The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Hotel Inhumans

Hotel Inhumans has two concierges, Sara and Ikurō, who service a very particular clientele: assassins. Not only does the hotel offer top-class dining, relaxation, and entertainment, but it also boasts an ever-fresh arsenal of weapons, false identity creation services, and a world-class cleaner crew. Here, assassins cross paths with each other as Sara and Ikurō tend to their needs without question.

Hotel Inhumans is based on the manga series by Ao Tajima. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

Right now, if there's one thing stopping me from adding Hotel Inhumans to my seasonal watchlist, other than lack of time, it's Sara. The first episode focused on Sion and his sister, so we spent much time with the concierges, other than Hoshi, grumbling about how much they hate their jobs. This episode puts a bit more focus on the two of them, and boy, does the dialogue stink.

Hoshi isn't so bad. He vents his well-deserved frustration at the clientele accidentally handing him a hunting knife with his suit, almost slicing him open, but playing air guitar and yelling along with heavy metal. That's fun! Relatable, even! It's the same reason Aggretsuko blew up among general audiences. But then Sara comes in, calls music “a series of notes and scales,” and lectures him about how he's naive for hating murderers. Why? Because they have their reasons for killing, whether it's motivated by a need to pay hospital bills or simply for the love of the game. I'm sorry, but it seems perfectly reasonable not to want to work for people who kill for money. She spends a lot of time talking about nothing, in a way that you can tell the writer thought they were making something really deep.

It is nice that this episode makes it clear that it's not going to be an anthology about poor souls who were forced into a life as a paid assassin. Kase simply seeks the perfect kill. He sees himself as an artist on par with a conductor; the show hammers the metaphor into our skull by constantly shifting to jerky frames of a live orchestra with a blurry filter over it. “Killer with a heart of gold” may be a classic for a reason, but a full anthology series about that would get old quickly. Rather, Hotel Inhumans looks to be in conversation with its very title by examining the humanity of people who kill for money. It just so happens that Sara describes that concept in the most circuitous, tortured way I can imagine.

This episode was the first of a two-parter, and I have to admit I'm curious about just what their “Dying Service” would entail. I might just need to make time for that third episode after all.

Nothing quite like a hotel as the framing device for a series of vignettes, right? I must assume that's why Hotel Inhumans is the third consecutive show that takes place in a high-class hotel with some sort of gimmick. There are so many closed doors with who-knows-what going on behind them, so many people coming and going, and most importantly, so many people whose job it is to serve their patrons. Add a twist, and you have your anthology series right there.

Tasokare Hotel took place in a hotel in the border between life and death, Apocalypse Hotel took place in a hotel in the far-flung future, and now Hotel Inhumans takes place in a hotel that serves killers. Their list of amenities includes the latest weaponry and false IDs. The two concierges, a young man and woman, must take on their guests' every request. In this case, their guest is Siao, a young mob hitman who has served since he was a child to ensure his sister safely makes it to the age of 20—but just before her final birthday as a hostage, he suspects the new head of the organization has broken the promise.

The emotional stakes required to make a story like this compelling are present: tension ramping up as he listens to the tapes his sister sends him every year. But once he reaches the hotel, there's a curious lack of friction in how the concierges accomplish his request. He must sign in with his blood, which is generally an ominous signifier; however, he's not held to anything at the end. Everything goes as planned, everyone is on time, and they lure the scummy second head in without a problem. There's no tension there, no deal with the devil to be made.

Instead, the emotionality of the story lies entirely in the question of whether or not Siao will get to see his sister again. While there is inherent pathos to his situation, the episode would have come together more satisfyingly if there were some push and pull for him to accomplish this through the hotel. That lack of tension, if anything, dampens the emotional satisfaction of the episode's conclusion.

There are hints of an overarching story, primarily in the relationship between concierges Ikuro and Sara. Sara is a stony-faced killer, while Ikuro is the brilliant tactician whose plan came together so seamlessly. In their downtime, they play rock-paper-scissors, and Ikuro grouses about how he hates killers and wants to quit. Who are they? Why are they there? Are their stories going to get any more interesting?

