The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Farmagia

The underworld of Felicidad—In this place, human-like people lived in harmony with monsters. Ten is a 'Farmagia,' who nurtures monsters from seeds, harvests them, and uses them in battle. He has been cultivating the strongest monster seeds to become one of the Oración Seis, rulers of the continents. Then, one day, the sudden death of the 'Magus Diluculum' changed the world drastically. In the brief moment of people's sorrow, Glaza, one of the Oración Seis who took control of Felicidad as the new Magus, begins his reign. To protect the ones he loves and to become the strongest Farmagia, Ten, along with his fellow Farmagia and monsters, rises up against the Oración Seis.

Farmagia is based on a video game by Marvelous. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

If you've seen one Hiro Mashima work, you've seen them all. I mean literally seeing; I can't speak for the plot, because I've only read a chunk of Fairy Tail and neural pruning has seen fit to eliminate most of it from my memory. If I wanted to be nice, I would call his design work “consistent”; however, I do not feel nice so instead I will call it “samey.” I don't know how much Mashima had to do with the story of Farmagia, but it all feels quite interchangeable with his other art, and none of it is very interesting to look at.

But more importantly: I want to dropkick Ten into the sun. He is the archetypical shonen protagonist: loud, brash, and full of unearned confidence. He makes noisy declarations about his future ambitions, even though he's lagging behind his peers in ways that suggest his off-beat ways will pay off someday. Here, he's growing his “buddy monster” out of wild seeds, and he's the only Farmagia who doesn't have one yet. He has a comical weakness: a fear of dogs. Of course, by the end of the episode, his monsters grow up and save the day. There's no texture to his character to set him apart from every other brash hothead who has cursed my vision and he is absolutely intolerable.

I'd never actually heard of Farmagia before this despite it apparently being extremely popular in Japan. Maybe because I only play cool games for adults like Persona, or maybe it's because I'm so behind on game releases I just finished Night in the Woods. Based on the anime, I can make guesses about the gameplay loop of raising monsters and using them to fight. Unfortunately, like many action RPGs, the story is quite barebones with archetypical characters. I don't think this means Farmagia is a bad game, though I'm not champing at the bit to play it; games and linear, non-interactive narratives have different demands—and great games often make terrible anime.

But man, am I tired of Mashima.

What pains me about Farmagia is that there's actually some interesting stuff going on here. We have a world ruled by a Demon King (translated as “Magus” for some reason) where people raise plant-based monsters at farms and use them for vital infrastructure. Then, we have a story where the “Magus” dies (read: is assassinated) and a new oppressive ruler takes up the reins. From there, we have tons of intrigue, a massive socio-political change, a public genocide, and the spark of rebellion against the new order. It's a fantastic setting for a fantasy tale—equal parts creative and familiar.

But there's just one problem, and it makes me completely uninterested in continuing to watch this anime: the characters. Our main hero, Ten, is the kind of protagonist I can't stand. He's dumber than a box of rocks and obsessed with becoming stronger while doing none of the hard work to do so. He just expects to be strong one day, completely ignoring any and all conventional wisdom and following his gut instead. And, of course, because he is the protagonist, it all magically works out for him because his feelings are so righteous—or because he cries at the right moment. Thanks. I hate it.

It doesn't help that the rest of the characters are equally one-note. We have the tomboy (who, of course, likes the main character despite his utter ineptitude), the serious guy (who probably should have been the main character), and the shy girl (whose sole personality quirk is that she can't stop putting random weeds in her mouth). Sure, none of them are as bad as Ten, but they're nothing to build a series around, either.

However, despite all my complaints, I want to be clear: This is not an incompetently made anime. It has decent world-building and the animation looks fine. It's just one that's not for me.

