The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Mebius Dust

Araki, Stella, and Olga are ordinary high-schoolers living in a city shaped by the mysterious Mebius Dust. Between gaming, bathhouse trips, and quiet walks home, their days pass peacefully—yet strange technology and rising unrest begin to quietly distort their everyday lives.

Mebius Dust is an original anime project based on the award-winning story by Hajime Shinagawa. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Is your name Charles Dickens or Lady Murasaki? No? Then you are not allowed to have so many named characters in the introduction to your story. Cruel of me to say, I know, but it's just basic creative writing advice; giving a character a name indicates to the reader/viewer that they're important and that we're supposed to remember them. And boy, does Mebius Dust throw a bunch of names at us right off the bat – Ainojou, Araki, Stella, Olga, Suzaku, Gengo, Renji, Yuichi, Haruto, Kyouko, Katsuki, Yuda, February Roar, LAMPs, Polis Hopper…I probably even got some of those names wrong because there were just so many. In all fairness, we're probably only supposed to remember the Polis Hopper kids and the suspicious scientist, but it's still not what I'd call putting your best narrative foot forward.

That goes double because there are some interesting aspects of this story's world. Apparently, after a meteor strike ten years ago, some children developed powers, known as “lams.” These Lamscuria are now forced to remain in their home cities and not use their powers above a certain level – and given that most of them now appear to be teenagers, this is clearly not something they'll just accept. They blow off steam by playing what looks like the most dangerous game of capture the flag every night, but they never get to unleash their full potential. You can feel how frustrating this is for them, and easily understand why they'd opt to trust the obviously untrustworthy scientist when he offers them a chance to escape the cycle. It's a decent hook.

So how, then, does this episode about superpowered kids playing dangerous games with the help of shady scientists end up being so incredibly boring? Part of the problem is the aforementioned bloated cast; we can only care about so many characters in the space of twenty-four minutes. Another factor is that of all of their super-duper powers, only the girl with the hair is at all interesting. The only scenes I actively liked involved her using her tentacular hair to do things. I suppose the post-credits scene with Araki revealing that he has “low dust levels” because he's…doing…something with his power that maybe helps the others is moderately interesting, but it's definitely too little, too late.

If the second episode can winnow the cast, giving us a core group of people to follow and actual personalities, it may redeem itself. As of this episode, however, there's precious little to recommend Mebius Dust, prehensile hair notwithstanding.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, the reason why the lamascuria kids can't leave their city isn't because they'll wreak havoc with their special powers, but because the minute they leave, their powers – and the body parts associate with them – will vanish? That's drastically less dystopian than I was imagining based on the way things were being phrased in episode one. It means that there are varying degrees of severity – Olga would simply be bald, which is easily compensated for, but Stella would lose her legs entirely. And Araki, whose lam is referred to as being in his frontal lobes, would risk lobotomy, which sounds like the most serious issue. So still bad, but now it sounds as if they're all being contained for their own safety rather than the well-being of others, which is much less drastic and vicious than I imagined.

In some ways, that makes this episode worse. While I understand that having their freedom curtailed feels awful, it still brings down the level of threat inherent in the story's world. They're not rebelling against an unfair system built to keep them down; they're bored kids who fully understand their situation. While the highly suspicious scientist is still offering them something they thought they'd never have, there's also no real reason for them to trust and accept his offer. The stakes have gone from “fight the man” to “teenagers don't have great judgement skills.”

It certainly doesn't help that the entire episode consists of the kids playing games for Yuda's entertainment. (And, I presume, so that he can study them without appearing to.) While I've learned that I'm always here for Olga's prehensile hair, watching a rowing race – where apparently oarlocks can just magically appear – and a game of whack-a-mole isn't all that thrilling, superpowers notwithstanding. The maze race is even less interesting, since it mostly consists of Stella and her opponent turning corners. It's consistently underwhelming for a series rooted in children with superpowers. I'd almost rather watch Olga eat ice cream and fries with her hair.

