The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Tougen Anki: Nikko Kegon Falls Arc

Shiki and his classmates just got back from Tokyo, so now it's time to reevaluate their skills. Their goal is to work together to reach the summit of a snowy mountain while being hunted down by other Oni practitioners, but that might prove difficult when nobody can get along. Meanwhile, Mikado wants to follow through on his promise to try and initiate negotiations between the Momotarou and the Oni. Will they actually listen to him, though, especially when a new Kishin is about to make them move?

Tougen Anki: Nikko Kegon Falls Arc is based on the Tougen Anki: Legend of the Cursed Blood manga series by Yura Urushibara. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll and Netflix on Fridays.

The first season of Tougen Anki was a miserable slog. As a fan of Blue Exorcist, Chainsaw Man, and other action-adventure manga that is actually good, I was especially offended by Tougen Anki's central conceit, which was, “What if a story brazenly copied all of the most obvious plot beats and character tropes from a bunch of beloved shonen manga but was too fundamentally incompetent to produce a final product that didn't suck complete ass?” The fact that such a gormless, lazy manga got even one season of anime is the tell-tale sign of an industry desperate to fill time slots with content, regardless of quality. The existence of this second season, though, may actually qualify as a targeted crime of malicious harassment. My lawyers are working on the finer points as I write this, so don't be surprised if a class action lawsuit is on the horizon.

Until then, I suppose I can earn a few extra bucks by explaining how far out of your way you should go to avoid Tougen Anki's second season premiere at all costs. This episode, like so many before it, focuses on the deeply unfunny, laborious antics of Shiki and his fellow Momotarou-in-Training. These guys hunt Oni, you see, and this premiere sees the show padding out its runtime by having the gang run through yet another training exercise. This one involves climbing a mountain in the middle of a blizzard.

Now, you might be wondering if the show can make such a stock premise interesting by generating some laughs and thrills through its cast's banter and the use of everyone's powers, but I'm going to go ahead and just stop you right there. Tougen Anki's cast is one of its chief failures as a work of animated fiction, since every single human being with speaking lines in this show is nothing more than the most boring, low-effort iteration of some other character you've already seen done better in a dozen other shows. The show's character designs are so sauceless that it becomes genuinely hard to remember who any of these random teenagers are and why they matter, even when the episode constantly uses clunky exposition to remind you of their personalities and powers. I'm sorry, but I have to reserve enough room in my brain to remember the faces and names of my loved ones, so Tougen Anki is fighting an uphill battle if it wants me to give a damn about Main Character Guy, Guy With Glasses, Guy With Face Mask, Guy Who Is Scared A Lot, Guy With Zipper Arms, or Girl With Boobs. That last one wasn't me being flippantly misogynistic, I swear. Tougen Anki just cannot conceive of anything for its female characters to contribute to the story other than to stand around whilst possessing suspiciously disproportionate breasts.

Before any of the sakuga-freaks out there start getting antsy, no, this isn't the kind of show that you can enjoy on the merits of its action, either. The premiere honestly doesn't even show off the best that Tougen Anki has to offer, since we're just watching Shiki and Co. spar in the middle of a blizzard. It's not like the show has ever benefited from focusing on real stakes, though. Just like we see here, all of the powers on display are the most basic cool-bro anime-fight moves you can imagine, like shadow-clones and shield walls, except they're all really ugly-looking on account of being made of blood. As in season one, this new arc of Tougen Anki will likely appeal only to very young, impressionable children who have literally never been exposed to another, better anime before.

I love a premiere that is only remotely interesting in the opening and closing minutes. The problem with Tougen Anki throughout the previous two arcs is that it never really amounted to anything beyond one of the most basic shounen series that I have ever seen. This premiere doesn't do much to rectify that, but at least it feels like I'm being rewarded for sticking with the series for as long as I have. Having most of the episode be a training sequence for the main cast, mirroring the training sequence at the beginning of season one, is a good way to show how far some of these characters have come. Probably the biggest difference is with Jin, who went from being really impulsive and a liability to the team to arguably the leader of the group. He's making rational, informed decisions, is only fighting when necessary, and is trying to take everyone's unique quirks into consideration. I like that, and it honestly makes me wish that he was the main character of the show, so at least that's something.

However, the problem with the setup is that it also highlights how little a majority of the show's cast has changed since season one. Almost every member of the extended cast still feels very annoying, out of place, and poorly conceived. I'm not entertained by Kuina's whole shtick of being incredibly obsessive, Rokuro's whole thing of being a coward (even though he supposedly had this major character arc back in season one), and Ikari was just downright a pain in the butt here. Ikari's whole character personality is just being angry, but I don't remember him being THIS much of a liability to the point where he genuinely seemed fine with letting everybody else fail or get killed just for the sake of a fight. He is literally embodying the worst elements of a hothead, and I worry that his focus during this premiere implies that he is going to be a focus for the arc. It could be interesting to see a character grow out of that, but given how this show doesn't have the best track record of developing characters in unique or interesting ways, I'm not necessarily gonna hold my breath.

The only thing really interesting about this episode was Mikado trying to plead his case to the rest of the Momotarou. I like that he stuck to his word and was willing to put his job on the line to try to change something, even if the response to his pleas was pretty standard. I wanna see what he's going to do to actually make a difference, so at the very least, that's another minor thing I could potentially look forward to here. Overall, this premiere was just another episode of the show highlighting the minor improvements, but also the glaring issues I've had with it since the very beginning. Whether it can actually turn into something interesting this season is a tall order.