The Season in Haikus - Winter 2025 (Part 4)

 Hello, all. It is finally time for us to wrap up our highly-structured, poetic exploration of the Winter 2025 season. We've had laughs. We've had cries. But now, everything is coming to an end. Today, I have a smattering of shows for you that are sure to make you go "Huh, that sure sounds like an anime." I also have Sakamoto Days, if you want to watch something that actually seems pretty cool. Buckle in and get ready to hear about the Red Ranger becoming an isekai hero, a vampire growing his own food from scratch, and elf getting isekai'd to modern-day Japan. Without further ado, here it is!

Sakamoto Days

Est. 8/10*. Watch

Taro Sakamoto is the most legendary hitman of all time.  The story goes that he could take out an entire office building full of yakuza with nothing but his wits and a box cutter.  But after a while, Sakamoto did the most dishonorable thing a hitman can do:  He fell in love, got married, had a kid, and left the lifestyle behind him for good.  Now, his clairvoyant former coworker Shin Asakura is tasked with putting him down for his insolence.  Thankfully for Shin, Sakamoto has grown fat in the days since leaving the mafia.  He runs a convenience store downtown, does odd jobs for his neighbors, and should make for an easy mark.  All he has to do is work up the courage to kill his old friend, and he’ll be in the clear.

Sakamoto Days is, unsurprisingly, the best show of the season so far (except for Farmagia, of course, to which it would be unfair to compare anything), and the only show this season to earn a "watch" on my rating scale.  It has a strong sense of atmosphere, excellent comedy, great character writing, and it gives the impression that it has a definite idea of where it’s going and why it’s going there.  The premise of a retired mafia man is one that we’ve seen plenty of times before, but it’s never been executed on with this level of skill.  Sakamoto really sells the idea of the hitman-turned-family-man in a way that the likes of Tatsu Wayofthehousehusband just could never.  His character design is downright delightful, especially when you see it move and hear the wonderful sound effects whenever his chin jiggles as he turns.  When he and Shin get into combat with the mafia folks who want to see them both dead, it’s dynamic, exciting, and fluid.  Plus, who wouldn’t want to see an overweight, forty-five-year-old man pluck a bullet out of the air with chopsticks?

This is one that you have to experience.  It’s fun, funny, exciting, and characterful, and there’s nothing I can say that’s going to sell you on the experience more than watching the first episode will.  You’re doing yourself a disservice by not at least giving it a shot.

*See comment below. This show sucks.

Babanbabanban Vampire

Est. 3.5/10. Skip.

I just see the twilight while hanging your heart.
I want to suck your soul until you're broke inside
I'm afraid you might think I'm weird if I said something like this.
But that's how much I'm crazy about you.

Those are the English-language opening lyrics to the OP of Babanbabanban Vampire, a show in which the 450-year-old Ranmaru Mori – the real-life retainer of Nobunaga Oda – is a vampire with a literal lust for eighteen-year-old virgin boy blood.  (It tastes better than other blood). After stumbling across a boy on the streets who saves his life when he’s suffering from a horrific sunburn, Ranmaru immediately falls in love and becomes determined to drink his blood.  There’s only one problem:  This boy is five years old.  That’s thirteen years younger than the prime blood-drinking age!  And so, Ranmaru ingratiates himself with the boy’s family, moving in with them and working for pennies at their bath house so he can spend the next thirteen years ensuring that this child never has sex, so that his blood will be at the pinnacle of flavor by the time he turns eighteen.

You can skip this one.

Übel Blatt

Est. 6.5/10. Test.

This is the kind of anime that people who don’t watch anime think of when they think of the word “anime.”  It’s gory.  Edgy.  Dark.  Scantily-clad women with big boobs abound.  There’s a young girl who winds up inadequately dressed because her clothes got wet and she had to change at a strip club.  If you are now or have ever been a fourteen-year-old boy, this is the kind of show that you rush home after school with your juice box to watch before your parents get home from work because, if they caught you, that would be a shit show.  And it’s fantastic at being that kind of show.  If you’re looking for an anime that opens with the main character getting an eye slashed out in a geyser of blood while the men he thought were his comrades-in-arms chuckle about how naïve he was to trust them, this is the show for you.

