The Season in Haikus - Spring 2025 (Part 1)

Hello, all! Welcome to another season of rigidly syllabic anime reviews! If you've never seen one of these before, or you generally aren't familiar with my style of reviews, here's the deal: I'm going to watch the first episode of every new anime that comes out this season (no sequels, spinoffs, or continuations) and let you know how I feel about it. Obviously, this is going to be based mostly on vibes, but my vibe meter is good enough that I'm usually only fiendishly wrong about exactly one thing.

Every show is going to get two ratings. The first is the X/10 rating that I would expect to give the show if my general impression of the first episode continued for the show's entire run, which isn't exactly the same thing as my X/10 rating of the first episode, but usually they'll be very close to each-other. The second is a rating of either "skip," "test," or "watch," and these are exactly what they sound like. This is the much more important rating for people who are looking for recommendations. "Watch" is the best of these, meaning that I'm happy to recommend the show, in its entirety, to anybody based entirely on the strength of its first episode. There will usually be one, maybe two, of these in a season. "Test" is what the bulk of worthwhile shows are going to get. These are shows that I would recommend giving a shot if you're looking for something to watch, but that I wouldn't go out of my way to make time for. Generally, some people are going to really like these shows, and most people are going to shrug their shoulders and say, "Yeah, that was alright!" "Skip" is pretty obvious. I recommend you don't waste your time with these. Very few people are going to find themselves enjoying these shows, and if you're one of them, you'll know it by the time you're done reading the review.

Without further ado, let's see what the Spring 2025 season has for us!

Once Upon a Witch's Death

Est. 6/10. Test.

Sometimes, you watch the first three minutes of a show, and you know instantly that you’re going to love it.  Once Upon a Witch’s Death was one of those shows.  Its opening is one of the best I’ve seen in a long time for a slice-of-life, cottage-core show.  There’s beautiful art of woodland animals falling out of the walls of a cabin while a young apprentice witch goes about her day feeding them.  The soundtrack gives the whole scene a lively, bouncy atmosphere that truly tickles the senses.  Combine that with adorable character designs and an intriguing title, and I was sure right from the jump that this was going to be the kind of show I would watch all the way through.  However, Once Upon a Witch’s Death is also the rare kind of show that can give me that impression in the beginning and still get dropped by the end of the first episode.

Meg Raspberry (yes, really) – apprentice to the legendary witch Faust (yes, really) – is about to celebrate her seventeenth birthday.  There’s just one problem.  Her mistress has just told her that she is suffering the effects of a curse and that she’s doomed to die in a year.  At this point, I was completely sold on a reverse Frieren.  A show about a magical teenager dealing with the cruel reality of death, slowly coming to terms with her mortality while doing as much good as she can along the way, all while her much older teacher has to accept the fact that the girl she’s spent the last bit of her life training to be her successor is going to die before she does.  There are so many interesting dynamics and story beats there that I was ready to put this at the top of my theoretical “ones to watch” list, but that’s not what this show is.  In fact, nobody’s dying at all, probably!  Because there’s a cure to Meg’s mortal curse.  All she has to do is wander the world collecting one-thousand tears of joy, and then her mistress can easily whip up a nice little poultice to cure that booboo right up.

I think Once Upon a Witch’s Death is going to be a fine show.  It’s giving me big Wandering Witch vibes, so if you liked that one, definitely check this one out.  It’s setting itself up to be a saccharine, pathos-inducing vignette show that’s absolutely determined to pull on your heart strings, no matter how much you don’t really want them pulled on, and I hate that kind of show.  I hate shows where inducing an emotion in the viewer is the point, instead of something that happens naturally as a result of characters going about their business.  I hate Clannad, I hate Your Lie in April, and I think I hate this.  If you don’t mind your emotions being put onto a factory line, finely processed, and then spat out the other end after twenty-four minutes of contrived tragedy-turned-happiness, you’ll probably love this.  If you do mind that, you’ll probably think this is totally fine.  It’s diet Violet Evergarden, and as someone who wasn't a huge fan of Violet Evergarden, I struggle to recommend it.

The Beginning After the End

Est. 5/10. Skip.

