The Spring 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Haibara's Teenage New Game+

When socially anxious college senior Natsuki Haibara thinks back on his high school life, all he has are fleeting fantasies of a happy adolescence that could have been. Imagine his bewilderment and surprise, then, when he inexplicably finds himself seven years in the past—one month before his first year of high school. He'll need all the help he can get to succeed, from a workout regimen to online how-to guides, a childhood friend, and plenty of sheer willpower.

Haibara's Teenage New Game+ is based on the light novel series by author Kazuki Amamiya and illustrator Gin. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

I think the issue I have with this anime is a philosophical one. While my high school life was far from perfect, I wouldn't change even a moment of it—not even the most embarrassing or painful moments. To quote another fictional character who, like Haibara, had the chance to re-do part of his young life: “There are many parts of my youth that I'm not proud of. There were loose threads—untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads—it had unraveled the tapestry of my life.” Simply put, I wouldn't be who I am doing a job I love in the place I love without every act that brought me to this moment.

This leaves me wholly unable to empathise with Haibara—even as the anime neatly sidesteps the aforementioned dilemma by making Haibara only a few years out of high school himself. He's a college student. His real life hasn't even started yet. Jumping back from his early 20s to his mid-teens means he only loses his college years—which were apparently so uneventful he has no friends or loved ones that he risks never meeting thanks to his time travel do-over.

Yet, despite all this, I see a path for this story to be more than just a simple wish fulfillment fantasy. The key to uplifting this story is that Haibara is under the mistaken impression that focusing on himself is the path to his “rainbow-colored” school life. However, that is only the first step. Self-improvement is great and all but he needs to look beyond himself and see his friends for who they really are. Despite liking Hikari in his first life, the issue is that he never really knew her. She likely didn't reject him for his looks but rather because he saw her as the prettiest girl in class and nothing more (just like everyone else). His self-improvement has opened the door to get to know her on a deep and meaningful level, but he has to make that effort or he could very well be let down again.

Of course, to see if the story actually goes down this path we'd have to continue watching—and I'm not sure this episode was enough to make me do so.

Something about the title to Haibara's New Game!+ was striking me as being especially depressing, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I was a few minutes into the premiere. That's when I realized that it just feels cheap and immature to call our titular protagonist's journey a “New Game! Plus.” That mechanic is reserved for when you've beaten the game and want to start from the very beginning to use your knowledge and acquired skills to have fun experiencing the story all over again. Haibara, though, is such a chump that he's already desperate to relive his teenage years when he hasn't even finished college yet. That's not a “New Game! Plus,” man, that's just giving up and reloading to a slightly earlier save so you can cheat your way through a couple of tough levels and maybe find a bonus scene you missed.

Maybe it's because I'm already well into my 30s, and maybe it's because I spend every weekday between August and May in a classroom anyways, but I always find the wish-fulfillment aspect of this whole “go back to the first day of high school and do it right” thing to be inherently silly. Why the hell would any adult willingly go back to being fourteen? Now, getting to redo college all over again? That's a fantasy I understand completely. You're in the prime of your life, you get to learn all sorts of cool stuff and then actually apply it in meaningful ways, you can drink as much as you want, and nobody bats an eyelash when you stop by the 7-11 to restock on condoms. Best of all, though, is the fact that literally nobody gives a shit about anything you do unless you want them to.

Sorry, I know I'm supposed to be previewing Haibara's Teenage New Game+, but this first episode really doesn't give me a whole lot to work with. We've already established that our main character is so terminally lacking in personality that the only way for him to find happiness is to revert back to being a child so he can exploit his knowledge and experience without having to actually be challenged or grow in a way that will be interesting to anyone that has a day job and a mortgage. What's worse, though, is that the show can't even get by on the sorts of rich stories or interesting supporting characters that Haibara could still encounter in high school, since the whole cast is composed of the usual stock cliches. We've got the smarmy little sister, the childhood-friend, the outgoing redhead, and the crush who makes the world go all slow-motion as she stands conveniently under a shower of freshly bloomed cherry blossoms. There are also a couple of bros for Haibara to hang with who…well, they certainly occupy the physical space and consume the requisite amount of oxygen that you'd expect.