If that doesn’t sound fun to you, and you’d prefer a more standard fantasy series with less of a Count of Monte Cristo flair, there are plenty of options available to you, but I don’t think this is one of them.  It’s totally possible you’ll enjoy it for the decent-to-good fight choreography and its generally “totally acceptable” sense of style, but for the most part, this is an edge fest.  If you’ve been looking for a new edge fest and My Worthless Appraisal Skill Actually Makes Me the Strongest (or whatever that Solo Leveling knockoff from two weeks ago was called) didn’t scratch that itch for you, then you should point your nose in this direction.

Welcome to Japan, Ms. Elf!

Est. 5.5/10. Skip.

Normal office worker Kazuhiro Kitase has a special, secret ability.  While dreaming, he can visit the land of sword and sorcery!  He can take up the mantle of Adventurer and swing his sword at demons and goblins.  And, most importantly, he can hang out with a hot elf named Mariabelle, who’s more than happy to hang around and have fun with him for as long as he can stay asleep.  You might be thinking to yourself, “Bryant, that doesn’t sound like a super special skill at all.  That actually just sounds like dreaming,” and you’d be right!  Except for the fact that you’re wrong.  See, while Kazuhiro thinks he’s dreaming, the truth of the matter is that he’s actually visiting a real fantasy world!  With real knights and real dragons and real elvish boobies!  And that means that, when he and Mariabelle wind up in a lopsided fistfight against a dragon in heat, it’s actually a really big deal that the two of them get blasted to death by its breath weapon!  Now, when a person in real life gets hit by a truck, everyone knows that they get transported to magical fantasyland to live out their magical fantasy adventurer dreams.  So what happens when someone in magical fantasyland gets hit by a dragon?  Turns out, they get isekai’d back to the real world!  Kazuhiro wakes up back in his bed, just like he always does when a monster kills him to death, except this time. . . why is there a naked elf laying in bed next to him?

Since the two of them were killed at the same time, and Kazuhiro hugged Mariabelle as the dragon’s flames were melting their skin from their bones, she wound up getting isekai’d alongside him!  Sure, her clothes didn’t make the journey, but for the most part she’s totally unscathed.  And it turns out, she loves Japan!  She loves sushi, she’s fascinated by radio towers, and seeing such tall buildings everywhere is an enormous change from what she’s used to in the fantasy kingdom!  It’s quirky, it’s ~sexy~, and it’s not worth your time.  I actually, legitimately, can’t really imagine any extension of this idea that would make me want to watch it.  Yes, the basic idea of a fantasy person getting reverse-isekai’d to the real world is fine, but it’s just fine.  It’s been done before.  It’s been done in a silly, light-hearted comedy show before.  It’s been done with an elf before.  In the absence of anything particularly good or unique to justify this show’s existence, I – the objective arbiter of good taste – sentence it to “skip.”  Bring in the next prisoner.

I Left My A-Rank Party to Help My Former Students Reach the Dungeon Depths!

Est. 4.5/10. Skip.

Do you know what the purpose of a book cover is?  It’s to sell you the book.  It’s an advertisement, trying to hook your attention and convince you that this book is the one what you should spend your money and time on.  By all rights, it’s the part of the book that should have the most thought and attention paid to it.  So if you see a book with an awful cover, it’s a safe bet that what’s inside that cover is even worse.  It’s true that, every now and then, you get a decent book with a bad cover.  Maybe there was a time crunch, or someone at the publishing house dropped the ball, or whoever commissioned the cover just had really bad taste.  It’s totally possible for a good book to have a bad cover.  But if you spend your life flipping through every single tome just on the off chance that this was one of the ones where the book quality : cover quality ratio was wrong, you’re doing yourself dirty.  You will waste so much time giving chances to horrible books – time that you could’ve spent reading good books instead – just because you decided that, when bad books tell you that they’re bad books, you aren’t going to believe them.  What I need you to do from now on is trust that, if a seemingly bad book is truly worth your time, you will hear about it.  There are plenty of good books out there that are proud of being good.  That will openly tell you that they’re good and that you should read them.  Don’t waste your time with books that want to hide it.  They’ll make their way to you if they’re truly worth it.  Read good books and keep the rest shelved.

