The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Sakamoto Days Season 2

Taro Sakamoto, once the world's greatest assassin, is now a retired family man. However, the underworld keeps pulling him back in. This time, four serial killers are on the loose and coming for not only him but his friends and family as well. Does he have what it takes to stop them and—more importantly—can he do so without killing them?

Sakamoto Days Season 2 is based on the manga series by Yuuto Suzuki. The anime series is streaming on Netflix on Mondays.

For a goofy comedy show, Sakamoto Days sure can be bloody, though perhaps that's not unexpected when most of the cast comprise of either current or ex-hit men. The opening scenes involve a group of terrifying foreign “Death Row Inmates” violently murdering their way through Japan's underworld, female killer “Dump” traumatically impaling a man at the height of his fear of death, while steel wire-wielding “Apart” slices up his victim's entire body, before placing the resulting circular meat slabs in a pleasingly systematic arrangement. These unsettling murderers are a step up from the relatively less psychotic enemies faced by Taro Sakamoto in the show's first half.

Despite his intentions to retire and lead a quiet, happy family life, poor Sakamoto never seems to get a break, not since main antagonist Slur put out a massive bounty on his head. His friends (and convenience store employees) Shin and Lu are now also on Sakamoto's enemies' radar, with Sakamoto understandably upset that his threat level is regarded as a “mere” B+. Meanwhile poor Shin is rated “D” with even the non-hit-woman Lu ranking above him (probably because she's such a menace when drunk).

Much of this episode focuses on characters other than Sakamoto, from the aforementioned, creepy Death Row Inmates, to the various members of The Order. Despite also being assassins, they're comparatively less disturbing, though the deadpan Osaragi's attitude to driving is terrifying in its own way. Shin and Lu are attacked by the axe-on-a-rope-wielding Saw, a maniac so deranged that Shin's mind-reading ability is powerless against him (as all he thinks is “kill… kill… kill… kill…”). This is a very entertaining scene, with these two adorable characters in real, mortal danger, and a cliffhanger leaving the battle unresolved.

While Sakamoto Days won't ever win awards for presentation, it's a show that pretty much achieves the minimum in both animation and aesthetics. It's still an entertaining show to watch, though primarily due to its delightful characters and humor. I do love shows that mix the macabre and mirthsome, so I'm more than willing to overlook the lack of visual polish we've almost come to expect from other Shonen Jump animated adaptations like SPY x FAMILY and DAN DA DAN. As long as you don't come to Sakamoto Days expecting revelatory visuals or a particularly deep story, it's a fine way to spend 24 minutes per week. Also Lu is always adorable—though perhaps I just have a thing for cute Chinese anime girls.

The premiere of Sakamoto Days can be split cleanly into two parts. The first is, oddly enough, not really about our main characters. Rather it is a reintroduction to the extended cast. On one hand, we have The Order—the assassins whose job it is to keep the other assassins in order. Through their little car ride, we learn a bit about their various personalities—and in the case of those we've not spent much time with, a bit about what they can do.

On the other hand, we have our bad guys for the season, escaped serial killers Dump, Saw, Apart, and Minimalist. Like with The Order, we get a short showing of their personalities and powers—solidifying the threat Sakamoto and friends face.

The back half of the episode is spent on Saw's attempts to kill Shin and Lu. Through the fight and Shin's mind-reading powers, we see the big difference between these serial killers and the assassins they've faced before. The serial killers are killing for fun—they aren't making any calculated plans; there's nothing on their minds but the general need to kill. This means Shin is at a distinct disadvantage.

So, of course, this give Shin the perfect opportunity to get a new psychic power—one that seemingly allows him to think like the people he's close to. In this case, it's Sakamoto he emulates which gives Shin Sakamoto's foresight while fighting. It's a cool evolution of his powers—and given how much time he's spent in Sakamoto's head over the first season, it actually makes a lot of sense.

Unfortunately, the fight ends mid-way—and at a moment where I suspect Saw starts his counterattack. However, given the fact that bottle of alcohol disinfectant ended up right next to Lu, I have a feeling that Drunken Master Lu is also about to make another appearance.

All in all, this is far from the best episode of Sakamoto Days, but it at least gets all the monotonous stuff out of the way so that we can get right into the action from now on.

The serial killers are coming! The serial killers are coming! Sakamoto Days has always done a good job of establishing the hierarchy of power amongst all of the other assassins within the series. Now we're getting introduced to straight up serial killers and I like how the show makes it very clear that even though one group of people does it for a job and another group does it for pleasure, killing is still killing at the end of the day. The threat level is still very high so we have to make sure that everybody is up to speed. I like the fact that this episode doesn't really hold our hands but that's also because the show is really just picking up from where the last episode left off. The scale of the show is getting bigger and thus we need to make sure that we are properly prepared for it.

