The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Grand Blue Dreaming Season 2

Iori's dream college life continues with endless seas, bright sunny days, and chaos with his diving club.

Grand Blue Dreaming is based on the manga series by writer Kenji Inoue and artist Kimitake Yoshioka. The anime series is available to stream on Crunchyroll every Monday.

If I got one thing out of this episode, it's that dear lord, do I love Shiori. There's something so incredibly funny about the idea of a little sister who's pretending to be obsessed with her precious onii-chan so that he'll come back home and take over work for their family's inn. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure her logic checks out. After all, how would her being so overbearing make him want to come home? If anything, one would think it would only drive him further away, right? So, admittedly, I'm not exactly sure I'm following her plan. Worse, from where I'm standing it doesn't sound like it would work at all—let alone the way she wants it to. Still, it's delivering some prime comedy, so I'm all for watching this play out anyway. Or, you know, as much as this anime will let us.

The episode ended with her leaving, so while I'd be willing to bet we'll see her again at some point, it's too early to say whether or not she'll be a recurring character (and if she is, just how recurring that ends up being). I hope she is, though! I get that this is a bro comedy and that watching the diving club get drunk and be goofy is, you know, more or less the point. Grand Blue Dreaming knows exactly what kind of anime it is, and by extension, what it wants to do (be silly and lighthearted) and how it wants to do it (alcohol, nudity). Still, I've never been able to place my finger on it until now, but I've always felt like, despite how strong this anime's sense of self is, it's been missing something. And thanks to Shiori and this week's episode, I've realized what that something is: a cartoonish villain.

This anime obviously hasn't been starved of antagonism up until now, but it's always come from a place of playfulness. Shiori, on the other hand, actually wants her brother to come back home. But rather than approach this matter more practically, she decides to pretend to be in love with him. And she helps get herself into character by stalking him with Y2K spy movie-adjacent gadgets. Everything about this feels like she's doing way too much, and that, especially with her obvious intellect and resources, there are a million better ways she could be going about this. But she's not. And I love that. It fits the goofy tone of this anime perfectly, and I'm here for it. Last week's episode left me feeling pretty underwhelmed, but thanks to her, I'm suddenly a lot more interested in watching more of this anime as the season goes on.

Dear ANN Readers,
Skipping the pleasantries.
Skipping the body.
Skipping the closing.
From, Kennedy.

…For real, though, it took nearly a decade, but here we are: the second season of Grand Blue Dreaming. I'm not as shocked that it happened as I am that it took this long. To that end, not that there was much story to recap in the first place, but I'm glad that this episode opened up with a bit of a recap anyway—which, by the way, was cleverly framed as Iori struggling to figure out how much he should tell his sister about what his college life has been like thus far. I was honestly expecting the recap to be something more along the lines of Iori's drank so much booze in the past few months that he can't remember what he's been doing, so the club has to recap him on everything. However, I thought the letter-writing bit was nice.

Still, funny as it was, it wasn't my favorite part of the episode. Without rival, it's Iori in the shower, when—lo and despair, for he has run out of shampoo! Surely, we've all been here. But you know where we (hopefully) haven't all been? At a point where we're some combination of desperate, curious, and downright brainless enough to look at a bottle of bath cleaner as a shampoo substitute. And (pretends to be shocked), it doesn't work out. Bravo, Iori.

Indeed, comedy is Grand Blue Dreaming's bread and butter, but that bit notwithstanding, I didn't find anything in this episode that I think I'm going to be, well, writing home about. Sure, some moments were worthy of a light chuckle—again, the letter writing springs to mind—but nothing I think I'll still be thinking about a week from now. And I'm including the facial comedy when I say that; this is an anime that's practically begging to be turned into folders upon folders of reaction images, but relative to what else we've seen from Grand Blue Dreaming—and certainly anime that similarly like facial comedy like Delicious in Dungeon—I didn't really find myself wowed.

So, I guess what I'm getting at here is that this was an okay first episode. I've seen better from this show, and I've seen worse. Still, with it having been so long since season 1, I was hoping they'd pull out all the stops for the premiere of the second season. There's nothing more disappointing than a well-liked series that gets a sequel after a long wait, only for it to be just okay once it's finally out after all those years of hype from its fans. Still, although I'm pretty underwhelmed, I'm willing to give it more episodes before I officially declare this sequel a flop.