Grey, the most powerful king in the history of the world, finds himself reincarnated into the body of a young peasant boy named Arthur (yes, really) who has an affinity for magic.  Now. . . he’s gonna live his life, I guess.  There’s not really much indication in the first episode about what’s going to happen in the upcoming ones.  We see Grey leading a legion of zeppelins to bomb some futuristic city, and then we see Arthur as a baby, wandering around his medieval-European-coded fantasy home while his fantasy parents do cool fantasy shit.  I would describe the plot in more detail, but here’s the thing.  You’ve already seen it.  If you’re into isekai at all, you’ve already seen at least the first episode of Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation.  If you’ve seen the first episode of Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, then you’ve seen the first episode of The Beginning After the End.  Someone wakes up in a medieval European-coded fantasy village in the body of a baby.  He slowly realizes that he’s a baby as he meets his parents, the generic warrior dude at the healer woman with big boobs.  As a baby, he marvels at his mother using magic to heal a wound, and so goes into the family library to read about magic.  He discovers that he has potent magical affinity and accidentally destroys a wall of his family’s cabin.  When he learns to walk, his father teaches him how to use a sword.  It’s exactly like Mushoku Tensei, except instead of an otaku loser being reincarnated as a baby and given a chance to do his life over, we get the most super special powerful king ever to live, and the constant comments about wanting to suck his mom’s boobs are replaced with constant jokes about baby poop.

If anything, I think the biggest sin committed by The Beginning After the End is the lack of an objective measure of power for the characters.  Most of the time, in an isekai, the viewer is presented with some numerical means of understanding what the characters can do.  They’re given levels or power points or something else that’s shown to us, explicitly, on some kind of stat screen or adventurer licenses.  Most of the time, this is done in a way similar to video games, so that the viewer can make the connection between the show’s power system and another power system that we’re more likely to understand.  This screen is useful because people understand that big numbers are better, and they won’t necessarily understand that a baby being able to blow up a building is powerful unless we also know that that baby has a big magical number.  The Beginning After the End also doesn’t have an explicit skill or talent system.  This could leave characters in the awkward position of having to think on their feet and use their abilities and their environment in creative ways instead of having a handy list of tactical options to choose from when things get hairy.  I understand that that’s not usually important in the first episode, but most shows go out of their way to give the viewer that information as soon as possible, and the fact that Beginning After the End doesn’t do that really shows me that it has no sense of awareness when it comes to the bedrock features of its genre.  At the very least, it could give Arthur’s magic power some kind of rank.  Whether that be alphabetical (SS-rank through F-rank) or nominal (“Sage rank,” “king rank,” “god rank,” etc.).  Seeing Arthur blow up a building as a baby doesn’t tell the viewer anything if we don’t have some idea of where that kind of power objectively falls when compared to other magic users.

Please don’t watch this show.

Your Forma

Est. 6.5/10. Weak Test / Wary Skip.

In the far-flung future of 2024, a sub-class of robot servants is working to help society function while the humans can. . . I assume just kind of hang out and have fun.  The only problem with that is that one of those robot servants just killed a guy, which shouldn’t be possible, because all of the robots are programmed with Asimov’s three laws baked right in.  Still, better safe than sorry.  The three robots who are in the same line as the one who killed that guy have just been recalled, and they’re going to be put out of commission.  But that’s a problem, you see, because our main character is the owner of one of those robots, and she needs him to help her solve crimes at her day job at the police factory.  Much of the work at the police factory, you see, involves plugging into people’s brains and physically diving into their dreams so that you can see metaphorical representations of their hopes, fears, past actions, embarrassing middle school memories, etc., and you can’t do that without a robot.  Our main character happens to be very good at this whole diving thing, and our main character’s robot happens to be very good at letting her be very good at it, so she needs him.  Now, the two of them are on a race against time to prove that this particular robot simply could never have killed the people they say he did.

It's a competently-produced cyberpunk crime drama.  If you like cyberpunk crime dramas, you might like this well enough, but it’s not special.  It’s the kind of show that gets made when someone really likes cyberpunk crime dramas and then makes their own, without any real sense of uniqueness or depth.  As always, take this with a grain of salt.  I don't like cyberpunk crime dramas, so I'm inclined to be harsher to it than it might deserve. It’s also totally possible that this show is going to surprise us with some new character or plot point in the next few episodes that makes the whole thing pop, but I doubt it.  Things usually don’t do that. Even so, it has some interesting elements, and if the idea of the metaphorical brain diving gets explored a bit more, I could at least see it having the potential to present its story in a more unique way than other shows of its kind. Worth checking out if you usually like this kind of thing. Probably skip it if you don't.

Please Put Them On, Takamine-san

Porn/10.