We see this with Sakamoto training a lot more. We get glimpses into other characters that probably are far stronger than him already and, in the second half, compare them to characters like Shin and Lu, who are definitely at the bottom of the show's power scaling. That's probably why the end of this episode is about them taking those first steps to catch up to everybody. Shin gets his psychic Super Saiyan transformation and I'm sure Lu will have her moment to shine later too. Hopefully, the show doesn't end up overcorrecting and closing the gap too soon. It makes sense, after all, why Sakamoto and other characters would be so many leagues stronger. This is something that often happens when series try to transition from an action comedy to a battle action format—because suddenly we have to sort of ground a lot of the goofier antics that happened before. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be the case just yet because the show is still keeping its relatively goofy charm, it's just raising the stakes this time.

I will say a bit mixed on the performances of the Sakamoto Days dub. I'm the one hand, I think it's impressive that they are utilizing actors that typically don't do anime. The performances are mostly solid across-the-board. It just feels a bit rough occasionally when we get to some characters like Shin and Lu, who occasionally will have a bit of an awkward line that I would have liked to hear retaken. Still, if their work on this show ends up giving them more involvement in anime dub production moving forward, then we could potentially see a lot more varied performances in the future. For now this feels like a reasonable transition and I'm curious to see the extent of some of these new abilities that are on display.

Sakamoto Days is back after a three month break and it kicks off pretty much exactly where it left off. I found the first cour of the show to be a decent, if not exactly exceptional adaptation of the manga, and for better or worse, that seems to still be holding true for this one. Anyone who was hoping that the break would result in some kind of massive uptick in production quality is likely to be let down, and given how this half is going to be a lot more action intensive, I'm a bit more afraid of how well the animation will keep up. On the positive side, we do at least get a much better OP than the first one, and the visual presentation of it feels a lot more in line with the visual style of the manga, so I'm willing to take small victories where I can get them.

As for the episode itself, it basically drops us right back into the fray with the group of serial killers currently after Sakamoto. We're also reintroduced to each of their gimmicks, but since we got a good enough handle on that in the last episode I don't feel like it was particularly necessary. One important piece of new information that we get though, is that these guys are also on the radar of The Order, and they're planning on dealing with them personally. The Order is more than willing to resort to lethal methods to deal with these killers but since they're the only clue Sakamoto has to Slur, he'd rather keep them alive—and this seems like it could be setting up a big three-way conflict as we get deeper into the season.

While all this is going on, Shin and Lu are out shopping as they try to figure out how to avoid slowing Sakamoto down, but end up having the misfortune to run into one of the serial killers, Saw. He's frankly not all that interesting aside from his gimmick of wanting to give people exciting deaths so they'll be less boring to him, but it's always a delight to hear David Vincent in a villain role—and he's pretty entertaining here. Fighting Saw gives Shin and Lu the opportunity to learn how they stack up against the rest of the underworld—and while this does mostly veer into discussing power levels, it does at least result in a good punchline. Since he's gotten rusty over the years, Sakamoto apparently only registers A.S.A.B-rank level threat as opposed to the members of The Order who are all considered to be ranked S—even with Sakamoto still otherwise being portrayed as an unstoppable machine of violence. That sounds pretty par the course for shonen power scaling though, so the real surprise comes upon discovering that Lu is somehow ranked as a C, while poor Shin is ranked just above the bottom in D. He obviously doesn't take this very well, especially since Lu's only really threatening while taking a drink—and seeing Shin contemplating this while being comforted by a bunch of puppies is the funniest thing to come out of the episode.

As for the fight itself…it's mostly just okay. Much like with the show's first half, the action here looks perfectly serviceable and rarely ever feels so stiff as to be actively distracting, but there's not a ton of movement either, and anyone paying enough attention can probably tell where the team is cutting corners with speed lines and impact frames. Again, it's not very ideal, but it's functional enough that bringing up the shortcomings would feel like beating a dead horse, so I'm gonna keep trying to refrain from doing so unless something looks particularly rough. Aside from that, there isn't really much else to bring up about the episode since it feels like more of a direct continuation than a mid-season opener—and we're gonna have to wait till next week to see how the fight here actually ends. Despite the adaptation's imperfections, it's nice to have Sakamoto Days back. And so long as it can keep holding itself together, it should keep making for a good time—even if it's not always a great one.