In other words, this show is dull. Innofensive, sure, and functional enough to kill time without incident, but I'd honestly have preferred that Haibara's Teenage New Game+ sucked a little more if it meant having a skosh more personality. As it turns out, watching a fundamentally boring person violate the laws of time and space to become marginally less boring is not a great premise for a television show. Who knew?

My philosophical issues with Haibara's Teenage New Game+ should be obvious, right? Bro, you're about to graduate college and by your own admission, you had a pretty good time. Why are you obsessed with going back to high school in order to experience “rainbow-colored teenage years,” a phrase that gives me intense ick? I have little patience for stories that romanticize high school as a halcyon period, especially when college is right there. However, I have a much bigger issue with the writing.

Remember Daria? The whip-smart series about a disaffected teen who thinks she's better than anyone else but over the course of the series learns that maybe her above-it-all attitude isn't super healthy? In the first episode, there's a joke where on her and her sister's first day at a new school, someone comes up to her sister and says, “You're cute. Want to be friends?” That's how everyone in this show talks. Natsuki's big change is less about using the social skills he developed over the last four years and more about losing 50 pounds in the space of a month, getting a better haircut, and wearing contacts instead of glasses.

I'd think for a second that maybe it was an intentional commentary on how differently people respond to you when you're thin and attractive, but there is absolutely no way this show is that smart. About half the dialogue consists of teens commenting about one another's looks on the first day of school as a form of introduction. “Nice to meet you! Wow, you're fit!” Walk into a room and screech, “I spy someone cute!” All they talk about is clubs and how attractive they are. They're boring. And for no discernable reason, Natsuki gets appointed the center of the group, as the girl he likes insists on calling their groupchat, “Natsuki-kun Family.” Because being idolized by superficial, boring teenagers is somehow this guy's dream.

And if you, too, are superficial and only care about pretty pictures, too bad! The episode is plagued with the foggy, washed-out animation that haunts me the same way haphazardly-applied glow filters did five years ago.

I don't want to make assumptions about the artist based on the art, but Haibara's Teenage New Game+ has a lot of psychology wrapped up in it.

Well, someone drank the Kool-Aid about what high school is supposed to be like. I get it – high school isn't fun for a lot of people. It certainly wasn't for me. That's why stories like Honey Lemon Soda or this season's The Ramparts of Ice exist: they reassure viewers that they aren't alone and that there is a way out of misery, even if only as a fantasy. But Haibara's Teenage New Game+ takes the approach that if you're not one of the fit, pretty people, you have no chance, and if you miss out on your rainbow-colored high school years, you'll be a miserable adult. That's the opposite of reassuring.

It certainly doesn't help that after Natsuki manages to go back in time to the start of his high school career, the first thing he does is become conventionally attractive. He knows what he did wrong the first time around. None of it was “be plus-sized and wear glasses.” It was that he tried too hard to fit in, as we see when he remembers his original self-introduction. But according to this episode, he just wasn't hot enough, and the minute he makes his little sister blush in the bathroom, everything's coming up roses. Suddenly, as one of the pretty people, girls are feeling him up and guys all want to be his pal. And you'd better believe that everyone mentions his good looks at every turn, as well as virtually everyone else's. These people are obsessed with being attractive. It's one dark reveal away from a YA novel.

I tried to find something I could latch onto in this episode. But somehow watching every suddenly accept Natsuki because he's handsome when before they rejected him for plot reasons just made me angry. The intense shallowness of the concept perhaps isn't a problem in and of itself, since everyone's entitled to their wish fulfillment, but its execution is just so bland and its message so blatant that it becomes worse. This is far more irritating than it needs to be, not even a solid piece of history rewriting. There are better stories about getting through high school, and I'd suggest you go find one of them.