Takane Takamine is the school’s most popular girl!  There’s nothing she can’t do!  She’s got the top spot on every athletic team she’s a part of, and rumor has it that she’s never scored less than 100% on an assignment.  There’s just one problem.  Takamine’s success is owed entirely to Eternal Virgin Road, a magical power that she was given in middle school.  Whenever she does something that has negative consequences, she can undo it by taking off her underwear!  If she eats a bad bento and winds up getting stomach cramps during an important track meet, all she has to do is shed that sports bra and all is undone.  If she circles the wrong answer on a test and winds up with a 98%, she just drops her panties and sees that A turn straight into an A+!  Naturally, nobody remembers her humiliating strip shows. . . except for Koushi Shirota.  See, Shirota accidentally discovered Takamine’s abilities while hiding in the gym storage room one day.  She came in to put on a new bra (her underwear disappears after she does the magic time travel thing), and he wound up getting an eyeful!  And that’s a problem for Takamine, because anybody who sees her naked boobies gains the ability to remember events that happened before she rewound time.  Now, Shirota knows Takamine’s secret, and he’s been roped into being her personal closet!  That is to say, the boy who carries around tons of spare underwear for her to change into after hers disappear into the temporal ether.

It’s porn.  And you know what?  For porn, I appreciate it.  It’s got a ridiculously contrived setup that’s bound to put our main characters in wacky situations that are definitely going to have someone out there looking uncomfortably at the screen and wondering whether or not they’re turned on, and isn’t that what we all come here for? What's the point of anime if we can't walk away from it feeling like we might've just looked at something illegal?

The Catcher in the Ballpark!

Est. 6/10. Skip. Or test? What's the rating for when I recommend you watch exactly one episode and then stop?

The Catcher in the Ballpark is probably the most refreshing and entertaining anime of the season that I'm going to tell you to skip.  Judging just by the first episode, it’s a vignette show featuring two(ish) short stories per episode, each of which takes place at the local baseball stadium.  We get glimpses into the lives of the girls who wander the stands peddling beer.  We get to see the security guards help a lost child meet up with her mother.  And that’s it for the first episode, but I’m sure there are plenty of interesting and heart-warming stories planned for the other eleven.  The man and woman who are set up to be the “main characters” of the show have great chemistry together.  Ruriko trying her best to be an effective and flirtatious saleswoman while hiding her inner anxieties is adorable, and Murata is a relatable businessman who just wants to get away and enjoy a baseball game with the few free hours he has in the day.  Plus, naturally, the general premise of exploring the ecosystem surrounding baseball, rather than baseball itself, is a unique and interesting take on slice-of-life!

So why am I saying to skip this, especially when I legitimately had a good time with the first episode?  Frankly, even though it’s definitely cute and novel, that cuteness and novelty come across perfectly well in one episode, and I don't think the other episodes are going to add anything to it that you aren't going to get in those first twenty minutes.  By the time you've seen three, it feels like you'll be wishing you hadn't, and after twelve, I doubt you'll ever want to see a striped baseball uniform again.  It has a great gimmick!  But it is a gimmick, and maintaining interest in a gimmick for four hours is something that very few shows can manage.  I don’t think this is going to be one of them.  By all means, watch the first episode if you’re looking for something lighthearted and fun!  It’ll definitely give you what you want.  I just don’t think this is going to be anyone’s radar as a long-term watch. 

The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows

Est. 5/10. Skip.

The Brilliant Healer’s New Life in the Shadows features a society wherein healing magic is strictly controlled.  Due to its power (whether that power is raw, magical power or political power, I’m not sure), people have to earn licenses to be healers, and Zenos didn’t do that.  I forget exactly why he forwent getting his accreditation (or if we were even told in episode one), but for whatever reason, Zenos has chosen to live his life in the shadows, taking medicinal odd-jobs while beating up grave robbers and stealing their slaves.  Does that sound like a fun show to you?  It must.  As a discerning anime viewer, who wouldn’t be enthralled?  However, I have terrible news for those of you who are opening up your favorite pirate site.  This show isn’t about Zenos.  It’s about a soup.

The episode opens with Lily, Zenos’s child servant, getting out of bed and preparing a wonderful meal for him to share with his four concubines.  However, there’s a problem.  The soup is just so delicious that the concubines can’t help but gobble it all up while Lily is out of the room!  They panic and fret for ten minutes, wondering how they’re going to replace the meal before Lily finds out.  Turns out, they don’t.  Lily does find out, and she sends them out into the world to gather ingredients to make a new dinner for her. . . roommate(?) before he gets home.  It is some of the most awkward and stilted storytelling I’ve ever seen.  We get a minute and a half with Zenos, where he does nothing but drink a little tea and tell Lily that he’s going out to market, before he leaves.  After that, one after the other, different tropes of hot anime women waltz through his front door, each one looking like she just came from the set of an entirely different show from the other three.  For ten minutes, they fret about soup.  Eating soup.  Making soup.  Panicking that there is no soup.  I don’t know these women.  I don’t care about their soup.  I want to go back to the badass underground mafia healer that I was told I need to care about.