Mebius Dust desperately wants to be interesting and to set up a fascinating world. It keeps coming close, but it never quite gets there, and all the prehensile hair in the world can't make it work.

I feel like the old “What would happen if my buddies and I all got superpowers?” daydream is a universally beloved childhood experience. Who the heck wouldn't want to be the X-Men with all their best pals over summer break, solving mysteries and beating up bad guys? Well, Mebius Dust is here to deliver its own bold take on this time-honored premise. What would happen if a magical mystery meteor suddenly gave a bunch of kids wild superpowers? Well, life would basically be pretty normal and boring, actually, except the kids might all use their powers to play parkour games in the middle of the night.

Absolutely riveting stuff.

Mebius Dust makes an attempt, sort of, to justify its premise within the larger context of its universe, with Araki and all of his friends all getting recruited to use their dust powers in more meaningful experiments that will hopefully allow them to leave the quarantine they've all been stuck in, but good Lord does Mebius Dust struggle to present any of this information in a manner that is interesting. I get that the kids' aimless boredom is meant to be an intentional element of this episode's tone to a certain degree, but absolutely nothing about Mebius Dust gets off the ground or hooks its audience in this first episode. The environments are dark and as dull as dishwater. The animation fails to capture any of the inherent excitement that ought to come with watching a band of superpowered hoodlums frolick around. The dialogue is a meaningless soup of proper nouns and pointless lore that fails to inject any creative spark into the proceedings whatsoever.

As the minutes crept by and this endless premiere refused to end, I was convinced that something would happen to liven things up. Maybe an alien invasion would break out in the middle of the excruciatingly pointless race that takes up the back half of the episode. Maybe government agents would swoop in and start taking kids out, and the crews would have to band together and fight for their lives. Hell, I would have settled for a good old-fashioned sports-anime rivalry between some cartoonishly bizarre teams with a bunch of crazy costumes and character quirks. Alas, we're simply stuck watching a dozen interchangeable doofuses run around and use their lame powers to play Anime Calvinball for a dozen minutes.

Mebius Dust can't even use the excuse of being obviously aimed at preteens, because if I'd been forced to sit through this crap as a teenager, I would have started chucking tomatoes at the screen before the episode was halfway done. Mebius Dust is for kids in the same way that the cheap pieces of junk that McDonald's packs in with its Happy Meals. It's completely a disposable and superfluous distraction that won't keep anyone entertained for much longer than it takes to scarf down a small cheeseburger and a handful of French fries.

At this point, I almost feel bad laying out all of Mebius Dust's flaws and failures. It's the critical equivalent of finding the loneliest boy at the beach with the saddest sand castle of them all and just kicking the thing into smithereens right in front of the kid. The show just makes it so damned easy, though, so what the heck am I supposed to do? I mean, this second episode is called “Adrenaline Game,” for crying out loud. We're talking about one of the single most boring and poorly slapped-together series of the entire season, here! The irony is just too delicious to resist.

Coming as a surprise to absolutely nobody who watched the first episode, the show with too many LAM(e) characters and a preposterously undercooked science-fiction premise did not magically get better after its faceplant of a premiere. In fact, “Andrenaline Game” feels an awful lot like a lazy rehash of the first episode. After some mindless chatter from the kids and some even more mindless exposition from Dr. Yuda, we are once again plunged into a drearily dark and wholly nonsensical “game.” If the first episode's barely coherent parade of random superpowers being wielded by characters nobody cares about really blew your mind, then maybe you'll get something out of this.

The closest thing we get to meaningful story development here is Araki's journey to discovering that his LAM power is precognition. Beyond that, though, there's really nothing going on under the hood with this script. The bloated cast only ever act in according to the broad shtick of whatever character archetype they represent, and then they use their powers to win some random challenge or another. It is truly impossible to give a damn. Also, while I'm airing my grievances, let's go ahead and chalk this anime up as another modern television show that just does not know how to set scenes at night without completely sucking the life out of them.

