The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle

As far as normies go, it's hard to beat Chitose Saku. He's the most popular kid in his high school, has an ironclad reputation that can even weather vicious online attacks, and a group of friends who are as attractive on the outside as they are on the inside. But when a teacher asks Saku to help a student who has been shut away in his room for months reacclimate to school life, his perfect world will never be the same.

Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle is based on the light novel series by Hiromu and raemz. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Although this looks beautiful, with rich art and animation and good use of light and shadow, I am leery. Our lead is introduced, leering at girls' legs and skirts. One female character is introduced, if not boobs-first, then boobs-second, with the shot of her cleavage taking up much more time than that of her face. And the boy he's supposed to be helping return to school has a streak of virulent misogyny that makes my skin crawl. Quite possibly part of Chitose's aid will be to get Kenta out of his ugly otaku stereotype mindset, but I found a lot of this episode very hard to stomach.

It also feels like perhaps it's trying to be classier or at least more erudite than your average tale of this type. Not having read the source material, I can't say if it actually is, but the impression I get from this episode is that we're in for a fairly standard story about a group of popular kids who use their popularity to help others. The episode itself is an extended thirty minutes with an extra twenty minutes devoted to two of the voice actors giving us a mini-tour of the series' setting, Fukui. I'm not sure the extra ten minutes of story content are merited, although I do understand what the goal was: to introduce us to the entire extended case of named characters in as natural a way as possible. And it does largely succeed there – there's a bit of unnatural narration about everyone's club activities, but the dynamic between the core group of five comes through clearly, as does Chitose's relationship with potential manic pixie dream girl Asuka, who I have pegged as his actual romantic interest.

The problem is that this feels very much like a prologue. There are far too many named characters, three of whom have names that start with “yu,” a major creative writing no-no, and all of them just feel like tropes in human skin. Chitose himself resents the school-wide assessment of him as a fuccboi, but he doesn't appear to want to do anything about it until his teacher sends him to figure out why Kenta's not been coming to school. If this interaction does result in meaningful change (and a friend's continued reading of the manga version suggests to me that it might), then this episode could be deceptive. But did it have to be dull as well?

As of this episode, the most interesting element of the story to me is that Asuka is reading some Golden Age of Mystery fiction, 1942's Phantom Lady by Cornell Woolrich writing as William Irish. If this deliberate name drop ends up factoring into the plot of the series, I could be grossly misjudging it. But as of right now, this feels like all style and little substance.

The first episode of Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle annoyed me. The second episode actively makes me angry. Interestingly enough, the reasons are exactly the same: Saku Chitose himself. Whereas he was just irritatingly pretentious in the first episode, in this sophomore (and sophomoric) outing, he crosses the line to full-on infuriating. How? By combining his social palaver with directives for Kenta that, in my opinion, cross that fine line he mentions between banter and bullying.

I also disagree that that line is fine at all. When someone tells you to lose weight if you want to be accepted into the social whirl of high school, that's bullying. When someone tells you that you can hang out with them for three weeks and no more, that's bullying. When someone spills your most painful secrets in front of the class, that's bullying. Chitose does all of those things in this episode, and he tries to pass them off as just good-natured ribbing. If I give him the (undeserved) benefit of the doubt, maybe he really believes what he's saying; even his friends call him a fuccboi, after all. But having been on the other side of things, it hurts when someone does that to you. If Kenta's going along with it and calling Chitose “king,” it's because he's desperate for any friends at all. It's unlikely to be because he, in his heart of hearts, believes that Chitose is really being nice to him.

There's effort on the show's part to make it clear that Chitose has problems, too. There's an attempt to frame him as feeling like the marble in a ramune bottle – a gimmicky trinket that's stuck between the bottle and the outside, forced to move with every tilt. While it's possible to get the marbles out, it's not easy without breaking the bottle, and the idea may be that Chitose's words and actions arise from feeling trapped. There's merit in that analogy that's worth exploring, but after watching these two episodes, I have a negative desire to.

With this episode, Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle solidifies itself for me as a thoroughly unlikable show with an equally unlikable protagonist. When it's not being pretentious, it's indulging in misogyny (really? Kenta decides to leave his room for “boobies?”) or bullying barely disguised as joking around. I already lived through my own miserable high school experience, thanks. I certainly don't need to stick around for this guy rehashing the experience.