When we finally do go back, we find out that he’s the badassiest of badass fighters.  He can do more than just heal.  He can dodge rocks that are thrown at him and fight possessed catgirls with magical backflips.  When he overhears a noble mistreating his slave, he’s aloof and sexy enough not to openly care, but when he later comes across that same noble begging to be healed after his slave slashed his stomach open with her inordinately sharp cat-girl claws, Zenos makes sure to demand the slave as payment so that he can strip her naked to magically remove her gall stones before setting her free.  As much as I wish this were bad enough to say “I wish this entire show were just about the soup,” it’s not.  It’s bad, but in a very standard way for anime of its kind.  If you’ve seen anything like Rising of the Shield Hero before, there’s no reason to watch this.

Rock is a Lady's Modesty

Est. 7/10. Strong test.

Imagine if you will a lady’s preparatory school.  High, ornate fences.  State-of-the-art academic facilities with wide, clean hallways and spacious classrooms filled with the finely-dressed progeny of the rich and powerful.  This is the kind of school where girls become Ladies, and Lilisa Suzunomiya does not belong here.  As the proud daughter of a kickass rock-‘n-roll musician, Lilisa never imagined she would be primping and preening in front a building full of girls who literally do not know what a guitar pick is.  Yet, after her father died or left or was abducted and her mother remarried a prominent real-estate tycoon in an effort to get them a better life, Lilisa solemnly decided to put her rockin’ ways behind her for good so that her family could enjoy the finery that her new step father could provide.  So now, she wanders the halls of Name of School, elegantly denying any hint of rebellion that creeps toward her, determined never to engage with any music that goes harder than Debussy.

So why is there a guitar pick with a skull on it on the ground?

Turns out, the school’s primmest and properest girl is actually a hardcore rock-‘n-roll drummer!  Otoha Kurogane is the model of feminine perfection, and she spends any spare moment she can get in the soundproofed music room of the moldy, old building out in the woods going hog-wild on a ten-piece kit!  When Lilisa follows her to her hideaway and offers to return her guitar pick, Otoha notices that she knows what a guitar pick is (yes, really) and deduces that she must know how to play!  After a little bit of begging and a bit of light fun-poking (i.e., “If you’re no good at guitar, you can just say so,”), Lilisa grabs the nearest guitar and starts rocking the fuck out.  After all, how dare this pampered little princess sneak around pretending to be a rock star?  Lilisa gave up everything just for the chance to have her life, and this bitch thinks she can get away with rockin’ out on the side if she just puts up the thinnest veneer of propriety?  How dare she!

Except. . . man.  She’s really good.  Going all-out on the guitar like this is really fun.  Lilisa has never met someone who can really jam at her level before!  The drums are electric.  The electric guitar is electricker.  Every note feels like someone’s stabbing a fork right into her soul and pulling out the good parts that’ve been buried under mountains of doilies and pomp.  And when their dueling banjos session ends and they’re both left breathless and sweaty, Otoha Kurogane kindly informs Lilisa that her guitar was weak as hell, and that Lilisa never should've bothered picking up an axe if she was going to play it like a two-fingered muppet. There's a window right there. Do the world of music a favor and, kindly, autodefenestrate.

And that, Lilisa informs the viewer, is how she met her lifelong partner.

You are hurting yourself by not giving this one a shot.  I don’t know if it’s going to manage to carry this energy through twelve episodes, but I do know that the first episode is absolutely remarkable.  I went into it expecting one thing, and came out of it with a character dynamic that I want to explore to the end.  Seeing how these two get closer (or don’t) as friends (or enemies) is going to be one of the highlights of the season.  If you are at all interested in music, prince-and-pauper stories, or lesbian frenemies, this has to be on your radar. It is on the asymptotic curve between Test and Watch, which is the second-highest praise I can give.

And that's it for this week! I would give you a preview of what's coming next week, but I literally have no idea! I always go into a new season totally blind. I don't even read the descriptions of these things before I watch them. If you disagree with any of my takes, feel free to say so in the comments! I would love to be wrong about some of these.

If you're coming here from Patreon and have no idea who I am, hello! I'm Explanation Point, and I do anime reviews and analysis. Usually, that's in the form of videos, which you can either see here on this page, or on my Youtube channel. Hopefully you enjoyed this well enough to check out something else!