The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Hell's Paradise Season 2

In search of clues to the elixir, Gabimaru and his group arrive at the castle of Tensen, ruled by the monsters who rule the island. Meanwhile, the shogunate sends additional expeditions to Shinsenkyō led by Yamada Asaemon Shugen, which the Iwagakure joins. Gabimaru must find the elixir and escape the island as an all-out showdown between humans and celestial immortals looms.

Hell's Paradise Season 2 is based on the Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku manga by Yūji Kaku. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

Hell's Paradise season two comes out swinging! The latest battle royal-inspired anime begins with bisexual icon Yamada Asaemon Jikka informing folks on the mainland about how things have started to unfold on Shinsenkyō, only for him to be informed that he, additional members of the Yamada clan, and the feared Iwagakure ninja are set to be dispatched to the island. For a show that's so far derived much of its tension from multiple factions in conflict, throwing new characters into the mix is a great way to raise the stakes and liven things up as season two kicks off.

Outside of Sagiri's group, navigating how to best meet up with Gabimaru and a pool party with the Tensens, the rest of this episode largely focuses on Gabimaru's group encountering and fighting the Aza siblings. Having lost his primary character motivation, the amnesiac ninja struggles against the quick-to-regenerate Chōbei. However, Gabimaru still manages to push Chōbei into a corner, prompting the bandit king to draw on even more of his Tao, and the episode ends with him beginning to transform into a plant monster similar to the form taken by a Zhu Jin in the first season.

While this fight has solid animation and is paced like the rest of the episode, I struggled to connect with it because of Gabimaru's amnesia. A big part of the appeal of Hell's Paradise is how hypercompetent and personally motivated much of the cast is. Even if most alliances are pretty well solidified now that we're in season two, there's always the lingering feeling that things could shift at any moment as new information materializes. Gabimaru not being at full strength or sound of mind undermines one of the show's greatest strengths, turning him into a far more reactive character. Hell, there's a good chance that this fight probably wouldn't even have happened if he hadn't lost his memories, as he doesn't really have anything to gain from it.

While it's a shame that the big action hook of this episode didn't do much for me, this episode succeeded in every other regard as a season premiere. The setting and characters have been reestablished, the stakes are about to be raised, and the visuals that helped drive the first season's success are as striking as ever! Once Gabimaru gets his memories back, this premiere makes me confident that season two of Hell's Paradise will live up to the distinct experience of season one.

Season two of Hell's Paradise is dropping me in a bizarre place. Even after going back and rewatching some of last season, I still feel like I could never really get behind some of the strange narrative choices that left our extended cast in the positions they were in. The biggest one was the choice to give Gabimaru amnesia, so he would once again forget exactly what he was fighting for. Not only is that a very frustrating plot to introduce right in the middle of your series after you've already spent a dozen episodes establishing your character, but I worried that this was going to be a narrative choice that would just be introduced for the sake of generating interpersonal conflicts. With the first episode of this new season, I can confidently say that is precisely what the show is doing, and I don't really like it.

Yes, Gabimaru is an incredibly competent ninja who doesn't trust people, but I feel like he wouldn't be so quick to start a fight with Aze in this episode if he had his memories. I know that the first episode of this season is meant to mirror the first episode of last season, where Gabimaru is constantly wondering why he's fighting or why his abilities aren't working, because the resolution is that he is fighting to get back to his wife. I liked that resolution in season one, and I liked how it kept reaffirming that this guy is damaged, but he managed to stay strong because he had someone waiting for him back home. The constant monologues in this episode about how he feels like he's missing something or that things don't feel right, no matter how much he focuses, feel really redundant in the middle of all the very well-animated choreography. Even Mei has to cryptically hammer the message that his “weakness” was what made him strong. I'm really hoping this plot point gets resolved by the next episode.

Outside of that, this episode really reestablishes where everybody is. The Tensen still sit menacingly in their big garden of Eden, training by practicing very violent sexual acts with each other. The rest of the criminals and their accompanying guards show up for one scene just to remind the audience they're there, and we get a very interesting cold open with someone who originally escaped the island. I don't know how he escaped the island, given that it's established it is tough to do so, and I also don't know how he brought back one of the horrifying giants that inhabit the island, but the show kinda handwaves that. I'm not sure if I'm missing something or if something was lost in translation. Not the best start to season two, but I'm hoping this is a rough patch the show can get over quickly, given how strong many of these narrative beats were in season one.

I know I enjoyed Hell's Paradise' first 13-episode season back in 2023, but I'll be damned if I can remember many plot details. Off the top of my head, I recall that the Shogunate sends a bunch of executioners, each assigned their own convict, with the intention of retrieving the Elixir of Life from a mysterious island. Said island proves to be a deathtrap filled with Things That Want to Kill Them All, including some seemingly immortal god-like entities. There's a white-haired guy ninja called Gabimaru who's pretty cool, and Sagiri, a female executioner whom I remember liking. I was more than a little lost while watching this episode, which doesn't do much to remind the viewer who any of these various people are. That's on me, but I don't necessarily have the time to revisit the entire series, and neither do many of the non-reviewer folk sitting down to watch this.

As before, Hell's Paradise is animated by MAPPA, who can always be relied upon to provide spectacle, though reportedly at the expense of their overworked animator staff. There's undoubtedly a cool fight in the second half of the episode. Still, as I couldn't really remember who any of these characters (other than Gabimaru) were, it fell a bit flat to me, to the point where my attention started to wander.

The episode begins with one of the executioners, Jikka, reporting to the Shogunate's officials about why he was the only person to return from the island. I don't remember him from last season at all, but I presume he must have appeared at some point. Anyway, he's rude to his employers, and he ends up being sent back to the island along with his haunted-looking executioner colleague, Shigen, and four new ninjas. Apparently, the Shogunate has decided that using convicts to ensure their professional staff survive the Island of Death wasn't the best choice, and is now pursuing alternatives.

Meanwhile, back on the island, the immortal god-people get up to some good old-fashioned sex-and-violence with each other, which leads to a very literal, bloody redefinition of the term “smashing.” Whatever floats their boats, I suppose. Pink-haired genki god girl Tao Fa is fun, though I seem to recall that these god people can change sexes at will. I don't remember whether she's as fun as a guy.

Elsewhere on the island, Gabimaru's having some memory issues, and his fight with a blonde god-guy is brutal and animalistic. Apparently, his “tao is wrong,” whatever that means, so he can't fight to his full ability. Despite snapping his opponent's neck immediately, that doesn't finish him off, which I imagine must be pretty irritating.

I think if I'm ever to enjoy this second season, I'll at least need to look up a summary video on YouTube or read a wiki. That's a warning to anyone looking to jump straight back in here – unless your memory of the first season's events is well preserved, you might not have a great time with this.