I have become wary of any anime title with the word “Farm” in it, but the opening minutes of Farmagia were honestly pretty refreshing. The world was colorful and lively enough to entertain despite being made of the stock standard fantasy monsters and whatnot. The atmosphere was generally pleasant, and the characters possessed an infectious enthusiasm and chemistry that made me laugh at their stupid antics. It instantly reminded me of the kind of unambitious but well-executed escapist stories that you find in some of the more niche JRPG franchises that focus on things like gardening, monster raising, and crafting. I've been diving headfirst into the Atelier games recently, so I was fully on board with this vibe.

As it turns out, Farmagia is itself one of those niche farming JRPGS on the Switch, and it just makes me glad that these video game adaptations are so much more consistently capable of making decent experiences out of formulaic genre exercises compared to so much of the competition. We've got a basic sense of comic timing for the wacky shenanigans, we've got some solid-enough animation and editing to keep the antics moving forward at a good pace, and Ten's gang of idiots make enough ridiculous faces that it becomes difficult not to root for them in their quest to tame the land and survive the oncoming war. There's even a dash of emotion to appreciate, like when Ten desperately tries to protect his little corn-wolf-monster things.

The show is far from perfect, with its aggressively loud comedy antics and occasionally janky-looking CG monsters. Still, by the end of this premiere, I laughed out loud a couple of times, and I was never once driven by boredom to check Bluesky for the fiftieth time or find some random chores around the house to do. I even put the Farmagia game on my eShop wishlist, though I'll probably wait for it to be on sale before I commit to the purchase. That's a good way to think about the show, too. It may not be the title you save up to buy for full price on day one, but it will almost certainly be a fun way to spend a rainy weekend stuck inside once you've cleared some of the more pressing entries from your backlog.

Oh, look who's back? The Oración Seis! If that name sounds familiar, that's because you've heard it in Fairy Tail and its sequel, 100 Years' Quest. But also in Rave Master. And Edens Zero. If it's a major series that Hiro Mashima has worked on, it's a safe bet that the Oración Seis will pop up, generally as the villains. True, they don't start out that way in Farmagia, but by the end of the episode, Glaza has corrupted them, so we're back on familiar ground. And that's not the only way that Farmagia's premiere may seem familiar: Mashima's usual cast of characters is also present, just with different names – Lucy is Arche, Natsu is Ten, Erza is Nares, and Gray is Leii, just to name a few. Is it nice to see Laki's character design given the supporting heroine treatment in Chica? Sure, but that doesn't do much to dull the nagging feeling that we've seen this at least twice before, if not four times.

Still, if Fairy Tail-style shōnen fantasy is something you enjoy, Farmagia is likely to scratch the itch, and this isn't a terrible first episode. The world is at least a little interesting: it's set in a place called the Underworld, where people farm monsters to help them cast magic and do other basic tasks. Everyone appears to have their own partnered monsters, which sets Ten aside; he's holding out for “the strongest” monster before he partners up, which his pseudo-siblings (they were all raised in the same orphanage) don't think is a terrific plan, especially since he wants to one day join the Oración Seis. But it is the potential foil to madman Glaza's psychotic plans to purge the land of the “weak,” something he doesn't have a set definition for but is determined (and happy) to use as an excuse to wage war on pretty much everyone. Ten and Glaza value strength, but arguably in different ways, with Ten set to take on the protection angle while Glaza is bent on annihilation.

Again, this is nothing new, but generally, this sort of story works to be engaging, and I think this episode succeeds, at least a little. Some of that is the way we don't know what happened to the fifth member of the sibling band, Emero, who may be our Jellal stand-in; clearly, Chica has a lot of unresolved feelings where he's concerned, and I'm a little afraid he's the masked soldier in Glaza's army. Ten accidentally hatching wolf monsters when he's terrified of dogs may not be particularly funny, but it does set him up to have to face his fears if he wants to fulfill his goals, and hey, kudos for using a term from 1977 (lookie-loo) for the name of a cyclopean fairy. I don't love the semi-awkward CG monsters or the recycled character designs, but there's still enough that's interesting in a comfort-food kind of way that I think has potential. If you like what Mashima's offered before, it's worth at least an episode.