The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

MF Ghost Season 3

Japan adopts self-driving electric automobiles and renders most gas engines obsolete by 202X. The fastest cars find new life in the MFG, a racing circuit held on Japanese motorways. Drivers from around the world race for a shot at the title. Kanata Rivington returns from Britain to Japan for the MFG and to find his father.

MF Ghost is based on the manga series of the same name by Shuuichi Shigeno. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

In the spirit of MF Ghost's continued and baffling insistence on starting each new season smack dab in the middle of a race, I'm not even going to bother writing a proper intro. Easing someone into things, or reminding them of what else has been happening in this series so far? Apparently not, as far as MF Ghost is concerned. So with that being said:

Were the visuals always this… cheap? It's been a minute since season 2—a little over a year—so maybe I'm just not drawing on it right away. But the 3D visuals aside from the cars (EX: Kanata's hand), and also the backgrounds (a number of which just looked like static photographs with a filter or two on them), gave me pause a few times, to the point where I found myself trying my darnedest to remember if the first two seasons looked like that, too. And while I could recall a few weaker visual moments in those seasons, I'm not sure it was ever quite so obvious as it was in this episode. And this is only the first one. So, hopefully that's not an ill omen.

As for the episode itself, Kanata is still in the midst of the Peninsula race with a hurt elbow. …Well, until he's not. Having a narrator suddenly come in and explain to the audience that Kanata was functionally getting a runner's high and that's why his elbow doesn't hurt as much. The whole sequence is incredibly jarring, and totally unlike anything else we've had in the series up until now. Surely, directorially, there was a better, more graceful way of going about this, right? Of showing, not telling? Either way, this is what we ended up with.

And yet, somehow, that's not even the worst directorial sin of this episode. I guess I'm having deja-vu—like last season, starting things out mid-race seriously killed any tension or momentum it potentially could've built up. I can't wrap my head around why Tomohito Naka keeps doing this. There's a feeling as though you're being suddenly pushed right into the middle of it, armed only with context you only half-remember right off the bat. You have to remind yourself of things as you go along. A recap might've alleviated things, sure, but you know what would've alleviated it even further? Dividing them with a more natural stopping point, like right before or after a race—the complete opposite of mid-race, as this series has decided yet again to go with for some unfathomable reason.

Still, there was one memorable moment of this episode that I'm sure Initial D fans, especially, might be interested in, and that was learning what's become of Takumi while “Rage Your Dream” played in the background. The moment was basically done by the time you realize it started, and didn't have much in the way of specific details. Still, MF Ghost has placed the bar firmly on the ground, so we have to take what scraps we can get. Alas, even when it invokes Initial D directly, MF Ghost just can't deliver the same gas gas gas.