Hits of the Summer 2025 Anime Season

I wound up watching two series regularly this season, Kaiju No. 8 and Nyaight of the Living Cat.

First, Kaiju No. 8’s second season, while very good in terms of quality, was a mixed bag as far as consistency goes. The issue is that the first season showed the characters as a team training together to fight the kaiju. In the second season, the characters, having graduated from their training, were sent to different teams all over Japan.

For me, this gave S2 a disjointed feel. Kafka Hibino, the main character, disappeared for several episodes at a time while the story focused on other characters. Reno Ishikawa, Hibino’s roommate while they were in training, has now been infused with a kaiju’s strength and is shaping up to become a super-hero like Hibino. Similarly, both Vice-Captain Hoshina and Shinomiya are joined with kaiju material and become hybrid human-kaiju fighters.

They’re souped-up fighters, not entirely human anymore, and they’ve made these sacrifices because kaiju no. 9 is the biggest monster they’ve ever faced. No. 9 is a super-intelligent kaiju with superior reasoning abilities, making him extremely dangerous.

Maybe I’m just used to the shonen team sticking together for multiple seasons, but Kaiju No. 8’s second season lost a bit of focus, in my view. I mean, the show is still very good and I will absolutely watch Season 3 whenever it airs. (We know there’ll be a third season because Season 2 ends on a massive cliffhanger, lol.)

... As does Nyaight of the Living Cat, my other must-watch of the season. It too ends on a cliffhanger, though hardly on the same dramatic level as Kaiju No. 8, so we know it will be getting a second season.

Though kind of a one-joke story (a mysterious virus infects all the cats in the world, and humans turn into cats if touched by one), the cast plays it absolutely dead-serious for the duration, which keeps it funny. They use water guns to scatter attacking cats, and distract the cats with cat toys while they run away.

The story follows the typical horror story plot of humans attacked by fill-in-the-blank (zombies, evil spirits, etc.). First they have to escape the city - which is crawling with cats - and then they must establish a secure compound out in the countryside with high walls and a castle-like gated entrance.

There’s even the crossover character, an infected cat with human-like intelligence, who is adopted by the surviving humans and brought to the compound. They name him Jones.

At the end of season two, I expect the cat virus will somehow be reversed and all the humans who’ve been turned into cats will revert to their human selves again. It’s a predictable ending, but until then, I’ll just enjoy the ride. :-)

Summer Semi-Hiatus

I feel like I’ve been super-absent here lately... until I realized that this is usually the time when I put this blog on summer hiatus, so no wonder. Lol!

I’ve been busy finishing the sequel to Daredevil Prince, and also working, so I’ve been time-crunched lately. When I’ve had the time I tried to catch up on the summer season series on my watchlist, especially Kaiju No. 8 and Nyaight of the Living Cat, my season favorites.

Otherwise, there’s not much to report. I’ll have more to say next month... which begins on Monday. Where did the summer go?

See you then!

The Summer 2025 Anime Season and What I’m Watching

And it’s yet another good anime season! Here’s what I’m watching this summer.

Okay, you know I had to at least give this one a try. Nyaight of the Living Cat is a comedy-horror mix, about a feline virus that turns people into cats if they so much as touch a cat.

This results in scenes like you might expect:

It’s fun. The actors deliver their lines with a straight face, in other words, like it’s all dead serious - which makes it even funnier. I’m only two episodes in so far, but it’s already a keeper on my list.

Each season, I always have a few series that are kind of the B-team, to me anyway. In other words, they’re entertaining enough to watch, but I don’t make any special effort to watch the new episode on the day it comes out. Last season, it was Apocalypse Hotel and Zatsu Tabi. This season it’s See You Tomorrow at the Food Court and Welcome to the Outcast’s Restaurant.

See You Tomorrow at the Food Court looks to be slice-of-life with high school girls. I’ve seen one episode and it was sufficiently intriguing to put it on the watchlist. It’s basically two high school girls, one glamorous and the other a plain jane, who meet at the food court every day to talk about... their days. Yeah... so we’ll see about this one.

On the other side of the spectrum, genre-wise, is the guild fantasy Welcome to the Outcast’s Restaurant.

Synopsis - From Tentai Books

Backstabbed by those he considered friends, Dennis has been exiled from one of the strongest guilds around: the Silver Wings Battalion. He doesn't think much of it, though, as he was dying to use his level 99 cooking skills anyway. That's why he decides to leave the city behind and open up a diner in the countryside.

While pursuing his dream, Dennis meets Atrielle, a girl exiled from her noble household and relegated to slavery until he saves her.

The pair open the diner together, and their first client is... an exiled knight from a different guild? How peculiar. But she is not the only customer; a cocky mage and a drastically overworked yet underpaid sage become regulars as well.

The knight brings trouble to the diner at times, but Dennis's cooking skills and beloved butcher knives cut through trouble and hunger alike!

Thus begins the legend of Dennis and his diner, the talk of the town!

It sounds like isekai but it isn’t, not unless something weird and unexpected happens in the story. It just looks like a story that is set in a fantasy setting, with a focus on yummy Japanese food, or maybe European food too, we’ll see.

This one is dark, and I’m not sure I’m in the mood for dark these days. Hotel Inhumans is about a strange hotel whose only guests are hitmen and Mafioso types. And there’s a hint of the paranormal in how the two hotel employees, Ikuro Hoshi and Sara Haizaki, deal with their guests’ situations. In the first episode, a young hitman has been working under duress for years, assassinating people because his sister is being held hostage. It has a bittersweet ending, after Hoshi and Haizaki (mostly the girl Haizaki) manage to beat up his pursuers and somehow give him vital information (that they really should have no way of knowing), which leads to that bittersweet end to the story.

I’m sure even hitmen deserve happy endings sometimes, but again, not certain I’ll continue with a dark anime right now.

Finally, there is Kaiju No. 8, a returning favorite from last year.

Kaiju No. 8 is the most fun shonen anime I’ve watched in years. The second season start was a little delayed, to July 19. To make up for it, Crunchyroll aired Hoshina’s Day Off, a one-off between seasons episode, on July 5.

Hoshina is the sword master Vice-Captain to Mina Ashiro’s mega weapon-wielding Captain.

Interestingly, season 2 begins with splitting up the rookie squad that were the main characters in season 1, as they’ve now graduated and are sent to different kaiju defense units across Japan. It’s kind of a shame that we won’t see the squad together again.

By the way, the final season of My Hero Academia has been announced. It will air starting in October 2025.

And the spinoff series, My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, is coming back for a second season next February.

The final cour of Bleach: The Thousand Year Blood War will also be next year. As always with anime, there’s much more to come. ;-)