The flood of new fantasy anime continues this season, no fewer than three debuting today. Because I don’t have too much to say about any of them, I thought I’d tackle them all in one post.

Isekai no Sata wa Shachiku Shidai

An overworked accountant is accidentally caught up in the summoning of the Holy Maiden — a Japanese high school girl — and sets out to work for the royal accounting department. Hard to break the workaholic habits of his old life, he quickly finds himself knee deep in trouble, trying to solve the department’s inadequacies as the eye of the ambitious prime minister falls on him… A solid first episode, but to call the animation and character design ‘adequate’ is to over praise it. This is a series I’d only watch for the plot, to see how our hero tackles his workaholicsm as well as the economical and political problems he wants to fix. There’s also a bit of unresolved (romantic?) tension between him and the head of the Third Royal Guards, the improbably named Indolark.

Maou no Musume wa Yasashi Sugiru!!

the Demon Lord Ahriman has a problem, one big enough to stop his world conquest: his daughter Doux is just too, well, . To fix her and have her become a cruel demon worthy of being his daughter, he puts her in the care of his right hand demon, Jahi, who vows to turn her into a respectable demon. At first she believes the Demon Lord was just too soft on his daughter, but it quickly turns out she has bitten off than she can chew, as Doux’s kindness was something she was born with and worse, rubs up on everybody she comes into contact with… How much you’ll like this show depends on how much you’ll like Doux’s voice, as it’s a very particular kind of little girl cuteness. Most of the fun is in seeing Yahi dealing with Doux stubborn, innocent refusal to not be kind and how frustrated she gets with it.

Yuusha Party ni Kawaii Ko ga Ita node, Kokuhaku shitemita

Yoki is isekaied into a fantasy world about to be overrun by a demon lord. As you might expect, he’s overpowered, as you might not expect, he’s just another mini boss of the Demon Lord, the first the Hero Party will face. He quickly overpowers them but then finds out their healer, Cecilia, is just his type and falls in love immediately. After a few months of the Hero and his party getting defeated over and over again he makes a deal: he will let them through if they leave Cecilia behind, so he can confess his love. He does so but she turns him down (what do you expect from cornering a woman you’ve been fighting for so long) as the Hero finally defeats the Demon Lord. Now he’s an adventurer but Cecilia is worried that his great strength will make him a pawn in the new power struggle to fill the political vacuum the death of the demon lord left behind… Okay animation but a bit of a slog to get through this first episode leaves me unsure whether I want to watch more of this.

While watching these three series I realised I’d read at least some of the manga version of all of them, but none of them left much of an impression. Of the three, Maou no Musume wa Yasashi Sugiru is the one I most like to watch more of. There are enough good series coming out this season that I don’t really feel the need to watch mediocre ones just because they’re mildly entertaining or I’m curious what’ll happen next.

Goumon Baito-kun no Nichijou is one of those cutesy slice of life series about people with unusual jobs, only in this case the job is torturer?

This is a world where killing and torture are legalized. Sero, a part-time worker at a torture company, enjoys torturing people every day with his senior colleague, Siu. With the addition of new part-timers Mike and Hugh, fun torture life continues!

One of those days when you truly believe anime was a mistake. I went in blind with this one, but once it became clear what it was about and how it presented itself, I noped out quickly. This is pure fascism:

I do understand that the incongruity is the point and, to many people, the appeal. Still, I just can’t find it in me to chuckle as Cero thinks in the opening sketch about what a waste of his time it’ll end up being if the guy he’s tormenting doesn’t actually have the information he’s seeking out. I grimaced at the posters promoting torture as a way of helping keep the world clean and safe, and the assurance that the men strapped to their chairs are all confirmed villains, so it’s totally okay.
[…]
What’s most baffling about this anime, however, is how it attempts to make our heroes seem not just “normal” but “good.” In this world, a torturer is apparently a legal job. All the people sent to them are guilty of something—even if it’s not the crime they’re being tortured for. So it’s totally okay that they’re being crippled and/or disfigured, right? Well, the show sure seems to think so.

Caitlin Moore and Richard Eisenbeis there nailing exactly why it is. It’s that whitewashing of what torture is, that insistence that everybody being tortured deserves it, that it’s good as long as it only happens to bad people, that makes it fascist. Because if you insist only bad people get tortured, the opposite is true as well: getting tortured means you’re a bad person. Some people are inherently bad and lose their human rights so can be tortured. How more fascist can you make it. It’s the same thinking behind Guantanamo and the idea of “illegal combatants”, people arbitrarily put outside the protections of the Geneva conventions so you could waterboard them.

In this first episode Orhun is thrown out of his party, saves a girl in the dungeon, then gets a job offer from her sister, the head of a famous guild.