Am I the only one who thinks Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle feels superfluous after last year's stellar Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! or My Teen Romantic Comedy – SNAFU from a bit further back? There are quite a few anime now that don't just aggrandize students' experience in high school, but actually dig into the very weird experience of being a young person navigating a social space that feels tremendously important while also being overtly temporary. Though maybe I'm being presumptuous in evoking titles like Makeine and SNAFU, as Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle premiere already lacks the quality of writing that made the other works gripping right out of the gate.

While the show is lavishly produced (they make all of the girls look extra appealing to the presumably hetero and male audience watching this show), none of these teenagers talk or act like real teenagers. So much of this episode is the main character, Chitose, espousing about how people perceive him and his friends instead of letting the lead and extensive supporting cast establish themselves in a way that feels more organic. This episode even features the Writing 101 trick of “how would different characters react differently in the same situation” to establish two of Chitose's love interests through comparison. I would have loved to have gotten more scenes like that instead of Chitose monologing about how he and his Super Best Friends club are super cool, even if they have haters.

My biggest issue with this premiere is that Chitose is just insufferable. Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle wants its lead to be the cool, confident, and mature for a high schooler lead that helps pull more socially maligned kids out of their toxic spirals, but his confidence and above-it-all attitude are so annoying! If this anime wants me to feel like I'm watching someone living out what they think will be the best years of their life, it should show me someone living their life rather than vocally insisting that things are great for them and their friends at every opportunity.

I can't be too critical of this premiere, as it's competently produced and is gearing up to maybe say something insightful about what it's like to be a young person in Japanese society today, but this opening doesn't inspire confidence. As someone who absolutely killed it in high school, nobody likes being in high school as much as Chitose, and I could do without another anime that waxes poetic about how supposedly special that time period is.

That real tour of Fukui at the end of the episode was pretty neat, though!

What happened to the ladies looking at the dinosaur animatronics and eating at Fukui restaurants!? They were the best part of Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle's premiere episode and I wanted to see them again! How am I supposed to stomach this banal and misinformed attempt at depicting high schoolers and the issues they face without the levity that comes from two women gal-palling around town?

After finishing episode two of Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle I cannot understand the intentions of its writers or who it's supposed to appeal to. Chitose feels like a young misanthrope's idea of a popular and successful student. Everything is easier for him, but that comes with downsides like other students having a sense of contempt for him. This super special popular boy's efforts to pull Kenta out of his room and self-imposed isolation then feel like a kind of wish fulfillment fantasy for those kinds of misanthropes. After all, who among us in a depressive moment of self-doubt hasn't thought “if people just made more of an effort to understand ME I'd be able to connect with them no problem.”

The issue, though, is that I don't buy Kenta's motivations for turning into a hikikomori. I understand how much getting rejected by someone you like can hurt, but this feels both like an over reaction on the character's part and an over-simplification of what motivates someone to become a social recluse. The end result is an episode of television that makes young people suffering from significant depression look like overly-sensitive crybabies and feeds into destructive and inaccurate ideas about how incels will simply get better if the popular kids would only be a little bit nicer to them.

Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle is such a fundamental misunderstanding of the interiority, social dynamics, and motivations of high school kids that I have a difficult time unraveling it without accidentally writing an essay. What I can say succinctly, though, is that I graduated as the valedictorian of my high school, was a varsity athlete in three different sports, and started dating when I was 15. I was “successful” in high school in the way that Chitose is supposed to be and his perspective and attitude are completely alien to me. This anime is attempting to frame itself as being more real and grounded than much of its subject matter contemporaries, but the end result is something that's difficult for me to parse emotionally or intellectually.

Also, apparently Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle will only put time, energy, and budget into making its various waifus look cute, as this episode looks much less impressive and while featuring the four girls less prominently. Also, while the OP and ED are technically visually impressive, they're pretty busy and less thematically readable as a result. Even in the midst of a slower season, I can't recommend that anyone check this anime out.

Generally, when people talk at screens, it's performative. Maybe they're watching a bad movie together, or pointing out a plot hole. Either way, it's more for the benefit of the people around them than for their own. So when I involuntarily yelled, “Shut the [redacted] up!” at the TV while watching Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle, despite the only other living being in the room being my little cat, who had long since turned her face away from the screen, I knew things had gotten bad.