How well the orchestra conductor metaphor works for you may very well determine the effectiveness of this episode in your eyes. It didn't quite work as intended for me, although I understand what the idea behind it was –Kase the assassin carries out everything in his life as if he were conducting a complex grand orchestra playing a difficult piece. It is, he feels, his job to make sure that everything flows smoothly and that no section gets behind or ahead of the rest. What this boils down to is convincing his beloved wife that he's a salesman rather than a contract killer and ensuring that his job doesn't interfere with his home life. And for a while, this seems to work.

But of course, this wouldn't be an episode about a hotel that caters to assassins if it kept working. Needless to say, things go south at the end, and Kase's request to the concierges for their “dying service” showcases another aspect of this job – or at least, it will, since this is a two-parter. That's where I become torn: while I appreciate the extra information about Ikuro and Sara, I also feel like giving that its own episode and finishing out Kase's story in one might have worked better. It's important to know that Ikuro doesn't enjoy his work and that he's not comfortable serving killers, even if (or maybe especially since) he has blood in his background. The difference between his attitude and Sara's is doubtless going to be key to their relationship and their jobs going forward. But it lacks the visceral nature and inherent tragedy of Kase's tale, and that undercuts his plotline a bit.

This is still an interesting story. Small details like the sheer number of customers at the hotel stand out, which is something of a shock given that Shao's time there was undisturbed by others. Kase's life is utterly different from Shao's as well, and Sara's attempt to show Ikuro that not everyone has a good reason to become an assassin underlines that starkly. This episode simply doesn't do quite as good a job as the first. It may be that that's entirely on purpose. Despite not enjoying this one as much, I still think it's worth another episode to see if it is.

Is this our third hotel-set series in as many seasons? It's an interesting pattern, and one that certainly does lend itself to the sort of semi-introspective plots that something like Hotel Inhumans seems to want to indulge in. Although I don't think it'll be giving the folks at Gingarou a run for their money, its conceit is still interesting: the eponymous hotel is a place for those in the underworld, the hitmen and other killers, to go if they need help. What that help is remains a bit of a mystery. In the case of Siao (which I'm pretty sure should be spelled Xiao?), his wishes are more or less two-fold – he wants out of the killing game, and he wants his younger sister Mao.

I think, given the premise of the series and the episode, that we always knew that granting Siao's wishes would be bittersweet. He was forced to become an assassin as a child in order to protect Mao, with the promise that she'd be returned to him when twenty years were up. I admit that I initially thought it was “when she turned twenty,” which makes things a bit more confusing, given the end of the episode; in any event, that didn't happen, and Siao begins to suspect betrayal. When he arrives at the hotel, bleeding, shot, and desperate, he's cared for by concierges Sara and Ikuro, the latter of whom has an interesting idea of what, precisely, a concierge's job is. While I very much appreciate the way that the show attempts to take word origins and definition into consideration, it also doesn't quite feel like Ikuro is being a “gatekeeper,” which he asserts is the likely French origin of the word. Sara, on the other hand? No one should want to go up against her.

The result is a mixed bag. I didn't dislike it, but it did have some consistency issues that dragged it down a bit, like Mao's age and how, exactly, the hotel actually functions. It would almost have worked better taking a page out of Tasokare Hotel's book and setting it on the edge of the afterlife, but as the plot goes on, it may become clearer. The art and animation aren't stellar, although the scene of Sara taking down her hair is breathtaking, not necessarily for its fluidity, but for the sheer panache of the thing. Bittersweet and at least a little intriguing, I think this has potential. As of right now, it merits the old three-episode test to see where it goes from here.

Can I just say that Ikuro's first scene in this second episode of Hotel Inhumans endeared me so much to the guy? I, too, sometimes have to blare metal music at full blast so I can whammy on my air guitar and scream out my frustrations at the “clients” I am forced to put up with. In my case, I'm coming up with new and creative ways to tell off the parents who complain about their kids' crappy grades because I won't let them turn in projects two full months after the due date for full credit. That's the same thing as having to deal with ruthless assassins and their deadly escapades, right?

