The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - Spy×Family Season 3

The cold war between Ostania and Westalis continues with a terrible strawberry shortage! Can Fiona Frost, AKA Nightfall, solve the crisis before it becomes too much? Maybe, but perhaps the bigger question is whether or not the entire Forger family can thwart an enraged construction worker from going on a rampage without letting each other in on their secrets!

Spy×Family Season 3 is based on the manga series by Tatsuya Endō. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll and Hulu on Saturdays.

I'm not sure that Spy×Family is starting its third season with its best foot forward, but I'm still delighted it's back. Certainly, these aren't the gang's most memorable adventures, although they do give us a good reminder of who's who and what they can all do. From Loid showing that he's just as adept with construction vehicles as with any other weapon to Yor swooping in to save an old man and his (not swole) chihuahua, the basics are all here—and that's not even getting into Anya and Bond's astounding psychic duet. If you needed proof that a dog's a kid's best friend, look no further than Anya and Bond figuring out that a construction worker was about to shake hands with danger and start throwing trees like the world's worst caber toss. This first segment is also notable for some truly stellar borfing from Bond. Move over, Siberian huskies, Bond is here to make weird dog sounds with the best of them.

The second half of the episode reintroduces my personal least favorite character, Fiona Frost. But this time she's far less obnoxious—mostly because her interactions with Loid are limited. Instead, she's off with Franky to stop a…strawberry shortage. That's part of the beauty of this series; it can switch gears between ludicrous and poignant at the drop of a hat. We're definitely going to be in for the latter in upcoming episodes, as soon as next week, even, as Loid's past begins to come to light—and it's the balance between those story elements that makes this series so special. (Not that you'd know it this week.) The highlight of this half of the episode isn't poignancy, though, but Fiona's fighting. It's fun to watch Franky drag her around the club to puff up his ego, but when the SSS shows up and she starts whipping out her leg skills, that's when things take off. The darkness of the scenes makes it a little hard to see, but the animation of her leg movements is exquisite.

Even if this isn't Spy×Family's strongest episode, it's still a good one. With its reintroduction to the major players and their dynamic, we're all set for things to take off from here—and all with Tatsuya Endō's admirable commitment to never hurting or killing dogs. It should be a borfing good time.

To understand why the “family” half of the title is so important – and, arguably, makes up the greater portion of the story by this point – you need to go back to the war. Although this series takes place in a fictional version of Cold War Germany, which means that the war in question isn't fully World War II, it's hard not to see the parallels if you're a student of history or have family stories about it. For context, when I was eight, my grandmother pulled down two old photo albums filled with black-and-white pictures and told me, “This is all the family we lost in the war.” My grandparents lived through it, but even at that remove, it affects my life.

How much stronger must it be, then, for Loid? While we've had hints of it before, particularly with how he relates to Anya and perhaps why he adopted her in the first place, mission notwithstanding, the second half of this episode gives us our clearest picture of his past. Not only can we see how his own father impacted the way he parents Anya, but we start to get an idea of why he became a spy in the first place. Sure, there are fun little moments, like when he admits to his friends that when he gets involved in imaginative play, he becomes fully absorbed, but what's more significant is the way that he abruptly and horribly learns the difference between “playing war” and “living war.” It's like the worst case scenario in those old Duck and Cover" videos from the 1950s, and he's not much older than Damian when it happens.

Juxtaposing this with the first half of the episode, which introduces the world's meanest teacher (whose name, Schlag, is German for “hit” in the physical sense). Little Loid is facing real, life-threatening danger; there's no guarantee that his friends or his parents have survived the sudden bombings. Anya and Damian feel like there's danger, but even if those Tonitrus Bolts are pins (which I'm pretty sure they must be), they're not in actual danger. Because of people like Loid, they have the privilege and luxury of little childhood fears.

