything but an absurd reversal of the TV series’ original shock ending. This was a shock TV show, after all.
And that’s how it goes, as the first episode of the new season drops off five minutes after the previous series’ finale, while characters stare slack-jawed in shock at what’s just happened. The situation is completely reversed— there’s a giant monster, emergency surgery, jokes about genitals and genitals saving the day— and we’re ready to party again next week.
Honestly, I found this episode so essentially Panty and Stocking that I would have been okay if they’d only put this out. It hits every base, including turning your boner into a jetpack. You’re either in or out for this kind of aggressively juvenile and purposely boundary-pushing material, and you can use the phrase “boner jetpack” to make that determination very quickly.
Turkey!
I’m gonna put the most recent trailer for Turkey! here. If you haven’t heard about this anime yet I think you should watch this trailer, to see if you could possibly have guessed where it was going.
One way for a new original anime to make a big splash is pretending to be something ordinary pre-production, then, on the day of broadcast, unveil a shocking twist in the first episode that actually sets up the real show to follow. Bang Bravern— which presented itself as grim military sci-fi, but revealed it was actually a wild romp about a gay super robot and the ripped, insecure pilot he loves— was a big success with this trick. (Bravern nearly fooled Crunchyroll, which didn’t commit to running the show until its second episode aired.)
Turkey! had been selling itself as a humble “girls in a club” anime about a failing bowling team. The first trailer followed the recent trend of girls’ clubs being in disarray and at each other’s throats with a tense confrontation outside a candy shop.
It turns out that scene is the heart of the first episode. The captain of the club is naturally talented and the other girls are just along for the ride, save the frustrated rival. After the captain half-asses a critical tournament moment, the rival snaps and calls out the half-assed nature of the group, only to be brutally shot down by club members who never cared much about bowling in the first place.
There is a showdown, some magic happens… and our heroine wakes up on the thick of a bloody battle in feudal Japan during the Warring States era. And that’s all we get!
This could be a masterpiece or a disasterpiece, but be aware that it’s directed by a sub-director on Momentary Lily, who seems to have escaped the grasp of GoHands. (He was gonna direct the Tokyo Babylon adaptation that got canceled for plagiarized art?!) Momentary Lily was first and foremost the writer’s fault, so I’ll give this one a shot. Certainly knows how to catch attention.
(Also, did you notice the character names match the characters from Maison Ikkoku? ALSO, did you notice the voice actresses in the feudal Japan part are all 80s-90s veterans?)
See You Tomorrow At The Food Court
I had already been reading the manga, which is probably the only reason I’m checking in on this adaptation. Because if you’ve ever read this manga, you might ask yourself how— or why— anyone would ever animate it.
That isn’t to say it’s bad: I really like it. It’s just that the entire comic is a series of stream-of-consciousness conversations between two high school girls about completely mundane subjects at the mall. Animating it almost doesn’t make sense.
These conversations are less about the subjects being discussed than what the conversation reveals about the girls’ personalities and relationship. This is the kind of quiet yuri where you’re just sitting back and enjoying the unspoken affection.
Wada is the type of “quiet one” who’s actually quite loud when they’re with people they trust (I relate), nerdy, needy and insecure. Yamamoto dresses like a flashy classical gyaru, but she’s the real “quiet one”, who takes these moments to relax and savor her friend’s silly complaints, along with that liminal-space charm of the mall.
Speaking of, mall atmosphere is reproduced in exacting detail in this animated version. I suspect that maybe the only reason Food Court was animated was to solicit sponsorships from the various common chains you’d actually see in a Japanese food court, which are prominently featured. You’ll definitely notice it when a KFC meal has about as much screen time as the heroines do in the first scene.
From my (limited) experience, shopping malls are pretty much the same anywhere you go, so the feeling of being stuck in this boring place of abundance translates directly. I wanted KFC for a minute, until I reminded myself how bad KFC is.
Dress-up Darling S2
The exception to the rule of shonen (boys’) romcoms comes back with another top-of-the-business adaptation by Cloverworks. I’ve talked about this show and I’m delighted to have it back.
This episode gets right to basics: everyone’s favorite free-spirited cosplay queen Marin Kitagawa wants to wear a scandalous bunny suit from her new favorite anime, and her tailor Gojo has to put the gravity-defying outfit together while generally suffering at how hot Marin is, as is expressed in excruciating detail by the finest artists in the Japanese animation industry. I’ve talked in the past about how much I like the Marin/Gojo dynamic, so check that out. In short, both characters feel real— rare in this genre— and Gojo’s a genuinely good, honest dude who you can understand Marin would fall for.
Another treat is the “anime within the anime” gag at the start of the episode: an extremely stylized production by Trigger veteran Kai Ikarashi about a team of slapstick bunny-suited assassins. If you’re into the Trigger/Imaishi rough, high-action animation style, you should probably treat yourself to this two-minute sequence even if you don’t care about this series at all.
Vending Machine S2
Not one I expected to come back, the single weirdest isekai premise gets another season this year. This one’s about a guy who dies protecting a vending machine and thus wakes up as one in a typical fantasy RPG world. In the first season, “Boxxo” (はっこん) becomes a beloved member of the community by offering food and various modern Japanese solutions to fantasy-world problems, while slowly getting embroiled in typical fantasy demons-versus-humans stuff that’s much less interesting.
Unfortunately at a season in, the RPG setting is starting to get flimsy, and the series is currently firmly concentrated on dungeon battles with super-powered party members and a hero who’s now effectively invincible. This series is at its best when Boxxo is off the front lines and doing things for people that only a vending machine can do, whether that is offering a wacky solution to a social problem or just comfort food for refugees.
It’s the difference between Boxxo holding off some bad guys with Diet Coke and Mentos in the first season and the vending machine firing off Coke bombs like artillery to hold down the fort in the second. The more Boxxo’s power creeps up, the more this show is left to the conventions of the isekai RPG genre, and the more boring it is to watch.
There's a lot more than this
It's a pretty damn busy season but I'm hitting 2,000 words over here. (I deleted a review of Uglymug Epicfighter when I flipped to the end of the manga and found I'd been too harsh on the first episode.) This was pretty informal, so while there are series beyond these I'm interested in– Leviathan and Hikaru come to mind– I dunno if you'll see another one. And yeah, I dunno if you're noticing, but I am trying to get more done faster on the newsletter.
The Gamesoft Robo Fun Club is a solo labor of love that depends entirely on paid subscriptions from readers to exist. If you enjoyed this piece and you'd like to see more, I'd love to see you become a regular or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers get exclusive posts. Thanks for reading the pitch and hope to see you subscribe!
