The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Vertex Force

---

Akira lives a peaceful life with his older sister Haruka and his mother, who runs a cafe. The family, however, harbors a secret — Haruka has inherited a power from her father called "Engine," and she hides that power from others. Akira, on the other hand, has not inherited his father's power, and he has an inferiority complex about it. Amidst this, strange events begin to occur around the world.

Vertex Force is an original anime series by director Kazuhiro Takamura and studio Shogakukan Music & Digital Entertainment. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

---

Lucas DeRuyter
Episode 1 Rating:

Hey, so I get anime is gonna anime and all that, but can we take a second to acknowledge how weird it is that Vertex Force introduces a sixteen-year-old girl as a main character and then immediately has an extended shot of her crotch on screen? While I do love how anime as a medium is able to more easily grapple with sexual material and themes as animation provides an extra layer of abstraction, this is extra not cool—and scenes like this are why anime as a medium still can't shake the skeezy reputation that defined it in the US for much of the 90s and 2000s. Furthermore, this creepshot in Vertex Force is especially weird, since I think the show is otherwise geared toward tweens and early teenagers, making this episode feel tonally inconsistent.

Set in a world where an alien invader temporarily shuts down the planet's power grid, the story follows siblings Akira and Haruka Tōdō. The children of their more benevolent alien father, they possess the mysterious “Engine” ability. The older Haruka has a greater mastery of this power than Akira and can manifest a hovering robot, but when a creepy giant robot baby attacks them, Akira awakens his power and creates metal gauntlets that let him defeat the surprise foe.

I should probably withhold judgment until we have a better sense of Vertex Force's powerset and characters, but this opening episode didn't leave a great impression. Right now, Engine powers seem indistinguishable from how Stands work in part three of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which isn't great since shonen action writing has come a long way in the thirty-plus years since the introduction of “psychic ghosts that wail on people” as a concept. Also, Akira is pretty boring as a protagonist and is defined mostly by his inability to use his powers for much of this episode, while Haruka is kind of whiny and annoying when the show isn't sexualizing her.

I'm a little curious to see what's going on with that psychic alien lady whose design looks like an exact middle ground between Tatsumaki and Fubuki from One-Punch Man, but I think that's more because she's a pretty, weird lady than because of anything the show sets up narratively. While this sucks to say about one of the few original anime we get in a season, unless things shake up soon, I think Vertex Force is set to be pretty forgettable.

Episode 2 Rating:

Why does the woman whose costuming as a child is offensive to indigenous Americans crush her gun after summoning her robot stand? I get that, to us as an audience, this suggests her magic power is stronger than a gun, but she can summon her robot stand at any time and presumably brought that gun with her for a reason. Sorry, I know this is a weird point to fixate on at the top of this review, but the second episode of Vertex Force gave me so little to go on that I'm kind of grasping at anything that stuck out to me.

Oh, I guess the main character, Akira, fully develops his magic power this episode, which lets him transform into a robot person rather than summon a robot stand. Why this power is super special or in any way more useful in battle than any other character's abilities has so far gone unexplained, but based on the ending credits, Vertex Force is about to turn into a soft harem show, so this is probably a big deal for one reason or another.

The action and visuals in Vertex Force still don't look great as of episode two, with a couple of issues that annoy me specifically cropping up. The micro-aggression character I mentioned before, Eleanor, is characterized as being super tough and working out a lot, but her arms are as rail-thin as the other characters', and she has no distinguishable physique to speak of. The lack of impact in fight scenes, because they're rendered in CG animation, also makes this anime feel like nothing but plastic figures smashing into each other.

Actually, it's worse than that because at least when you're a kid playing with action figures, you can invent cool powers for the different characters! The various robot stands are distinguished only by one having a gun, one having swords, and one having a giant hammer, which doesn't meaningfully vary the combat visually or add any strategy.

I'm confident now saying that Vertex Force is a miss, which is a shame with how few original anime we get every season. As of this second episode, it feels like a half-baked effort to sell a new line of figures to nerdy adults with disposable income, but I doubt that element will be very successful given the quality of this anime.

---

Rebecca Silverman
Episode 1 Rating:

What's the worst part about Vertex Force? Is it the crotch-forward introduction of sixteen-year-old Haruka? The CG that can't quite handle faces? The clumsy lore-dumping? Those are all bad, sure, but for my money, the absolute worst thing here is the subtitles. Behold two examples of Crunchyroll having some serious collision issues at two different points in the episode. The latter is annoying, but for a brief moment you can read that the word underneath is the translation of what's written on Mom's apron. The former? Just a mess. They switched software for this?

