The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Keroro Gunsō ☆

Sergeant Keroro comes to conquer Earth, only to get captured and stuck living with the Hinata family!

Keroro Gunsō ☆ is based on the Sgt. Frog manga by Mine Yoshizaki. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

While I may be living a life that will almost certainly have me visit—and could potentially have me living in—Japan for a significant length of time, a thing I love about writing about Japanese media without ever having visited the country is that I can be surprised by a popular series that's apparently been running for twenty-plus years.

Sgt. Frog, depicted in this series with the Japanese name of Keroro Gunsō ☆, has more than three hundred manga chapters and about just as many anime episodes across seven-plus seasons. Aimed at young children, the franchise follows the Hinata family as they get entangled with anthropomorphic alien frogs trying to invade Earth, but they're mostly goofy, chill little guys who hang out and use their advanced tech to punch up Earth's cultural institutions. This episode in particular features the aliens building a miniature city and shrinking various characters so that they can experience being alone in the urban space—though that might have all been an excuse for Sgt. Keroro to better admire the Zaku II Gunpla figures he built earlier.

Graded on the curve of children's media, this opening episode of this new installment in the franchise is pretty good! It's packed with good-natured hijinks and cool moments featuring robots, mech suits, and other anime iconography that helped me fall in love with the medium as a kid. It even has a quiet moral about how cops kind of suck and how people should be cautious around them—a nice break from the casual copaganda I'm used to seeing in media geared toward young audiences.

My biggest critique, though, is that it's not entirely clear to me who Keroro Gunsō ☆ is for in 2026. While kids don't care about continuity as much as adult viewers, there's little onboarding for these characters and this story, and you're really expected to go with the flow. This episode also includes a gag referencing Mother Brain from the Metroid series that, while hilarious to a thirty-one-year-old nerd like me, would likely feel nonsensical to this anime's intended audience. The last time Mother Brain showed up as an active antagonist in a Metroid game was in 2004's Metroid: Zero Mission, which was a remake of the original 1986 game. Maybe this is a gag for the parents of the kids watching, but even then it feels like a stretch.

Regardless, Keroro Gunsō ☆ is a pretty fun show for young audiences, and I hope this leads to more young people getting into the medium .

Oh, okay! So Keroro Gunsō ☆'s premiere was doing an in medias res thing where they were showing off the scope, visuals, and vibes of this reboot, and then jumping back to where the story actually begins with this first episode. Cool! That opening probably worked better for people more familiar with this long-running franchise than I was, which is why we try to run these preview guides for two episodes when we can. Now that I've been sufficiently onboarded to Keroro Gunsō ☆'s whole deal, I see the vision and think it's a really solid piece of children's/all-ages media!

Showcasing how Sgt. Keroro came to be stranded on Earth and live with the Hinata family, this episode is filled with the kinds of introductions and backgrounds I would have appreciated in the premiere as a first-time viewer. Fuyuki being a big-ol occult nerd makes sense, and his enthusiasm for Keroro's shenanigans both pushes the plot forward and creates fun tension with his older sister, Natsumi, who's largely the straight man in this episode. It's also fun to see their mom, Aki, just casually awesome, and it's always good to see media that makes moms multifaceted.

The ritual Sgt. Keroro steals the show, though, and he is a super fun kid's show version of a dirtbag. Abandoned on Earth, which he was supposed to invade, by his militaristic race of frog aliens, he is both motivated to suck up to the Hinata family to live comfortably in their good graces and betray them whenever he sees a chance to connect with his nation's military. The gag at the end of this first episode, where he both loves the obviously haunted spare room the Hinata's stick him in and then immediately transforms it into what a kid would think an awesome bachelor pad looks like, really stands out to me.

I acknowledge that I'm maybe being a little generous to Keroro Gunsō ☆, but have you seen the state of kids' media lately? It's bleak out there, and any show a young child and their parents can reasonably enjoy without boring either party to tears is worthy of praise! This show is probably for an incredibly narrow slice of people in the US, but if you want to get your kids into anime, I think that Keroro Gunsō ☆ is a great place to start!