Oh, I had an inkling from the start. The first minute and a half of the bloated double-length premiere had the characters ruminating on being “blue” in reference to the Japanese idiom “blue spring,” meaning youth. When the episode started in earnest and Chitose opened his mouth, I could feel the wellspring of antipathy rising within me. He may not be the typical nebbish harem protagonist, but to be honest, he's so much worse: arrogant, pretentious, and oh-so-proud of his nonexistent wit. Other boys in his class hate him because he's friends with all the prettiest girls in class! They gossip and call him a “fuccboi” (thank you, translator Sriram Gurunathan – you did an excellent job) behind his back! Never mind that that's a perfectly accurate assessment.

He's surrounded by manic pixie dream girls who clearly want to ride his bicycle metaphorically as well as literally, each one spouting the most overwritten dialogue and narration this side of Your Lie in April. Chitose has two male friends, but they don't matter; there are only two other notable male characters. One is the lazy teacher who gives Chitose the task of bringing back their classmate, who hasn't attended school in months, and the other is that student. What a treat he is, calling girls skanks and floozies. Screw off.

The animation is overall pretty nice, albeit generic, but way too aggressive with color correction. Entire scenes will have a strange blue cast over them, whereas a scene at sunset is so orange that it looks like there's a wildfire happening just offscreen. The music, on the other hand, was the best part of the episode; the transition from tinkling piano to rock guitars at the very end was surprisingly effective, even liberating. It felt like everything was… opening up.

And then the episode ended, and I spent another fifteen minutes watching two of the voice actresses stand in front of animatronic dinosaurs and eat at famous restaurants in Fukui. Not going to lie, those dinosaurs were the highlight of my morning. They were not, however, even a little bit worth sitting through Chitose's horsecrap.

Did I just watch an episode of anime, or did I read a “self-help for men” book? This episode of Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle was approximately three-quarters Chitose giving Kenta, the poor otaku from the previous episode, basic life advice. Stuff like, “People will be more interested in you if you ask them about their lives,” and, “People who seem effortless actually work really hard.” What's next, telling him to clean his room?

It truly was like listening to a motivational speaker, in that he was giving basic advice and inspirational platitudes that eventually took a weird turn. In this case, it's Chitose demanding that Kenta call him “King” and promising that following his advice will lead to him touching boobs. Although he does eventually get back to better platitudes, such as, “Stop talking about 3D girls like they're an alien species,” and, “Stop posting on toxic anonymous imageboards,” that and his first-episode arrogance cast the entire thing in a weird, cultish light. The mix of common sense advice and cult leader behavior as an almost Petersonian element to it.

Fun fact: this episode actually caused a minor argument between me and my husband, who didn't watch the first episode with me. Chitose's oily smugness in the first episode, combined with his female friends' universal desire to hump him, made him intolerable in a way that my husband couldn't understand.

On a more positive note, this episode did bring us the opening and closing theme songs, both gorgeous in their own way. The opening is stuffed with bright, bouncy, joyful animation—primarily of the girls but with all the major characters popping up. The ending animation sequence of Chitose hints that maybe our boy may be putting on a happier face than he feels inside is a bit of a mismatch to the Cider Girl number, but I'm probably going to be humming it for at least a week.

More than anything, the themes reminded me of Makeine, which had a similar vibe to Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle but was a much better-written series with likable characters, unlike this schween. I wish I were watching that instead.

Look, man, I get it, high school sucked for me, too. The magic of being a writer is that you can spin up any situation to fantasize about as an outlet for frustrations, long-simmering or short-standing. So here comes Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle, an anime for people who either peaked in high school or desperately wish they did. The opening narration alone will be sure to exhaust any remaining nostalgia for that period of adolescence that well-adjusted viewers may have. For the rest of it, the audience is stuck in this Saw trap of fuzzy classroom memories and plinking piano keys over someone's pretentious LiveJournal updates for over thirty minutes—plus another twenty-ish of their travelogue and food posts.

I'm not sure if this kind of fulfillment for guys who desperately wanted to "win" high school is more or less sad than the overpowered isekai fantasies, but it's definitely no more conducive to engaging storytelling. The titular Chitose narrates the seemingly endless introduction of his crowd of super-awesome friends like he's telling you about his favorite gacha-game characters.

