The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Scum of the Brave

In an alternate 21st century, rich mafia members can turn into "Demon Kings" through increasingly popular ether-enhancement surgery, and the bounty hunters called "Braves" are the ones called upon to take them down. Yashiro only wants the simple pleasures in life - pizza, beer, and card games. When three young Braves offer him a majestic sum to be their private tutor, he agrees solely for the money.

Scum of the Brave is based on writer Rocket Shokai and artist Nakashima723 's Scum of the Brave (Yūsha no Kuzu) manga. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Salt Joe is my new favorite minor character name. I'm exhausted today due to a poor night's sleep thanks to my adorable cat and general preview guide burnout, and today's crop of premieres has been especially underwhelming. I was struggling to stay engaged. Then, like an oasis in the desert, the words “Salt Joe” crossed my screen. How does one end up named Salt Joe? I can't imagine that his mother gave him that name. What personal feat does the epithet “salt” come from? Or perhaps it's more a pattern of behavior. Either way: Salt Joe, I love you.

Even better, he's in a show that isn't total trash! Scum of the Brave impressed me right away with how it handled its worldbuilding. After some basic setup right at the very start letting us know that human augmentation has led to a boom in organized crime, it lets things unfold through the characters' choices and dialogue. It does this all without relying on “as you know” exposition dumps! Jogamine and Yashiro come from opposite ends of the world of braves: Jogamine is an idealistic student groomed to fight bad guys with her superpowers, while Yashiro occupies a firm morally grey spot in the underworld, where he drinks, eats junk food, and plays legally distinct Magic: the Gathering.

The classic setup of a cynical mentor getting caught up in caring for starry-eyed naifs has its charms, but Scum of the Brave still falls short on the execution. The episode is mostly dialogue and set-up, which is fine; Yashiro's dynamic with Salt Joe and his other friends has the comfortable, lived-in quality of three not-so-great guys who know each other well. But the framing in these scenes is noticeably stiff; characters rarely speak and move at the same time, giving it a stilted effect. There are only a few flashes of combat, and while they're okay, they likely won't do much to sell to an audience in an action-oriented series like this. The jazzy opening theme, which would have had me bopping around in my chair if I had the energy, promised more poorly-composited 3DCG monsters than I care to see in an action series as well.

Scum of the Brave has had very little buzz around it, which is fair considering the episode is okay at best. Still it grinds my nerves that it'll probably do worse than many outright bad series. Give it a shot, and you may get to add it to your list of shows that nobody else watched!

There's a bit of visual storytelling in this episode that I really enjoyed. We see several times throughout the episode that heroes inject themselves with something that lets them turn their mana into practical power—basically becoming superhuman for a short time. When doing so, a mark appears on their faces. Late in the episode, when the Demon Lord's troops attack the bar, they all have these marks as well.

This implies that there is no difference between the Braves and the Demon Lords on a practical level (beyond one side taking drugs and the other getting surgery). It all comes down to whether they choose a life of crime or a life of hunting criminals. And as we see with Yashio murdering a man in cold blood, the line between the two can be quite fuzzy indeed.

Then, thrown into this underground war is a well-funded school training young women to be Braves—instilling them with basic fighting skills and a sense of justice, but not preparing them at all for the gritty world they'll be entering. These girls are seen as a joke by both sides. The actual Braves see them as naive kids, and the Demon Lords see them as hostages they can extort for money.

All this makes for a great setting for a supernatural buddy cop tale where jaded veteran Yashiro is teamed up with pampered hero school student Jogamine, and they have to confront the underworld together. It's a classic story of ideals clashing with grim reality—and how this conflict affects the people involved.

