The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Reincarnated as a Sword Season 2

Some isekai protagonists are reincarnated as powerful warriors or skilled wizards, but our protagonist was reborn as a sentient sword! He's taken up by Fran, a desperate girl fleeing evil-doers intent on selling her into slavery. With her new weapon's help and guidance, she strikes down her captors and secures her freedom. Together, the unconventional master-student duo embarks on an epic journey to liberate those in need and exact justice on the cruel of heart.

Reincarnated as a Sword Season 2 is based on the light novel series by Yuu Tanaka. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Wednesdays.

Judging by the hilariously edgy visuals and music of Reincarnated as a Sword's very welcome second-season opening sequence, one might expect the show to be some kind of grimdark fantasy in the Berserk or Attack on Titan mold. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. One part Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill, one part Reincarnated as a Vending Machine, and one part Nekopara (without the objectification), it's a mostly cute and cozy show where Fran, an adorable cat girl, wanders the world, assisted by her unnamed (she calls him “sensei”) sentient sword companion.

Fran is most definitely the main reason to watch the show. Her facial expressions and squeaky voice scream “moe” in every scene, though she's no slouch in the action department either. In this episode, Fran and her sword sensei try to reach a Laputa-like floating island. Unlike the Ghibli version, this one's full of skeleton monsters, unfortunately. As luck would have it, after their first failed attempt to reach the island, they crash-land in a barn full of suspicious-looking pink-and-purple-spotted flowers growing in the dark, tended by a necromancer.

Usually in fantasy, necromancers are bad news, but this chap, Jean, is a surprisingly decent sort. Not only can he summon massive friendly flying skeleton wyvern thingies, but he's good in a fight too. He's also skilled at terrible dad jokes, so that's a bonus, sort of. I love his meek little skeleton minion who has a tiny flower growing from one of the cracks in his skull.

Reincarnated as a Sword may be just another isekai power fantasy, but it has enough unique flourishes to make it worthwhile. For one, the sword guy, although powerful, isn't really the focus. Yes, there are JRPG-like status screens aplenty, plus talks of levels and skills and classes, but I'll forgive that kind of narrative laziness when Fran, and her big doggy companion who keeps running out of MP and slinking into her shadow to recover, are both so completely adorable.

The battle sequences are a cut above the usual isekai slop too, with dynamic angles and decent animation. It's always an interesting show to look at. I'm very glad Fran and her sensei are back on our screens, and I'm looking forward to whatever nonsense they get up to next.

First off, the Daicon IV reference is still as great as I remember. Once again: a catgirl like Fran flying on top of a giant sword like Sensei, as cliched as it is, will not be cool, especially when it's done so right. But you know what also holds up really, really well, though, perhaps even better than I remember? That OP. FZMZ delivered exactly the right type of high-fantasy metal cheese needed for this type of anime. It is (and I mean this as a compliment) a symphonic shlockfest of the highest order filled with cartoonishly evil riffs, hyperbolically operatic vocals, and lyrical odes to dreams, distances, dimensions, butterflies, and whatever else every nerdy metal act has waxed poetic about a thousand times over by now. Also, excuse me, is that a reference to Apocalypse Now, I see? Very nice. It's an obvious choice, something that has been done many times before, but so are references to Daicon IV. The point is that I still respect this anime's ability to see an opportunity and run with it. Especially when it does it with such blink-and-you-miss-it subtlety.

So here I am, watching the first episode of Reincarnated as a Sword's second season once again. This time I am home alone in front of my computer screen instead of watching it on a giant screen with a massive audience huddled inside a tight pocket of the Javits Center. The environment changes, the video and audio quality changes, but my opinions about it have not. Just about everything I said at the first episode's Anime NYC premiere still holds true. The action sequences are fun to watch even if the animation is a bit rough around the edges; new characters and situations come through naturally, and Fran and Sensei's dynamic is wonderfully reintroduced through lighthearted buddy comedy. There's still that slave plotline that bookends the episode, plus the edgy, metallic nature of the OP to keep in mind, so I'm going to assume the action and humor are here to pack in as many yuks as possible before the anime wanders into darker territory. All in all, it's the same fun episode I saw a month ago. I could probably copy and paste 90% of my Anime NYC article here, clap my hands together, and be done.

I won't. Here's one thing I noticed back then that I didn't write about, that I should have written about, especially now that a second viewing has made it clearer. The sequencing and pacing. There is a lot going on in this episode, and the narrative can be thought of in five different segments: Fran and Sensei starting their new adventure by riding Jet and eating curry, flying to the floating island and then getting knocked down by a floating skeleton, being introduced to Bertrand and Jean, flying back up again and successfully landing onto the floating island once more to explore a dungeon, and of course the slave plotline that bookends it all. If the anime wanted to be sluggish, it had enough to drag its events out for two episodes. If the anime wanted to rush through things, it could have skimmed through its opening moments just the same, maybe even cut a few bits out. It does none of that. The episode moves from one event to another without feeling long, or like it's throwing too much exposition and action at you at once. The action sequences are quick and to the point, while the slower scenes introducing Jean and his background (which take up perhaps a good third of this episode) feel substantial and expository enough to not feel like a dragged-out dialogue dump. These are small things, but they go a long way with me.