It's wild that I am watching a brand new episode of Sgt. Frog. Full disclosure: my exposure to this very long-running franchise is quite limited. I checked out the manga some time ago, when I was a kid over twenty years ago (and don't you dare try to make me sound old as hell; I know, already). I also caught a stray episode here and there over the years, but I've never sat down to properly watch a run of the series, so my familiarity with its story and characters mostly boils down to recognizing the different Sgt. Frog Variants that I'm sure all have names and backstories. Still, with the modern world in a near-constant state of chaotic freefall, it is somehow comforting to put on an episode of Sgt. Frog in 2026 and find that nothing at all has changed.

Okay, well, a few things are different. The character designs have been spruced up a little, and the animation is all shiny and high-definition now (though it might be missing a certain grit that cartoons had back in the good ol' days). At the end of the day, though, this is Sgt. Frog, so anyone even marginally aware of this franchise ought to expect wacky antics, failed world-domination plots, and plenty of references to Gundam and Gunpla. I will say that, having only really discovered the joy of building model kits long after my first exposure to the little green guy and his hobbies, I feel a newfound kinship with ol' Kerokero. At first, I wondered what the hell the deal was with this cockamamie scheme to shrink the Hinata siblings down to the size of a model city, but as soon as the Gunpla appeared, I understood. It is the only rational choice if you have the alien technology to shrink people to 1/144 scale.

Some of you might be wondering if now, several hundred episodes and two decades into its run, is a good time to jump onto the Sgt. Frog bandwagon. On the one hand, this show is absolutely a continuation of the original, with all the backstory and lore in tow, and I honestly started to check out once the episode became positively stuffed with humans and frogs I only vaguely recognized as separate from our core trio. That said, let's be real and admit this show is, first and foremost, silly entertainment meant for middle-schoolers, so nothing is so complicated or obtuse that anyone couldn't figure it out as they go along. I don't plan on keeping tabs on the next three-hundred episodes of Sgt. Frog myself, but it is comforting to know that, should I ever want a straight shot of pure mid-2000s nostalgia injected into my eyeballs, a brand new batch of Keroro Kontent is only a click away.

Sgt. Frog is the kind of show I always find hard to write a second-episode preview for, because it's designed to be a consistent, predictable experience. We're talking about a series with hundreds of episodes, at this point, with a plot that can never really advance because it would mean the end of the wacky frog shenanigans we're all here for. So, now that the novelty of seeing a shiny new version of Sgt. Frog in 2026 has worn off, what else can we do but ask and answer one simple question: Is the episode fun?

Yeah, I think it's a pretty good time. I always appreciate a good fourth-wall break that goes beyond the usual Deadpool shenanigans of, “Wow, tropes and clichés exist!” This week, the episode shows the first time the Fuyuki siblings encounter the Sgt, complete with an ominous nightmare of Hinata's that foreshadows Earth's imminent invasion by a bunch of tiny mascots. The narrator immediately pauses to reassure us that, no, the broadcast schedule didn't just decide to screw with the episode order or anything, and we're sticking all this exposition for newbies at the beginning of Episode 2. Moreover, a quick trip over to the first episode of the original run of Sgt. Frog makes it clear that this is a complete remake of that initial alien encounter, right down to the kids finding their alien invader hiding behind a peeling panel of fake wallpaper.

So, I guess I have to take everything I said in that preamble back, because we're not dealing with the endlessly escalating misadventures of a sitcom ensemble decades in the making already in progress, and this new Sgt. Frog series really is a complete reboot. At least, I think it is? I don't know for sure, honestly, but I'll leave any theorizing about alternate dimensions or time loops to the hardcore fans in the comments section. All I know is that I appreciated this episode even more than the first episode of the season because, well, it's basically the very beginning of the story, just like fans got to experience back in 2004. Except the kids have smartphones now, naturally.