Perhaps this approach would have been more effective in novel form, but when you're shotgun-blasting this many characters to the audience in an anime, having them actually embody and demonstrate their personalities and charm points would be more effective and economical. But then that might distract from Chitose's status as the center of this terminally small high school world. If he couldn't use the personalities of his friends and associates, as well as his cool teacher confidant, as an opportunity for surface-level philosophizing about how they interact with society, what would he do?

As a writer myself, I can't overstate how much Chitose (and to a lesser extent, his entourage) talks like a writer. Everything is a pretentious declaration of one's place in the world or a pithy remark trying to communicate multiple layers of relationships they wish they had. It's sort of like Monogatari but with no actual purpose or self-awareness behind the pretentious speeches, to say nothing of a complete lack of real compelling friction in the conversations between Chitose and his various girlfriends. While an actual plot is getting underway, the runway to it in this extra-long premiere is so lengthy, given all the establishing character details, that it's going to exhaust anyone who doesn't tightly identify with Chitose himself. The "conflict" thus far amounts to a couple of circular conversations to try to talk a friend-zoned nerd out of his depression. At least this light novel anime gets the ass of other light novels with some of the parody titles that are name-checked, anyway.

Establishing vibes in a story like this is important, and Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle has some decent looks going for it as it meanders so much at the beginning. It's a lot of filters and twinkling dust motes, to be sure, so the pretensions of the visuals are as apparent as the writing, but it never looks bad. However, its grandiosity works against it, as this sweeping treatment is not in service of accomplishing much except establishing how special and amazing Chitose's high school life is. The ending literal smash cut even feels less like a compelling cliffhanger and more like the author trying to write the sort of impactful, inspiring setpiece they had always dreamed of creating for their own underclassmen/imagined admirers. Perhaps some viewers will be at an age or point in their lives where this can actually resonate, but I feel that for many people, Chitose will only be a reminder of how much they've moved on—or need to.

As Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle moves from its insufferable introductions into being actually about something this week, I can critically confirm that I did hate it less. That mostly applies in terms of the show and story itself—and what I can admit is appreciable about it. But so much of its tone, as well as Chitose himself, is still incredibly annoying. I'll give some points to the series at least for seeming to have some metatextual awareness—Chitose effectively admits that he knows there are plenty of people that find him annoying, and his overconfident exemplifying of his own success is simply how he owns that position regardless. Hey, he's not wrong.

That's the main tonal disconnect I find myself running into with Chitose, especially at the beginning of his rap session with Kenta. It's the paradox of knowing you're technically aligned with someone on their points, but you don't want to agree with them simply because they're being such a smug, annoying ass about it. Also I think a lot of Chitose's pointed pontifications would work better if they weren't couched in grandiose analysis about his and his peers' potential based on what they're doing in high school. This is a person who would be setting himself up for a pretty harsh reality check if he were real and not a mouthpiece for an author to dispense their revelatory life advice to teenage nerds.

But just as contrast can make anything look better in comparison, Chitose makes his case in having to coach an even more annoying type of person in Kenta. Look, I can't have vented my years of irritation with nerd-venerating light novel fantasy stories and then not be pleased with Chitose dressing down Kenta's self-pitying existence as a walking cliche. Sure, Kenta's inciting incident is still that he was rejected and ostracized by a girl "For No Reason" rather than conceding that actual toxicity often plays a role in these events. But still, Chitose summarily quashes his self-centered worldview and brings him up with advice a bit more actionable than the old nebulous "have confidence!"

I think that's why it's hard for me to fully condemn Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle at this stage. Yeah, it's still an obnoxious self-fellating fantasy on so many levels, but if more nerds took in material like this instead of misanthropic no-self-improvement persecution wallowing, maybe those nerds—and the world—would be better. And yeah, it can be nice to imagine the possibility of people earnestly letting you open up to them and encourage your betterment because they're genuinely decent. It's still all basic sociological sentiment wrapped in an over-conversational presentation, however. Then again I'll take that conversation over Chitose's purple prose narration. It's ultimately an episode that could have been just an advice post on Reddit—and as annoying as the poster's writing style is, at least it's ostensibly good advice.