The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Tune In to the Midnight Heart

At the end of a difficult day, the haughty but purehearted rich kid Arisu found his only solace in the voice of another girl his age, who hosted a livestream under the pseudonym "Apollo." Then, one day, the broadcasts stopped. Arisu has dedicated years to finding Apollo's true identity, and he's narrowed it down to one particular high school. He transfers in as a student and figures it'll be a cinch--but then discovers it could be any of the girls in the broadcasting club, and the real Apollo isn't talking for reasons of her own. These four girls have no use for Arisu's personality, but they each harbor dreams of using their voices to build a career, and they sure could use his money.

Tune In to the Midnight Heart is based on Masakuni Igarashi's Tune In to the Midnight Heart manga. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

There is an art to writing a deliberately unlikable protagonist. You want the audience to sympathize with him at least a bit, even if they want to stuff his head into a toilet. He must suck enough that it's implicitly clear that he's written to be obnoxious, but not suck so much that the viewers don't want to spend time with him. I believe that Tune In to the Midnight Heart passed these litmus tests; I wanted to give Yamabuki a swirlie the moment he opened his mouth, but from the looks his classmates gave him, they probably felt the same way.

However, there's a third metric: does the audience want to spend time with him, despite the fact that he's incredibly annoying? That one, I'm not so sure the episode succeeded at. At the very least, I don't feel compelled to accompany Yamabuki on his quest to find the real identity of Apollo, the host of the midnight pirate radio/live podcast he'd listen to in middle school. His personality at the start of the episode is over the top, with his boasts of the efficiency of his bodily functions and demands that the girls in his class say, “I love you,” to him. As the episode goes on and he meets the four weirdos of the broadcasting club, he starts acting a bit more human and…

Nope, still annoying. He spends most of the episode either yelling at the girls for some reason or another, or being tormented by them in turn. While I'm not opposed to a bit of antagonistic flirting, his tendency to shout at them mid-broadcast isn't exactly endearing. Frankly, harem series already have an uphill battle to catch my interest, and Tune In to the Midnight Heart simply cannot compete with pretty much anything else coming out this season. I'd mostly forget the four girls' gimmicks the moment they stepped off-screen; while they're not obvious archetypes, they lack the strong traits or hints of layered personalities necessary to cement them in my mind. They're cute, and nothing more.

It's also kind of an ugly-looking show. While it's less obviously troubled than Gekkō's other series this season, There Was a Cute Girl in the Hero's Party, I suspect that the relatively young Studio Bit off more than they could chew. The color scheme is way off; daylight scenes look rather cold, but most of the series takes place at Golden Hour, if Golden Hour turned everything orange-brown instead of gold. The character animation, while not obviously stiff, has a mushy quality instead, where characters tend to warp a bit every time they move. For a series that hinges on wanting to watch cute girls, this seems like it might be a deal-breaker for a few folks out there.

Tune In to the Midnight Heart isn't disastrously bad, but I can think of about a dozen podcasts I'd rather listen to than Apollo's whispery voice.

Here is how the hero of Tune In to the Midnight Heart is introduced after the cutesy little opening that explains his longtime crush on a gal he's only ever spoken to, and not met: He loudly berates his teacher for stammering a bit during his opening spiel and then proceeds to announce to his class that he is a “99% perfect” genius who only needs one thing to find that missing one percent and become whole, which is for every girl in the classroom to take turns telling him that they love him. Later on, when a girl actually takes him up on his offer, he soundly rejects her by proudly sharing that his perfect intestinal biome causes him to take a satisfying dump at the exact same time each day. Arisu Yamabuki is, in other words, a delusional and vainglorious idiot who is destined to get his ass beat sooner rather than later. This is a wonderful turn of events.

So many anime are so afraid of straying beyond the bounds of the hallowed “self-insert protagonist” that they refuse to make a main character with any character whatsoever. Arisu may be an insufferable doofus who would make any real-world social interaction into a torture session worthy of Jigsaw himself, but this is a cartoon, where exaggerated and unbelievable caricatures are a good thing, so long as they're executed well. Yamabuki isn't on the same level of paradoxical charisma as, say, Okabe from Steins;Gate, but he is the sort of lad who earnestly mutters “Curses!” when his quest to reunite with his long-lost love meets a stumbling block, which isn't nothing. I will take a cringe-fail weirdo who says “Curses!” over a bland potato-golem who screeches “There's no way that Girlfriend-chan could ever like me!” any day of the week.

Naturally, Arisu's fate directs him towards a gaggle of ladies whose distinct but noteworthy hairstyles and fashion choices mark them as the obvious potential candidates for a “long-lost childhood friend” reveal, down the line. Gee, it sure is inconvenient that Mysterious Voice-chan draped a blanket over her face during her voice-only chats with our boy back in the day, you know, just in case any hypothetical cameras were angled directly above her head and might clue some invisible audience into her real identity. It looks like Airus will just have to get close to all of these gals, darn it.

This is where my major complaint about Tune Into My Heart arrives, which is that the four leading ladies we meet are not terribly interesting or enticing as love interest for a romantic comedy. The show goes out of its way to make sure we all recognize that Shinobu, Nene, Iko, and Rikka all have different looks and voice-related quirks — Shinobu is into making announcements, Iko is a VTuber ,etc — but there's just no chemistry to be found in this cast, yet. Combine that with the show's very flat direction and average-looking visuals, and Tune In to the Midnight Heart ends up merely just okay, and nothing more. There are a few very strong romantic comedies vying for our attention, this season. A show is going to have to do better than this to really stand out.

I admit that, as someone with a family history in radio, I find a lot about this show's setup hard to swallow. We had newscasters and DJs at the house all the time, and their voices always sounded pretty much the same in person as on the radio. (And let me tell you, having multiple public radio news voices in one room is an experience.) But maybe that's because it was professional radio – perhaps Yamabuki faces a greater hurdle because of the nature of podcasting. If I cared more about the plot, I might give it more leeway.

But sadly, this was one of those episodes that danced on my last nerve. In many ways, it feels like a throwback to harem anime of yore – Yamabuki is confronted with a set of four girls fitting various molds as he tries to find the indie podcaster of his dreams. He last heard the girl broadcasting as Apollo back in middle school, and ever since she went off the air, he's been determined to find her…so he can make sure she deletes an embarrassing response he made. Or so he claims – Yamabuki doesn't seem like the most honest person, especially when it comes to himself. The reality is that Apollo supported him during a difficult time in his life, and he wants to reconnect with her, but that makes him feel too vulnerable. And so he tells himself another story.

If I had to put money down on the outcome of this quest of his, I'd say that all four girls in the broadcast club who sound vaguely like Apollo probably took turns playing the role back in the day. All of them have too much in common with his mystery girl, and the girl herself all but admits that she's in the club at the end of the episode. That means this will likely boil down to Yamabuki trying to sort through them while at least three of them are as obnoxious as possible. Nene already clearly has it out for him (and resents the intrusion of boys into her previously boy-free school life), but the other girls are all nearly as annoying in their own unique ways: Iko the would-be VTuber is super quirky (or “quirky”), Shinobu is bad at pronouncing things, and Rikka…we don't know much about yet, honestly. So she's not as obnoxious yet, which is nice.

With its stiff animation, ugly school uniforms, and Yamabuki's weirdly lightless (and lifeless) eyes, this doesn't even give me anything to enjoy looking at. The voices are fine, but they can't make up for how irritating the characters themselves are. It's a good thing I'm usually asleep at midnight, because this isn't a show I'll be tuning back into.