Anyway, this one is about a guy who worked with one of the world’s best adventuring parties as their resident support caster/live stream operator.  It was his job to make sure everyone in the party was appropriately buffed to fight the monsters they were killing, and to make sure that their live stream was working so that everyone watching at home got the best possible experience.  He decided that the party didn’t appreciate or pay him enough, asked for a raise, was told to leave if he wasn’t happy with what he was being paid, and said “Yeah, okay.”  Now, he's working with a party of low-level adventurers that he used to teach, helping them delve into the depths of dungeons and making sure they’re all camera-ready for the live stream that is, for some reason, something that the author of this series thought would make it better. Sakamoto Days is still currently airing for one more week. Please, go watch it.

The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World

Est. 5/10. Skip.

There is no reason for you to watch this show, and I don’t mean that because it’s bad or because you’ve seen it before.  In fact, the premise is a fun and unique extension of the isekai formula that I’m surprised we haven’t seen before.  I love the idea of a sentai hero sentai-ing around an isekai world and defeating the Demon Lord with love and friendship while accumulating his harem of elvish lassies, so please know that I'm not saying you don't have to watch this one because it doesn't have any potential. The reason you don’t have to watch this show is because you already know everything there is to know about it.  The Red Ranger, of Power Rangers fame, becomes an adventurer in another world.  He uses friendship-based kung-fu to fight golems.  Megazord goes toe-to-toe with dragons.  It is exactly the kind of show that you’re imagining in your head, and I don’t mean that in a positive way.  Sure, it’s a good thing to meet viewer expectations, but you have to have some twists and turns, or else, what's even the point of you?  This show feels like it made a list of everything that could possibly happen if you take a sentai hero and put them in a fantasy world, and then it just. . . did those things.  Wouldn’t it be funny if our protagonist yelled about the power of friendship during his fight scenes?  Every time?  Wouldn’t it be funny if his made-for-children’s-tv enthusiasm clashed against a deadpan mentor character?  Wouldn’t it be funny if he summoned the equivalent of Megazord and had to teach new fantasy-land friends how to pilot it?  If you take the time to imagine the most bare-bones, by-the-book approach to this premise you possibly can, you will have thought of something almost as boring as The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World.  It is a perfect 5/10 show, and as lazy as it feels to only write a single paragraph about it, there is truly nothing else to say.  Go Go Loser Ranger just came out a few seasons ago.  Go watch that, instead.

And here we are, at the end of another season. Fill to me the parting glass, friends, and go forth and watch whatever anime seem fun to you. If you want recommendations, I have only one: Sakamoto Days. There are plenty of shows this season that are worth testing out and might be fun for the right group, but Sakamoto Days is the only show to come out this season that I'm willing to unequivocally say is going to be good (aside from Farmagia, which is unrivaled perfection). If you absolutely must have more than one show to check out, I would prioritize Zenshuu, followed distantly by Flower and Asura, with Headhunted to Another World and maybe Magic Maker much further down the list. Throw in Medalist if you like sports mentor/underdog shows. If you need an ironic watch, Babanbabanban Vampire might actually work for the right group. There's a bit of wackiness and some downright baffling decisions in it that have nothing to do with the pedophile vampire. Ameku M.D., Doctor Detective also rides the line between being unintentionally funny and intentionally cool, and I think it might be fun for a few episodes if you want something lighthearted and kinda stupid.

That's it for this season! Looks like next season is going to start around two weeks from now, so join me on April 9th to talk about every Spring show that's aired by then! If you have other recommendations or opinions, leave them in the comments. I'd love to hear what you all thought of this season.