The point is, Hotel Inhumans does seem to be more of an anthology style series, at least so far as the assassins who frequent the building are concerned. Instead of picking back up with the guy who lost his sister last week, Ikuro and Sara have a brand new guest to accommodate this week. These two were easily the best part of Hotel Inhumans' premiere, so I'm glad they're taking more of a lead this time around. Ikuro's bitter free-spiritedness contrasts well with Sara's calm and collected persona, especially when you see them both put in the work to keep the hotel running smoothly.

The change in focus also allows for the show to shift its tonal priorities, which could be a good thing so long as Hotel Inhumans can be consistent in its execution. This week is much more comedic than the first episode, with our attendants helping out a hotel regular named Kase, who is trying to maintain the illusion of a salaryman lifestyle for his wife. Instead of tragic backstories and touching family reunions, we get jokes about a hardened killer getting kissy-face emojis from his affectionate spouse.

It isn't as satisfying a story as Shao's was last time, mostly because it doesn't get as much room to do its thing. Kase is very much the side character this time around. While his conflict between being the perfect killer and the perfect husband is a solid trope to fall back on for the genre, there's only so much empathy we can build for the guy throughout a few scenes in one episode. I also wasn't a fan of the weirdly filtered live-action photos the show used for his orchestral daydreams.

In other words, I enjoyed the material with Ikuro and Sara even more in this episode of Hotel Inhumans than I did in the premiere, but the new assassin story we got was only just okay. That's to be expected in a show where there is a revolving door of new hitmen for our overworked protagonists to attend to. Maybe the next guest will knock our socks off.

There sure have been a lot of supernatural shows about hotels lately, haven't there? While there was essentially no chance that Hotel Inhumans was ever going to dethrone Apocalypse Hotel as one of the year's best anime, never mind being the best cartoon about running a hotel, specifically, I still went into Hotel Inhumans feeling pretty optimistic. Hotels are naturally interesting and diverse places to work and live in, after all, so the potential for quality is just right there, baked into the premise.

Well, the first thing I should mention is that this isn't actually an anime about a supernatural hotel. The titular “Inhumans” are monsters of a metaphorical kind. Killers. Criminals. Assassins. You know the types. I was actually pleasantly surprised to discover this; there are ten billion anime out there about robots and elves, but surprisingly few focus just on regular guys killing other guys with their guns and their fists. Hotel Inhumans is a grittier and more grounded anime than I was expecting (relative to the usual fare, at least). You could accuse it of stepping on John Wick's toes a little, but you know what? I'm happy to have more solid anime in the world that remind me of John Wick. Especially considering that the recent show that featured input from the actual creator of John Wick was Lazarus, and we all know how that turned out…

Anyways, in Hotel Inhumans, the main character of this premiere is a gunman named Siao, who has been taking lives on behalf of a shady criminal empire to protect his sister, who has spent the last twenty years living as a hostage and bargaining chip. The only proof Siao has ever received of her continued safety is a series of annual lullaby messages, but her protection is jeopardized when Siao is nearly the victim of an assassination attempt. This leads him to the titular hotel and to the services of the other leads of the show, a pair of mysterious concierges named Ikuro and Sara. It's a great premise with solid worldbuilding. Ikuro and Sara are especially fun, and their more hands-on approach to hotel management helps differentiate the show from any live-action counterparts.

Siao's quest for revenge and proof of his sister's safety concludes on a predictably tragic note, but a last-minute promise of remaining family ties gives Hotel Inhumans a strong framework for future episodes. At least, I think it does. I'm honestly not sure if Siao is going to remain the main character of this program, or if this is going to be an anthology series with a revolving door of new leads that arrive at the hotel. It could work well either way, though, and I'm looking forward to finding out what twists and turns await us in the future.