The Best Anime Premieres of Fall 2025, Ranked

By Elijah Gonzalez | October 14, 2025 | 1:50pm

Anime Lists best anime fall 2025

The Best Anime Premieres of Fall 2025, Ranked

After a summer that barraged us with very good cartoons, this fall’s slate of anime is admittedly much more reserved, and if you were to be reductive, you might say it’s mostly a bunch of sequels alongside a handful of worthwhile newcomers. Thankfully, though, there’s more to this batch of shows than just its two biggest headliners, Spy x Family and the “final” season of My Hero Academia (after Attack on Titan’s three-season-long final season, I’ll never trust this term again). Specifically, there’s plenty to watch if you’re open-minded, as demonstrated by its standouts: horse girls, a buff Santa Claus, and punch-happy noblewomen abound. Let’s get into it.

Honorable Mentions

With last season’s disaster lesbian extradoinare, WataNare’s Renako, temporarily leaving the airwaves, we badly needed a new hot-mess sapphic to fill her place. Luckily, Nana Futami from A Mangaka’s Weirdly Wonderful Workplace is here to carry the torch. She’s a newcomer manga artist who is catastrophically down bad for her very cool editor, Sato. Hijinks ensued, and this first episode quickly established the charming dynamic between our lead and her counterpart, setting the stage for more entertaining girlfail action.

On the other end of the tonal spectrum, This Monster Wants to Eat Me is a far more somber yuri series. It’s centered on Hinako, a girl suffering from waves of depression as she struggles to cope with the tragic loss of her family. Before long, she stumbles into the sightlines of Shiori, a mermaid who, as the show’s title indicates, does in fact want to eat her. Despite this seemingly off-putting premise, the premiere did a good job conveying Hinako’s mental space, using deep-sea imagery to capture how she’s drowning in grief.

While My Hero Academia’s first episodes used to serve as thinly veiled recaps meant to remind literal children of the plot, the latest (and allegedly last) season of the series kicked off with a bang. Here, things begin with a high-octane battle that demonstrates just how good this superhero story could have been if it stuck to its original premise (a powerless protagonist who wants to be a hero). Bones went all-out and delivered action spectacle that suggests we may be in for some fun this season.

5. May I Ask For One Final Thing?

Watch on Crunchyroll

The first episode of May I Ask For One Final Thing? puts all of its eggs into one basket, but admittedly, it’s a very good basket. After watching our heroine, Scarlet, endure a long list of abuses that are fairly standard in this type of “villainess” adjacent series, we get the payoff: our protagonist punching the lights out of a roomful of despicable rich men. After a relatively visually conservative episode, Liden Films delivers bone-crushing blows as Scarlet well and truly demolishes these awful people, her gloved fists pounding them into dust. If nothing else, it demonstrates that this series, which is about the familiar concept of a noblewoman getting her engagement to a prince annulled due to that prince’s selfish whims, is willing to take some wild swings. Let’s hope the rest of the series lives up to this opening haymaker.

4. Spy x Family Season 3

Watch on Crunchyroll

Spy x Family’s first episode back served as an excellent reminder of why the show has proven so popular, seamlessly combining humor, smoothly animated action, and wholesome bean moments delivered via its central munchkin, Anya. For those unaware, Spy x Family follows the Forgers, a “fake” family that consists of Loid, a spy, Yor, an assassin, Anya, a psychic, and Bond, a dog that can see the future. Basically, Loid is a spy from the “west” (the story takes place in Berlint, a fictionalized take on Cold War-era Germany) who is trying to prevent the outbreak of another war. Season 3’s premiere is largely an aside meant to reintroduce us to the series’ charms, but WIT Studio and Cloverworks’ flashy animation makes this feel like anything but “filler” as we witness an unlikely battle between construction equipment alongside some side-story antics. This collaboration between these impressive animation studios remains a sight to behold, which is certainly a good thing because the season seems poised to tackle Loid’s weighty backstory next. Hopefully, this will give the series, which has been a bit too lackadaisically paced as of late, the extra jolt it needs.

3. Sanda

Watch on Amazon Prime

Sanda is about a kid who can turn into a buff Santa Claus, and guess what? It’s pretty good. We follow the appropriately named Sanda as he’s sucked into a quest to aid his classmate Shiori in finding her best friend, who disappeared several months ago. How will he do this? By Henshin transforming into Old Saint Nick, of course. If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is, something that standout studio Science Saru (Dan Da Dan, Ping Pong The Animation, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, and a bazillion others) deeply understands as it plays with the absurdity of the situation before delivering explosive bursts of animation.

And despite harping on this Christmas motif in some amusing ways, perhaps the most impressive element of this premiere is how it finds a surprising degree of sincerity in Shiori’s desire to track down her companion, an important bit of genuineness that helps ground the otherwise ridiculous antics. On top of making a good first impression, the series is also based on a manga written by the award-winning weirdo Paru Itagaki and is being helmed by one of the best animation studios of the moment; it’s certainly one to look out for.

2. Ranma 1/2 Season 2

Watch on Netflix

The first season of Ranma 1/2 was a pleasant surprise, overcoming the potentially dated nature of its source material with great execution and a largely accepting demeanor. The story centers on Ranma and Akane, a pair of martial artists in an arranged marriage who find themselves fighting off waves of suitors as they work out their feelings for one another. Things are further complicated by the series’s most defining twist: Ranma was recently struck with a “curse” that makes it so that whenever they’re doused in warm or cold water, their biological sex changes. What makes the premise work, both in general and in this initial episode back, is that any potential mean-spiritedness is kept to a minimum as Ranma fairly quickly adapts to their new normal, switching forms as it suits them.

Moreover, this adaptation from MAPPA has proven willing to cut down its much lengthier source material, more efficiently getting to the action comedy goodness and moments of romantic progress between our leads, as it lays on smoothly animated fight sequences and ridiculous gags. While it can be hit or miss when it comes to a given project whether you’re getting the good version of studio MAPPA or the “overworked on unsustainable deadlines because the studio handles too many series at once” MAPPA, so far, this Ranma 1/2 remake has been the former.

1. Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray Part 2

Watch on Amazon Prime

Somehow, the horse girls have returned. Coming off this summer’s Uma Musume craze, with all the fun times and gambling-related problems this entailed, the spin-off prequel Cinderella Gray remains a tremendously executed sports story that also happens to center on humanoid horse girls. We pick up as Oguri Cap, a sprinter from the “nowhere” town of Kasamatsu, continues her Cinderella story, bursting onto the scene of Uma Musume racing with a running style so powerful it earns her the nickname the “Ashen Beast.”

What makes the series work so well is its profound understanding of the dramatics of sports, capturing the momentous importance that both competitors and sports fans place on their chosen pastime. Is it maybe a bit melodramatic when we see a shot of a champion racer standing atop a mountain of her defeated foes, a crimson cape blowing at her back as she enjoys a view from the top that only the best will ever see? Yes. However, you probably won’t care, as a lifetime of dedication comes to a head in a crackling barrage of animation firepower that further proves why CygamesPictures is one of the most exciting studios in the anime scene today.

While Cinderella Gray doesn’t reinvent the core tenets of sports dramas (outside the core absurdity of its premise, that is), it confidently executes on its vision, bringing to life blood-pumping rivalries tied to very human (er, horse girl) stakes delivered via tense races that explain the (presumably made-up) mechanics of horse girl racing. Basically, it nails both the underlying drama and strategy of the sport, as it cashes in on the hype of following a racer whose entire approach is very literally to come back from behind.

Can CygamesPictures produce the best anime of the season two times in a row? Only time will tell, but the studio is off to a perfect start.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.