Frankly, this is a fun episode that mixes action and comedy quite well. I don't know if it'll keep me hooked for a full season, but I'll be back next week for sure.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to parse the opening explanation for this show: that “the medical procedure for gaining magical power” had basically turned all the two-bit thugs and yakuza in Shibuya into “dark lords” and that the people who fight them are called Braves. That's not because it's a nonsensical statement; within the boundaries of urban fantasy, it's actually relatively tame. But having it thrown at the screen before anything else feels a bit like a polar plunge. It probably would have worked a bit better after we saw some of the action and had a chance to wonder what was going on with those “injections.”

Not that there's much action to speak of. We do see part of a fight between a dark lord's minions and a high school girl, and later one of those minions is stomped to death by the ostensible main character of the show, Yashiro. But most of this episode belies the action premise by being comprised of a lot of talking. Yashiro talks about how broke he is. Aki (the high school girl) tries very hard to convince Yashiro to train her and help her and her friend Yukine save their teammate Sara, and Yashiro's pals make semi-snide comments in the background while one of them smirks a lot. It's not precisely putting its best foot forward, nor does it help that we barely see any of the fighting – not that I want to see Yashiro crush a guy's head with his foot, but I can't help but think that it would have made the episode a bit more striking.

There are some interesting bits and pieces strewn about. The “injections” don't look like they involve needles, which makes me wonder how the ether (in-world for what's usually called mana) enters the bloodstream, and it seems that everyone has a unique mark that appears when they're using it. These appear to correspond with a specific element – Yashiro's is fire-coded, Yukine's teleportation is wind-coded – but we don't know how those elements are determined and if everyone gets unique injections. And is it only Braves who use them? Do dark lords simply get surgically treated, and that's what separates the two groups?

I'm mildly curious about these things, but not enough to watch more of this. The world doesn't feel well put together, and for whatever reason, Aki's cross-shaped pupils really bother me. This feels like it wants to be edgier than it is.

“What if mobsters but also anime magic and junk?” asks Scum of the Brave, to which I respond a hearty, “...sure, okay, why not?” It beats choking on more fantasy slop, that's for darned sure. Plus, the show's premiere starts with a self-aware, campy tone and some easy-but-nonetheless-relevant social commentary about how much it sucks to be so goddamned broke these days, which means Scum of the Brave is earning some bonus points off the bat. We've officially reached the point of Preview Guide, where, after dozens of episodes of new anime in a row, I am just happy when a show has the basic decency to act like it's trying to keep my attention, let alone hook me enough to earn a return visit or two in the coming weeks.

Our heroes are basic but serviceable, which isn't a great place to be kicking off a new season, but sometimes it takes time for a cast to find its groove. On his own, Yashiro doesn't make for much of a much when it comes to the whole tough-but-ultimately-decent guy, but I like how he plays off of the intense and deeply committed duo of Aki and Yukine. As I said, we don't have a whole lot to work with beyond the familiar paradigm of the cynical mentor figure leading a ragtag group of gung-ho kid heroes. Take any random issue of X-Men where Wolverine was leading a group of younger mutants around, bleach Logan's hair, and stick the X-Tykes in sailor uniforms, and you have a decent idea of the vibes that Scum of the Brave is operating within.

Where the show will have to prove itself some more to fully earn an enthusiastic recommendation is the part where the good guys fight the bad guys with their cool magic powers. The summary of this first episode begins by flaunting “...a world where crime has turned fantastical”, but most of the premiere consists of two teenagers and a burnt-out adult man talking in a greasy bar. I get that the idea is to match fantasy-action tropes with the aesthetics of a modern crime story, but you still have to add some flair to the final product. If anything, mixing magic and mobsters should open up no shortage of opportunities to get really loud and really weird with your worldbuilding and your action, but there is very little of that to be found in Scum of the Brave's first episode.

I'm tacking on an extra half-star to this one for the sake of raw potential. This could develop into a decently entertaining time-killer if it plays its cards right and figures out how to have some fun. For a first episode, though, I expect a heck of a lot more than twenty minutes of exposition attached to a coupon that says, “We promise, these magical girls will kick mobster ass, like, any minute now.”