It's a parallel that works, because to the kids, Miss Schlag feels like a very real threat. She's the sort of horrible, Trunchbullian adult who delights in tormenting children for no other reason than that she can, and Anya's brave sacrifice genuinely feels like one to both children. There's no denying that it's a really nice thing for her to do, especially since she's in more danger from Bolts than he is, and to Damian, it means the world. But the fact remains that Miss Schlag is a bully rather than a villain; it's just in the world of childhood that she feels outsize.

This probably would have been a better episode to open the season with, but it also would have been a lot to take. But I'm glad the series is covering Loid's past as shown in the manga, because we forget wars at our peril – even in silly shows about psychic kids and superspies.

Did anything that happened in this episode matter? Does anything that ever happens in Spy×Family matter? After a certain number of episodes of treading the same ground without any kind of forward momentum, I'm starting to get a little tired of it all. Maybe this isn't fair. There are lots of sitcoms that I enjoy, both of the anime variety and otherwise. What is it about Spy×Family that drags at me so? I was all-in at the start, enthusiastically chuckling at the Forger family's antics.

The premiere of the third season is nothing more than business as usual. It's divided into two half-episodes, the former of which is about the Forgers going on a nice family outing until Anya catches Bond's vision of a man in an excavator (I think? I know I should really be more up on my big truck knowledge, considering my field of work). She directs her parents to where the dastard is carelessly knocking down a building, embittered by overwork and sleep deprivation.

To be honest, most of the what and why of that segment has slipped out of my head by now. Outside of Loid jumping behind the wheel of an excavator as well, it followed the episodic formula so closely that I found it hard to care. Anya has a vision she doesn't understand, Loid does something cool, Yor uses her superstrength to save someone. They're more superheroes than spies or assassins at this point. They're so hypercompetent that the episode felt frictionless—unable to stop, unable to start, unable to move forward.

I had a hard time shaking off the lassitude for the second half—and it took me longer than it should have to realize that hey, this is doing something a bit more interesting. It turns the focus to Franky and Nightfall, a pair of characters that one wouldn't associate with each other. Nightfall is still completely obsessed with Loid, but we get a bit more of a window into who Franky is and what drives him. Plus, the gunfight is cool, and we get an excellent shot of Nightfall disarming a guy with her leg. The animation for this half is a bit stronger as well.

I don't know if I'm going to keep up with this season of Spy×Family. It's just another sitcom designed to run in perpetuity, without having any forward progress on the characters' stated goals from the beginning. I don't have time in my life for this kind of wheel-spinning.

Oh, so this is what people were talking about when they promised SPY x FAMILY would draw me back in.

Like the previous episode, this one was divided into two halves. The first is a lighthearted little story about Anya gaining another Tonitrus Bolt after lending Damian her handkerchief in a surprise bag inspection, but getting closer to him in exchange. It's cute and funny – Anya imagining how her action would lead to world peace is such quintessential young child logic that I had to laugh. It's also emblematic of what “progress” looks like in SPY x FAMILY, where even episodes that deal directly with the main plot are determined to keep things in stasis. If one thing moves forward, another must step back.

The second half is a completely different matter. We step back in time to Twilight's childhood, when there was a tenuous peace between Ostania and Westalia. If I'm being totally honest with myself, it hits the exact beats of every story about how children's lives are ripped apart by war. The little boys innocently playing soldiers, the ominous overheard conversations about rising tensions, the conversation about how both sides are different, the resolution to make amends… and then boom. Then the bomb hits, quite literally in this case, and everything changes. Childhood is over.

It's a touch maudlin, but I have to admit that I'm soft when it comes to stories of children whose lives are torn apart by war. Since I already know and am attached to the character, seeing the context that created him had a power to it that it wouldn't have otherwise. The beats felt familiar because I knew what was coming and have engaged with plenty of war stories, but they were well-handled otherwise. The moment I saw the repeated image of the hawk wheeling in the sky, I knew that it was a visual metaphor for Ostania preparing to strike, and that it would dive right as the bombs struck. I knew it, but I still welled up a bit when it paid off and the child whose name we never knew's life ended, and the spy Twilight's began.

