The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - Let This Grieving Soul Retire! Season 2

It's the golden age for treasure hunters—adventurers hungry for wealth, fame, power, and glory, who risk their lives in treasure vaults throughout the world.

“Let's become treasure hunters.”

Krai and his childhood friends swore to become the greatest of them all, but that dream should have died the day Krai realized he wasn't cut out for the job! Yet expectations continue to mount, right along with Krai's fear for his life. While his childhood friends climb closer toward their dream, this grieving soul has one simple wish: to pack it all in and retire!

Let This Grieving Soul Retire! Season 2 is based on a light novel series by Tsukikage and Chyko. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

When it comes to season premieres of ongoing series, they usually start one of three ways: 1) jump right into the next arc, 2) continue plodding along with little-to-no fanfare, or 3) reintroduce the cast with a one-off adventure. This episode is option three, but with a twist. Rather than an ultimately meaningless adventure set in the present, this episode provides a vital piece of backstory: the first meeting between Tino and the Grieving Souls.

Thus, this episode allows us to get to know Tino before her obsession took hold—before she saw Krai as an omnipotent, god-like savior and before Liz's training began to warp her perception of the world. It also gives us a bit more time with the members of the party who haven't appeared in the present-day storyline yet—namely Luke, Lucia, and Ansem—and gives us a taste of what they can do by showing how crazily strong they were half a decade ago.

Overall, this episode is a good example of what to expect from the series as it follows the usual pattern. Krai stumbles through a complex and/or dangerous situation, his friends end up defeating whatever evil they encounter, and he emerges looking like a mastermind who has manipulated everything and everyone to achieve the perfect resolution.

However, where this episode truly succeeds is in its low-key humor. The jokes about the masks really got me. Revealing that the party is literally blind while wearing them redefines a ton of scenes from the first season—and makes our heroes seem even more powerful. That those masks were bought solely for the reason they look cool (despite basically bankrupting the party) is also a good gag—but not as good as the revelation that they are bulletproof because they are made of top-tier materials (hence their cost).

And then there is the big joke of the episode. To quote the late, great Raúl Juliá:

“For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me... it was Tuesday.”

In the same vein, for Tino, the day she met Krai was the defining moment of her entire life. But for Krai, it was just another day of him meandering through life with no real plan other than trying to slack off. Krai doesn't even remember the event until hearing Tino describe it at length to anyone who will listen (and many who don't want to).

And, like Bison, he doesn't really even care—either about the events in general or forgetting in the first place. Instead, he thinks about how to use the now much stronger Tino for his own plans—namely, using her as a bodyguard while he adds to his massive relic collection.

All in all, this episode is more of the same—and I mean that in the best way. If you watched the first season and enjoyed it, you'll enjoy this episode too. I know I did.

I mean, it Ain't Bad™. The Grieving Souls are reintroduced well enough; there's a joke involving a dude's 'fro that I laughed at, the animation is competent for this type of show, and I kind of like the color scheme here (seriously, the oranges and reds in this sunset-drenched town are magnificent). And hey, props for the show saying that slavery is bad, and that cruel slaveowners need their proper comeuppance! It's crazy how it's 2025 and we still have to give props to anime that actually do that, but whatever, I'll take what I can get here. Still, though, I feel whatever positives I'm giving the show here feel a bit fished out here. The start of Let This Grieving Soul Retire!'s new season isn't mediocre by any stretch of the imagination. It's not even meh. But something about the pacing just irks me.

Like a good chunk of Grieving Soul, much of this new episode is told through flashbacks, focusing on the origin story of the adorable, girly simp of the gang, Tino. A group of child slaveowners tries to kidnap her in the town alleyway, only for Krai and the Souls to intervene to save her. The Souls then continue to give the slave owners the ol' one-two-buckle-my-shoe in the flashback sequence, interspersed with Tino reminiscing about the memory in the present. The episode cuts between the past and present, giving it an unnecessarily choppy feel. Not that I'm against cutting back and forth between two time periods or stories like that—The Godfather Part II is the masterclass example of the former, and Liz and the Blue Bird the latter. But the pacing of a Walter Murch editing job, Grieving Souls is not. The cuts here don't really add to much, and don't change the fact that I'm still watching fantasy that seems too straightforward for my tastes.

That being said, I'm not sure if I'd be smitten by this episode if it went for a more traditional pacing. I'm not invested in how Krai continues to lounge around in the back so the rest of the Grieving Souls can do all the heavy lifting. I get that this is the entire point of his character and thus the show itself, but I wish there were more dimension to his character than being a weak yet still conniving enough group leader. I wish the same for the other characters—it's a tinge bit adorable to see Tino fawn over her dear leader, and even better that we get to understand why she does. And yet, I can't help but feel that this is the most interesting she'll be. None of the characters and moments in season one really stuck out for me, and I'm not sure they will this season.

A 4:3 flashback showing us how Tino got to meet her beloved Grieving Souls is a clever way to kick off this new batch of episodes. It's a great way to ease us back into the universe of this show. Plus, by now, I—like plenty of other viewers, I'm sure—have been really curious if she has anything in particular that's driving her to be so zealous about Krai's “strength” in particular, and it comes off as the sort of thing that's rooted in a personal experience. So, as a choice for a storyline in this first episode, this is an excellent choice!

My favorite aspect of it, though, is, well, the aspect ratio—that the flashback segments were in 4:3. This is only a flashback five years in the past, so I guess there's something to be said about how that makes it come off like it's way longer, but I thought it was a cute detail all the same. It tickled my zillennial heart. Charming little things like this have always been a strength of Let This Grieving Soul Retire!, even in its first season (the narrator springs to mind), so I'm all the happier to see something like that in this first episode.

Still, even taking into account how adorable I think the changing aspect ratio of the flashback segments is, this still made for a good episode—a nice, bite-sized storyline of a less-experienced-but-still-pretty-powerful Grieving Souls helping out a young Tino. Let This Grieving Soul Retire! has generally favored storylines that last multiple episodes up until now, so it's refreshing to get one that's quicker, and especially one that tells us so much about our main cast of characters (Tino especially). It's short, it's sweet, it's to the point. I imagine that, especially if I were binging this show, an episode like this one now and again would feel like a good checkpoint.

This is all to say that, especially as the first episode of a new batch, this one works pretty well. It's not doing anything amazingly (save for the fun detail of the aspect ratio), but what it's doing, it's doing well—and that's enough for me to say that I enjoyed this episode. Admittedly, the first season of this show—while I didn't dislike it per se, I also never really felt wowed by it either. I was quite surprised to find that I actually ended up liking this episode. It was a surprisingly enjoyable start for a show that I've otherwise generally found pretty middling up until now. If this continues, I might become a fan by the end of the season.