The gags were plentiful and plenty goofy, and they benefited from the modern sheen of the new, high-definition animation. Fuyuki and Natsumi make a likable sibling pair of leads, though the episode's real revelation for me was their smokeshow of a mother. You're telling me that she's a badass motorcycle enthusiast with a cute pair of glasses and she works as a professional editor? Sgt. Frog is officially speaking my language, and it is a sophisticated dialect that the immature, inexperienced boy I was in '04 could never have parsed.

Were you hoping that this was an entirely new Sgt. Frog reboot that would explain the series from the beginning and be newbie-friendly? Then I have some bad news for you – it's not. Or at least, it doesn't start at the beginning of the story; I'm not convinced that things won't backtrack in episode two. Either way, this premiere assumes familiarity with the characters and the setup, and while it's easy enough to follow, it also throws a lot at you fairly quickly.

As someone who somehow missed the first series and the manga, I found this pretty middle-of-the-road. The basic idea – vaguely humanoid frogs have invaded Earth from outer space and befriended kids – comes through decently. We're not sure why these frogs are so terrible at invasion, but honestly, if a giant talking frog wants to clean my house and do my laundry, I'm not going to object. Each frog has its own dedicated color, speech tic, and human pal(s). In this episode, they spend most of their time fighting off the military police, led by supercomputer Mother Blackstars, who took over after all the amphibian cops resigned.

I can see how, if you were more familiar with the characters, this could be very, very funny. It's the sort of children's media that relies on absurdity and loud exclamations for humor, and both are abundant in this episode. Admittedly, just the concept of a ninja frog is funny to me, but it was Giroro, the gun-forward tsundere (I assume) burgundy-colored frog who won me over. He seems like he could actually take over the planet if he could stop getting worked up over things or crushing on (human) Natsumi. The action is fast-paced and gleeful, reveling in its goofy plot developments and assorted cast of insane frogs and kids. It's so fun that it's hard not to get pulled in, even as you try to figure out why Koyuki is a magical girl and why Keroro thinks cleaning is a great invasion strategy.

It certainly helps that it looks good. The simple character designs contrast nicely with more complex visual elements, like Keroro's beloved gunpla and the immaculate details of the town model he unveils. Lines are clean and clear, and colors are bright but not loud, making this a picture-perfect children's cartoon; if it had an English dub, I'd be very quick to recommend it for younger viewers; as-is, if you have a little subtitle reader, I'd still give it a whirl with them. Despite not fully understanding what's going on, this is a lot of fun – a madcap, zany take on an alien invasion.

I do appreciate a good metafictional joke, and this episode has that. You see, episode one was either meant to be confusing (for newbies) or nostalgic (for franchise fans). This episode goes back to the beginning, and it does so by asking whether the show actually aired out of order. It tickled my funny bone, and while I'm still not fully sold on the story, I really like that it took the time to consider both audiences and then poked fun at itself for it. That is how you do self-referential humor!

And even without much background in all things Keroro, I'm not sure we needed to go back to the beginning of the story. It is nice to know how he ended up living with the Hinata family and a bit more about them (though I could've done without the jokes about how much their mother hates animals), but it's also not nearly as madcap insane as just being thrown into the action. That's not a complaint, to be clear – the very idea of froggy aliens planning to invade Earth only to have their vanguard unceremoniously discovered and tied up by humans is still pretty great, and that the kids' first thought upon learning that he's stuck isn't “lock him up” but rather, “well, I guess he's our pet now” sums up why the amphibian invasion didn't work in the first place.

The absurdity remains the best part of this show. I'm not just talking about the frog invader, but the little details like “the Hinata family has a murder basement haunted by the ghost of an unjustly executed girl from the Edo period.” It's got enough detail to almost feel like worldbuilding while still giving the impression of being cobbled together from a bunch of tropes into one big joke, and it works. Comedies like this really need to lean into their own absurdity, and Keroro Gunsō ☆ understands that. As we know from the first episode, that's only going to keep escalating until it reaches perfectly ridiculous heights, as it should.

If episode one confused you, don't write this off until you give episode two a chance. Going back to the beginning might make it easier to sell to viewers looking for a goofy Saturday morning experience. Break out the sugary cereal and settle in, because this is going to be a fun ride.