If that sounds a bit thin for a first episode, don’t fret: there’s plenty of unnecessary exposition to fill up the runtime,as Orhun monologues to himself about things he already knows. A common flaw in light novel adaptations, of which Yuusha Party wo Oidasareta Kiyoubinbou of course is one. You can get away with it in text, but there’s not much fun in watching him fight utterly generic monsters will thinking about how he was kicked out from his party for not being a good enough support magician, as he retrained from being a swordsman. Even if it’s all animated a bit better than usual for such series. The whole experience is less like watching anime and more like having somebody read a fan wiki entry to you explaining the world building.

It’s not great. And the worst thing it does is give you room to think about how absurd the setup is. Orhun is thrown out of the Hero’s Party supposedly because he’s not good enough an support magician. He’s not good enough because originally he was a swordsman and had to retrain himself into this new role as his party needed it. Nevertheless, they still became a record-setting S-rank party. So why sack him? Because they teamed up with another S-rank party, whose leader Sophia Claudel — inventor of the party system and a support magician herself — was so much better than him that they had no choice but to sack him. A bit unfair if you ask me and it doesn’t really make sense. Especially since Sophia herself clearly does value him, despite only having met him once, during that team-up. Sure, ulterior motives may be in play, but it all seems not very well thought out. Easy to skip over in a manga, but hard to ignore in anime.

A better adaptation would’ve avoided all this by cutting down on the exposition and start where this ended: as Orhun accepts Sophia’s job offer of mentoring a group of newbies in her guild during their first dungeon crawl. Start it there, then you can show why he got the job and hwy he was available much more naturally. Or they could’ve started with that collaboration between Orhun and Sophia’s parties, which would’ve neatly led to the banishment etc. By keeping rigidly to the way the manga/light novel did it, we instead got an episode where the action was done less then ten minutes in, the rest of it just being people talking at each other. A good example of the weakness of most of this sort of fantasy series, putting setup over storytelling.

This year I set myself the goal of finally finishing three anime series (Mazinger Z, Goldfish Warning and Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ that I’d been allegedly watching for years. I started Mazinger Z back in 2022 and the other two in 2020 even! That’s way too long. Even at the start of December I was still far behind my goal. I found a solution: make one giant playlist alternating episodes, the comedic Goldfish Warning as a palate cleanser between the more serious other two shows.

This helped a lot. I found it a lot easier to watch one episode of three different shows than set myself down to binge three episodes of the same show. It helped build anticipation for the next episode, especially with Gundam ZZ. It also helped to keep my attention, as especially with Mazinger Z, a rather formulaic show at times, I found myself starting looking at my phone a lot a few episodes into a binge watch.

So why not do the same thing next year? Take a couple of seventies, eighties and nineties shows, pile them in another playlist and make it a weekly watch? What I wanted as a sventies entry was simple: following Mazinger Z it had to be Getter Robo of course, the mecha series that Go Nagai created after Mazinger Z, which ran at the same time as the latter’s sequel, Great Mazinger. That would be the “super robot” entry in my playlist. The other candidate was Great Mazinger, but that was 56 episodes and I’m a bit fed up with Mazinger anyway.

To follow up Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ I wanted an eighties mecha series. First I thought about either Ideon or Armoured Troopers Votoms, but decided in the end on two shorter series: Giant Gorg and Panzer World Galient, which at twentysix and twentyfive episodes neatly matched Getter Robo‘s fiftyone. Both are also more typical eighties mecha series than either Ideon or Votoms would’ve been.

All that left is the nineties option. Ideally this would’ve been a full length television series, but I couldn’t find any that struck my fancy, so I compromised by instead adding several OVA series: Dirty Pair Flash (16 eps.), Patlabor: The New Files (16 eps.) and Giant Robot: the Animation (7), leaving em twelve episodes short. Which is just enough to finally finish off Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water which I first started watching in 2017!

If I start watching on January 4th and watch three episodes each Sunday, I can finish it all up roughly around Christmas again, without stressing myself out about having to finish all of them. And by focusing on smaller series alongside Getter Robo I can hit milestones earlier too, which is a bonus. I could even swap out series if one turns out to be a bit naff. All this to avoid mindlessly watching terrible crap just because it’s airing.

This is my anime resolutions for 2026: do you have any and if so, what are they?

Remember, it’s not really Christmas until Ichigo swings that axe:

Here’s your weeb Christmas song playlist. First up, Aikatsu wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy Nieuwjaar:

If we got Aikatsu you cannot neglect PriPara either:

Moving on from idols, Toradora did a Christmas song too!

And finally, IdolM@ster remembers the reason for the season: it’s Jesus’s birthday! Happy b-day Jesus!