Last week's premiere of Grand Blue Dreaming's second season really threw me for a loop with how funny it was. I liked the show just fine back when I covered it a thousand years ago, but I was straight up guffawing last week in a way that doesn't happen too often when I'm watching anime comedies. This week's adventure with the Peek-a-Boo Club isn't as riotous as the last one, unfortunately. The production quality is already starting to slip, for one, and there is no escalating sequence of gags as perfect as Iori's attempts to steal that dirty picture from Chisa's pocket. It's still a pretty good episode, though, thanks to the presence of Iori's sister, Shiori.

The whole bit that defines Shiori's character is just a solid foundation for good comedy: She acts like the typical anime little sister with an unhealthy attachment to her big brother, but that is all just an act. Shiori actually thinks Iori is an idiot, but she knows that, if he doesn't somehow end up living with their parents again, they will make her take over the family ryokan in his stead. So, she has arrived in Izu to do whatever it takes to sabotage her big bro's life and drag his drunken ass back home with her. Shenanigans ensue, of course.

The stuff with Kohei being an irredeemable otaku and pervert is funny enough, but there's only so far you can go with the gag where he repeatedly threatens to murder Iori for having such an ideal little sister. I much preferred the moments where Shiori's mask keeps threatening to slip as she discovers that everyone in this club is a lunatic in some way or another, and her cunning schemes cannot stand up to the impenetrable wall of ridiculous stupidity that makes up everyday life in the Peek-a-Boo Club.

What makes this episode really work, though, is the fact that it actually has a little bit of heart stuffed deep down in the depths of its shameless, depraved heart. Iori may not make for the best brother in the world, but he knows that Shiori is just putting on a show because of how scared she is about being forced to take over the ryokan. Seeing Shiori grow to actually kind of... sort of... maybe... just a little bit... like her idiot brother is genuinely sweet.

Plus, we got to see real diving in this diving anime, for once! May the wonders never cease. I imagine that this bumpier and less consistent version of Grand Blue Dreaming is going to be more of the norm for this season, but with any luck, we might be able to get a couple more episodes that are on part with that excellent premiere. If the show can manage that, I think this second season will end up being worth the wait.

I originally reviewed the first season of Grand Blue Dreaming in the Before Times of 2018. Since everything that happened before the first great COVID pandemic has been reduced to a half-remembered fever dream in my brain, you will forgive me for almost completely forgetting about the show's existence until this second season randomly popped up out of nowhere seven years after the fact. It's not because Grand Blue Dreaming isn't worth remembering, either. I went back over my reviews from the time, and it seems that Pre-COVID James mostly enjoyed the show for what it was, even if its sometimes janky visuals and proudly crude humor made for an inconsistent comedy.

What surprised me even more than the mere existence of this new Grand Blue Dreaming season, though, was how goddamned hilarious it ended up being. I'm not sure if it's because my standards have changed as I've gotten deeper into my 30s, or if Zero-G's collaboration with Liber has significantly improved the production values and comedic timing of the series, but either way, this was a hell of a premiere. I would even go so far as to recommend it to new viewers who haven't had time to catch up on the first season added to Crunchyroll, because there's not much you're missing out on. This episode does a fine job of reintroducing us to Iori, Chisa, Kohei, and the rest of the Peek-a-Boo club. It makes it very clear up front that this “diving club” anime is really about the daily misadventures of a bunch of deranged college students who spend most of their time stripping naked, getting piss-drunk on cheap beer, and nearly killing each other with their wacky anime shenanigans. This new season is even introducing the jealous little sister character into Iori's life, so you can imagine what kind of fresh new madness Grand Blue Dreaming will cook up for him in the coming weeks.

Seriously, though, I can't get over how much this episode killed it with the stupid comedy. Your mileage will vary, obviously, since we're marching deep into the trenches of Dumb Frat Boy Humor here, but you have to respect the show's commitment to its bits. Iori's extended mission to steal a dirty picture from Chisa's back pocket is a classic exercise in comedic escalation, culminating in the boy nearly getting his skull crushed by Chisa's jealous older sister when it inevitably ends up looking like Iori sullied Chisa's maidenhood (which only becomes funnier when you remember that Iori and Chisa are cousins). I'm not promising anything classy or intellectual, but if you are the type that can find joy in seeing a bunch of dumb kids let their freak flags fly in a bunch of surprisingly well-animated sketches, then you might well get a real kick out of Grand Blue Dreaming this summer.