I had this whole conclusion locked in where I rhetorically pondered who the heck this show could even be aimed at aside from desperately bored middle schoolers. Then I went back and looked over my preview from last week just to be safe, and wouldn't you know that I already used that bit the first time around. That's how utterly devoid of substance Mebius Dust is, folks: It forces my mind to instinctively run on auto-pilot after thinking about it for too long. I'm going to set this one aside for good, now, for the sake of my own brain.

Mebius Dust — originally titled Möbius Dust which is better because Möbius is at least a real word and, as far as I can tell, this anime has no connection to the Ultraman Mebius series — is one of those works where the story behind it is more interesting than the final product. Originally made public in 2019, this anime's screenplay won the Kids/Game category of a “turn your story into an anime” competition hosted by DeNA, Sotsu, and Nippon Cultural Broadcasting. However, this project immediately stalled out and, seven years later, the end result feels more like an advertisement for a game or toy franchise that doesn't exist than a piece of narrative media.

Set in a world where kids have begun to develop superpowers after a meteorite crashes into the planet, these children use their powers to play over-the-top games of capture the flag. If they use their powers too much, though, the cops will catch on and bust up their fun; that is, until a mad scientist type shows up and gives them devices that let them hide their power output, allowing them to express their powers more fully. While I do appreciate that this anime doesn't over-explain every character's powers and instead lets a viewer intuit what everyone can do from the events on screen, this episode still drops at least a dozen named characters in twenty minutes, making it really hard to care about any of them individually.

The powers the characters display are also kind of weird and inconsistent with the lore established in the episode's opening. These abilities are supposed to be mutations in the bodies of these young people caused by exposure to particles from the meteorite. This makes sense in some abilities, like the lead (maybe it's hard to tell) having future vision or one character being able to grow and manipulate her hair like prehensile limbs. However, some characters have what appear to be fully robotic legs and can summon suits of armor, which I think merit more explanation. I know I should probably suspend my disbelief more for what's clearly a children's show, but if the X-Men franchise has been good at making mutant powers feel believable for more than sixty years, Mebius Dust can at least offer a better justification for some of these powers.

While competitions with editor oversight have historically been an effective way to elevate new talent in manga, animation requires far more cooks in the kitchen, all of whom need to share the same vision for a project. Mebius Dust is half-baked in both concept and execution. There's way better stuff that you could be watching this season instead.

The nicest thing I can say about Mebius Dust is that it is pretty obviously a piece of children's media and should be judged on an appropriate scale of quality. However, I firmly believe that kids deserve better media than what's presented to them in Mebius Dust and don't think it's a “good” anime by any measure. Featuring incongruent world building, another round of super powered obstacle courses that aren't really tied to any kind of stakes, and the introduction of even more characters to this already bloated cast; I cannot recommend anyone watch this episode or any future episodes of this anime.

The opening act ostensibly sets up Araki's malaise and vague concerns about his developing powers, but this was entirely undercut for me by a stranger coming up to these super powered kids and hyping up their recently posted capture the flag video. This was really weird for me since the first episode establishes that these kids really aren't supposed to be using their powers for fun and this is even reinforced earlier this episode when two characters flee an area after triggering an energy output warning. I understand that kids have a special capacity to do dumb stuff, but it's hard for me to suspend my disbelief around this show's set-up when the main characters are actively posting their crimes to the internet.

The majority of this episode then shifts to some new superpowered competitions, and it's still not clear if there's an overarching structure to these events or if this is all for clout. There is a bit of a lore drop here that the kids lose the parts of their anatomy when they leave the area affected by the meteorite, which makes me wonder if the robot leg girl and the prehensile hair girl lose those when they leave town, or if they're replaced with regular legs and hair. Regardless, this segment is pretty uninspired with animation that is ultimately serviceable at best.

Then Araki meets what I think is a ghost girl as he's walking home, before the episode ends with a new, edgy, team of super powered teens that might spell trouble for the already bloated cast. Except this tension is immediately undercut by the ED animation segment, which shows every superpowered character in the show so far being super best friends throughout the city. I don't think anyone should watch this show, and I'm really excited to stop thinking about it the moment I file this review.