Of course, there are probably worse shows where they could have had this issue. Vertex Force has some interesting ideas, but it's sadly lacking in execution and, dare I say, forethought. Pardon me if I sound old and cranky, but I didn't have indoor plumbing until I was six years old. I lived in the country, so we lost power all the time. And you know what? I did just fine. While I can understand that Haruka may feel like a smartphone is necessary for life and that it's inconvenient for planes not to fly, my dad was navigating to the mainland without GPS for most of his life and part of mine. (But we will not speak of the Kazoo in the Fog Incident.) Life goes on, even with the event called “Power Down.”

That, as I said, may just be me being cranky, but it really feels like the writing is straining to make the rest of its plot somewhat credible. I'm not sure that it was strictly necessary, however – Akira and Haruka's dad could have come from a different planet that suffered a catastrophe without it. EDVA, whether the living bobble-head robot or the white-haired woman we see a few times, would have been just as bad, and Haruka could have inherited her dad's Engine powers all the same. It smacks of making the worldbuilding more complex than it needs to be, and that's really too bad. I like the idea of Engine (always treated like a proper noun without an article before it), a sort of mecha marionette that hovers above Haruka and moves as she does. It's a neat take on the formula, and when Akira acquires the version that's more attached to him, it broadens the technology in an interesting way. The living robot is also pretty great in a horrifying way; it bleeds and drools but appears to be composed of mechanical parts. There are some genuinely good ideas here.

Unfortunately, even without the subtitle issues, the episode squanders these things. The entire middle section is composed of info dumps as the kids unironically draw a chart of what their mom told them about their dad, and there's a whole subplot with a goat that doesn't really make sense. I could see this maybe surprising me in episode two, but right now it feels like an anime designed to sell toys to a demographic that may be into rather different toys. Seriously, episode two needs to calm down about Haruka's groin.

Episode 2 Rating:

Credit where it's due: Crunchyroll's subtitles are legible this episode and, apart from a bit of a recap, the episode is utterly devoid of Haruka's underage crotch. Congrats, Vertex Force. You cleared the absolute lowest bar I had for you.

Mind you, I didn't have “Swiss stereotypes” and “somewhat inappropriate First Nations imagery” on my list of things I didn't explicitly want to see, so this still isn't doing a great job. This week, two of the remaining three girls from the theme songs show up: Lala from Switzerland and Eleanor from the US. Lala is adept at fixing clocks, like all Swiss people, and Eleanor is from an unspecified First Nation; she and her mother (in a flashback) wear somewhat suspect clothing to reflect that. We know from the opening that the third girl has a pet…mustelid of some stripe, which, based on the other two, I assume is rampant in Hokkaido. (The animals themselves, not keeping them as pets, to be clear.) All this goes to show that Vertex Force is both trying to be diverse in its characters and doing the absolute minimum to show it.

The plot itself does ease up on the lore-dumping. All we get is what's strictly necessary: EDVA wants to get her hands on ENIA, the mech Akira manifested at the end of the last episode. It seems significantly more powerful than the Engines, if only because it actually protects its user, unlike the girls' engines; Akira is fully inside ENIA, so the Battlenoid doesn't eat him. Presumably he's also warmer and has fewer bugs in his teeth once they all fly off at the end of the episode. Akira's ability to use ENIA is unusual; none of the kids' fathers could, and there was no guarantee Akira would ever be able to manifest it himself. But now that EDVA knows it's here, the stakes, according to Eleanor and Lala, have been raised considerably.

That's all well and good, and I still like the marionette aspects of the Engines, but the show does little to create a real sense of urgency. Akira and Haruka's mother just sort of blithely waves them off as they go out to fight the monster that destroyed their dad's home world, and no one has been significantly battered in their fights. Haruka's drive to look after her brother is good, but there isn't much that feels immediate about their stated need to fight off EDVA. It feels like the episode is going through the motions rather than actively telling a story.

Still, this is better than episode one. If you haven't run screaming from this, it may be worth waiting for the final cast member before deciding. But I'm done – it's just not particularly gripping, and I'm having a hard time caring what happens to these kids at all.