It hit me hard enough that I'm planning to donate the money I make from this review to help real children affected by wars happening right now.

It is a little disappointing that this season begins without any real fanfare. As someone who is more or less up-to-date with the original manga, I know that we're entering the era of Spy×Family, where we focus less on bigger arcs and more on telling individually contained stories. Based on the preview of episode two, I'm very much looking forward to seeing glimpses into one of the darker stories that the season can potentially go into. However, because this season didn't wanna start that way, we get our first episode that really feels more like a filler OVA than a genuine season premiere. That isn't to say the episode is bad; in a lot of ways, it is a quintessential Spy×Family episode, but I'm a little disappointed that it doesn't really offer anything more than that.

The episode is divided into two parts, with the first one getting into what a typical family outing looks like for the Forgers. We have Bond and Anya noticing a potential disaster, Anya gaslighting Loid into taking action, and Yor is just there to showcase her impressive physical feats. End the story with a joke about Anya being a kid who doesn't like studying, and you pretty much have the formula for a pretty standard chapter of Spy×Family. It's cute, gorgeously well animated, and that is not how construction equipment works, but I don't care because it looked really cool. There's a bit of commentary about how many adults in this country are dealing with the fallout from the way society is being handled, potentially as a result of the war.

We get into that a bit more with the second half of the episode, revolving around Franky and Fiona, who are a duo that I honestly didn't think would work well together. Still, it does lead to some pretty fun comedic potential. I appreciate the fact that we gained some insight into why Franky works as an informant. He doesn't really care about the East or the West; he's just trying to stir up trouble and make some money like a rebellious teenager. I respect that, he's doing his best to live his best life, which also fits his character as the more comedic one of the main cast. I like that the show, in general, occasionally gives us hints into more mature themes or ideas revolving around how the adults are actually dealing with all the violence and political discussions around them. It really does feel like that is the story that the author really wants to tell more of sometimes. I hope season three is the one that gets to showcase the writer's ability to delve into those topics more thoroughly.

Well, that ending was like a brick to the face. Sorry, I used humor to deal with incredibly uncomfortable situations. I read the original manga and I remember how caught off guard I was at how everything played out because, to a lot of SPY x FAMILY fans, it might feel like a hard shift from what we had experienced before. But that's kind of why I like it and if you really think about it, the breadcrumbs have been laid out for a while.

The first half of the episode was relatively light. Anya might've gotten her first bolt, but she also managed to build a stronger connection with Damien—who now owes her so that could be set up for future developments between the two. However, I think the first half of this episode was also meant to act as a contrast to the second half as the episode as a whole revolved around children. The first half focuses on the current generation whereas the second half deals with the last generation—and I think a lot of us forget sometimes that the last generation were the ones who had to deal with the worst of the ongoing war.

I like how the episode builds up that traumatic shift even if it's very obvious. Seeing Twilight be this mischievous little kid who is glorifying the idea of growing up to be a soldier is really heartbreaking when you think about it. He's given in to the propaganda of the people in the east and thinks that the best thing you can do for his country is to be a soldier to fight. But just when he's starting to realize that he might've been wrong about that and that the whole situation is obviously far more complicated than anyone else would let you believe, that's when the strike happens. The fact that the last thing Twilight said to his dad was a lie is also really poignant when you consider the fact that in the modern day, he is virtually living a lie at the same age as his father when he last saw him. It's really gut wrenching, but I think this is what SPY x FAMILY needed.

Don't be wrong, I love the comedy of elements. But you can tell that there is a bigger and more traumatic story going on in the background. The whole absurd premise is built on the idea of preventing another major war. Plus, almost all of the adults are jaded in some way because of the work they had as kids and young adults. The show just didn't wanna focus on that, but we're finally there and I am very, very curious to see the actual journey of how Twilight started to where he got where he is now.