The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You Season 2

Ever since Kizuki confessed his feelings to Mizuho on her 17th birthday, romance—and how she feels about Kizuki, in particular—has been heavy on her mind. But a decade later, Kizuki is no longer present in her life. In fact, he's no longer in the lives of anyone in their friend group. He seemingly dropped off the face of the earth three years ago, and no one's sure what happened to him or why he would hurt everyone like this. Will his absence create more opportunities for romance for the other members of the friend group, who also harbor romantic feelings for Mizuho?

Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You Season 2 is based on Haruka Mitsui's Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You (Dōse, Koishite Shimaunda, or KoiShima) manga. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

As you probably recall from season 1, while Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You mostly takes place in 2020, it will occasionally fast-forward to a decade later, in 2030 (which, now that we're in 2026, we're officially closer to than 2020. Wild). This isn't an inherently bad idea—plenty of excellent stories have used this exact technique—but it creates an awkward dissonance. The 2020 portions of the story are obviously trying to make it seem like, while all her friends have a crush on her, it's mostly Kizuki and Shin putting in the most effort to win Mizuho's affection. But from what we've seen of the 2030 segments, not only is she still single, but Shin (who's still in love with Mizuho) seems very obviously like the one with the best shot at her.

On paper, this might not seem like much of an issue. After all, you can still do things with these ideas, right? In practice, it has the opposite effect. While the 2020 segments clearly emphasize a rivalry in love, the 2030 segments actually suggest that rivalry is largely irrelevant. And that takes a lot of the fun out of things. And I don't know that we've had an episode that demonstrated this as clearly as this one, which has what I believe is the longest flash-forward to 2030 we've seen in this series, and gives us the long-awaited return of Kizuki in 2030. We still don't know what he was up to, and everyone's (rightfully) mad at him for ghosting everyone, but he's at least present now.

This is all to say that I see what this series is trying to do, I just don't think it's executing the vision well, and this episode is no exception. We're supposed to be caught up in the rivalry between all these boys and Mizuho, but since we know that even 10 years later, virtually nothing has changed, it really zaps a lot of the drama out of it—makes it feel stale, and like it doesn't matter. And that's not the only issue this series has, but it's the one that's on full display in this episode. It's such a shame, too, because this series could be doing much worse, sure, but it could also be so, so much better.