---

James Beckett
Episode 1 Rating:
I honestly couldn't place the name of SMDE Studios when I looked up the production credits for Vertex Force on the handy-dandy Anime News Network Encyclopedia, but then I realized that I have definitely seen their work before in works like The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim (an underrated flick) and The Duke of Death and His Maid. Now that I can add the first episode of Vertex Force to their filmography, I feel confident saying their 3D animation is pretty okay, bordering on good. In the case of Vertex Force, they're going for the effect of mimicking the look and feel of a traditionally animated TV show, so it's hard to say whether some of the stiff movement and odd shot composition is actually intentional, but either way, the end result is an action/science-fiction cartoon that looks just decent enough to get the job done for its target audience of pre-teens with money to burn on cool robot merchandise. Whether you take that as a recommendation or a warning likely depends on how much you're willing to put up with to watch robots do cool stuff for several minutes every week.

I suppose I should say that pre-teens with expendable income are the presumed target audience, since the show's camera has a noticeable tendency to get all up into the cracks of its female characters' crotches, which can only mean that the animators are doing their work with a decidedly different set of viewers in mind. I feel like most anime viewers have developed a natural autoimmune response that causes their brain to just skip over the prurient asides of otherwise innocuous cartoons, so I doubt this stuff will be a complete deal-breaker, but just go into Vertex Force knowing that it's going to be one of those anime that might be very hard to explain to your normie friends and family that sit down with you one week to check out those newfangled annie-mays that the kids are always going on about.

I'm a professional critic who has to put up with the pervy inserts no matter what, and I do happen to be a fan of big robots getting into fights, so I spent much of the meandering first half of Vertex Force's premiere anxiously waiting for Haruka and Akira to finish going through the school-day motions so we could all start playing Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Robots. About ten minutes in, I kind of got my wish, and Haruka summoned her cool “Engine” and saved her little bro from an exploding helicopter. We have to sit through a bunch more exposition and at least one more Steadicam crash straight into Haruka's large intestine before the nifty skeleton-robot-thing comes out of the ocean and demands to brawl with our heroine.

Thankfully, once the action does get going, Vertex Force ends up being perfectly acceptable junk-food entertainment. The choreography is clean, and the camera frames the all-too-brief bout well enough to make me confident the show might have a genuinely good setpiece or two up hiding up its sleeve. The jury's still out on whether the by-the-numbers story and distracting fanservice will make Vertex Force more trouble than it's worth, but it's at least worth sticking around for one more episode.

Episode 2 Rating:

The premiere of Vertex Force was decent enough for a middle-grade mashup of familiar anime tropes and Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Robots. That episode ended with a big tease of the new robo-punchy Engine powers Akira unlocked, meaning he can fight alongside his big sister and take on the alien menace threatening humanity. This week, the kids begin the episode by being held up at gunpoint by a nerdy glasses-girl and her friend, a mysterious military babe decked out in fatigues and a tank top. So far, so good. For me, I mean. Obviously, things could be going better for the siblings.

When two strangers bust out their own Engines and attack Akira and Haruka, we get our first taste of the mech-on-mech action Vertex Force has in store, and I'd say the results are promising. As before, the CG animation on display won't blow any minds, but it works well enough to make the battles feel kinetic and interesting. The Engine designs are pretty cool too; they remind me of how the Transformers looked in the most recent live-action movie, after they course-corrected from the metal monstrosities we saw in the Michael Bay run. The character animation in any scene that relies only on dialogue could use more TLC, but it is more a problem of shot composition and blocking being constrained by the limitations of traditional (and low-budget) 2D animation. Once we all learn that simple shot-reverse-shot exchanges aren't the only way to frame dialogue, we'll be in better shape.

The writing's overall strength is also a mixed bag. I think we can safely say that all the lore about Engines, ENIA, EDVA, and Theians is going to be straight gobbledygook, but a certain amount of gobbledygook is tolerable in a silly kids show about robots smashing each other and monsters up with their big punches. The character writing, on the other hand, is just solid enough to keep the attention of the audience members who happen to be older than twelve. I thought the moment where the kids' mom clangs her cooking utensils together to stop the beach brawl with a dinner call was pretty cute, and I think Haruka and Akira share a fun brother-sister dynamic.

Is Vertex Force an anime that I can recommend to any of the adults reading this preview? Not really. It's about as nourishing and well-crafted as the cheap breakfast cereals kids scarf down as they power through their Saturday morning toons. Those kids are exactly the target audience for Vertex Force, though, and I imagine they will be satisfied with the action and adventure the show offers. It's fine, and nothing more.

---

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of Anime News Network, its employees, owners, or sponsors.