I like this show so far, although as I've said before, I'm not jumping up and down for it. It didn't even crack my list of most anticipated anime of the fall season. I need to call a spade a spade here: Reincarnated as a Sword is another flavor of power fantasy where catgirl Kirito teams up with a giant sword to become bigger and stronger. That's all it is. It's an isekai world you've seen before, playing by more or less the same rules, filled with plenty of archetypes you will see in fantasy and isekai again, and again, and again, and again. You don't need to read Mechademia to understand where this is going. It's exactly what you expect, and it delivers. For what will end up being leftover seasonal popcorn, that is all I can ever ask for.

Reincarnated as a Sword worked by simply being a much stronger, much more likable (re)incarnation of the modern isekai formula. Teacher and Fran were a cool pair with a strong rapport; they were strong but not overpowered, and the fights that facilitated regularly got extremely cool. The worldbuilding for the requisite game-flavored fantasy world could be rather thoughtful, with the one caveat that the show was still given to light-novel-tastic overindulgences of explaining RPG mechanics to the point that Fran herself regularly conked out during them. So it's easy to understand why my body seized up when, in this premiere of the second season, an incoming infodump prompted Fran to proudly declare that her recently raised adventurer rank meant she could totally handle these explanations now. Was her promotion last season really just a reason for the story to indulge even more exhausting explanations?

The scene immediately cuts to Fran passed out on the table. After all this time, it's fantastically funny as an anticlimax, and it also gives Teacher reason to give us, the audience, the Cliff's Notes version of the explanation. Truly, Reincarnated as a Sword has learned, and is showing a step up. Those four long years between seasons must have made a point on the production. In general, the anime seems more confident. It might be because it's been so long coming back, but this first episode has no problem rewinding the proceedings from the first season's cliffhanger tease to ease viewers back into the situation and expand upon the fight with the skeleton knight that sent Fran and Teacher down into the current storyline in the first place. I'll even take the slightly more detailed explanation of how Fran's surfing around on the telekinetically powered Teacher works, since seeing a catgirl sky-surf on a sword was like 50% of why I was in for this show anyway. I'd have half a mind to call the first season a Surf Dracula for taking so long to get to that had it not been plenty of fun on its own.

The fun is so pointedly back with Reincarnated as a Sword for this new season. There are layers and stages to the skeleton knight fight, and it's one of two dazzling aerial raves that this episode packs in. But set between those ascents to Brawlhalla is the meet-and-greet with the current questgiver, the necromancer Jean, and the aforementioned explanations of his whole deal. Some of this is wrapped in Reincarnated's customary more-thoughtful takes on fantasy standbys, so here necromancers are an important part of the undead ecosystem and not necessarily evil. Jean's actually pretty cool once past his more blustery tendencies. He has a propensity for naming all his summoned necromantic minions things like "Bernard" and "Andy," and he even shows how story explanations and the show's distinct flavor can be interwoven.

That is, phase one of getting up to the floating dungeon they need to conquer sees Jean summon his biggest, baddest, bone dragon (christened "Andy" natch) to fly himself, Teacher, and Fran up there. The fight is, again, dense with layers and steps, including deployments of cannons and whole hordes of skeleton warriors for the heroes to hack through. But it's propelled by the only temporarily summoned Andy needing to burn through all of himself to make it onto the sky-island. So the whole thing is wrapped in the drama of the characters passionately cheering on the name of this skeleton dragon they just met fifteen minutes ago, in the same tenor that a group of over-invested player characters in a tabletop RPG campaign would about the same sort of entity. By the end, as Jean is expending MP to peacefully send Andy off for his sacrifice, it imparts his character and the connection necromancers have with their familiars in this setting, and is both so absurdly earnest and earnestly absurd that I had to respect Reincarnated as a Sword for making it work. It feels true to the setting and communicates the tone of this world and how it works, which is so much better than just explaining it at length. Then Jean turns straight to the camera and makes a bone-headed pun. I think I love this guy.

Not that it's perfect right out of the gate. Studio C2C hasn't missed a beat, meaning the fights are as slick as ever, though the character models (that aren't CGI) can slip into more simplification than I'd like sometimes, and some effects look a bit cheap. And I'm not sure how well this framing flashback to the torturous origins of the apparent new villain currently known as "Nameless" is going to jibe with the rest of this. But Fran's dark backstory and the show's respectful treatment of it were a strong feature at the beginning of Reincarnated as a Sword. Put it on the "wait and see" pile for now, and for the rest of it, enjoy the ride. Be sure to pay respects to Andy upon arriving.