The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

FX Fighter Kurumi-chan

Kurumi Fukuka, a college student who will make her debut in the foreign exchange market to recover the 20 million yen (about US$126,000) her late mother lost there. She believes it will be easy to get that money back, and with that goal in mind, she jumps into a world where things can turn from heaven to hell in an instant. Unrealized losses and loss-cutting, a racing heart that won't stop... Despite this, she wants to buy, sell, and earn. She is joined by other "FX fighters," and the market heats up. Kurumi continues to play a cute and slightly dangerous money game as charts swing back and forth.

FX Fighter Kurumi-chan is based on the manga series by writer Demunyan and artist Daisuki Tansan. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

I don't know about you, but I don't particularly feel entertained by watching someone develop a crippling addiction. That goes double if said addiction has already resulted in their mother's suicide, an event which fifteen-year-old Kurumi took the absolute wrong lesson from. Her mom, Kozue, got addicted to what is essentially gambling – investing on the Foreign Exchange (FX or FOREX). When she lost everything, she committed suicide. Kurumi, somehow, took from this that if she were to embark on a similar investing attempt, she would succeed and become wildly rich. She spends five years planning and studying for this, confident that her math skills – better than her mother's – won't let her down.

I think you can guess what the result is.

In Kurumi's defense, she really, really needs psychiatric help. At fifteen, she thought that she was the only one who could help her mother make back the money she lost, that she alone could stop her parents from getting a divorce – something, it must be said, that was never mentioned. She seems to feel that succeeding where her mother failed will right a past wrong somehow, and all I want to do is stage an intervention and get this poor young woman some badly needed help. If I ever get isekai'd, let it be as a psychiatrist to anime characters.

Knowing that Kurumi needs help doesn't make watching this a whole lot of fun. Perhaps it's my training as a mandated reporter, but every second of this is utterly painful. Not in a visual sense; it must be said that it looks pretty nice (boob physics in the ending theme aside), and I'm glad we didn't have to see Kozue's suicide – or her body in the coffin. (Good job, Dad, for not letting your daughter look.) I don't love the way Kurumi and her mom scream and shriek; the high-pitched tone is like a needle in my ears, but it's hard to deny that they're justified in their upset. And I daresay we can look forward to more of the same from the entire cast of candy-colored young women; even the narrator says that trading on FX isn't a good idea. It's gambling, pure and simple, and the way it's framed here makes that clear.

I'm very much not looking forward to watching a second episode of this. It's too grim for me, no matter how hard it tries with its bright colors and peppy, fanservice-laden theme songs. Addiction is exactly no fun to watch, and that's what this is.

Have you ever read an Ellen Hopkins novel? Hopkins is the foremost purveyor of YA trauma porn (and at one point was the bestselling poet in the US; she writes her novels in verse), best known for her Crank trilogy. One of the foremost themes she writes about is addiction in its various forms, and even when she's not looking at that particular issues, she writes about mental (and physical) illness. I don't love her work, but I have to admit that if she'd been the author of FX Fighter Kurumi-chan, it would've been a lot more palatable, because one thing Hopkins never does is vicariously enjoy the torment her characters go through. The same cannot be said about this show.

There is value in a story about crippling addiction. There's even merit in a work that examines the familial nature of inherited or learned behaviors. But what I find objectionable about this series is the way it positively revels in every single terrible decision Kurumi makes. In this episode, we see her begin stealing from her father in order to fund her gambling habit. She also hangs out with another young woman who is a clearly terrible influence, pushing Kurumi to make moves she otherwise wouldn't have and deliberately not speaking up when she sees her “friend” getting into trouble. Kurumi may have gotten herself into this mess, but Mochiko is doing her best to keep her in it, staying quiet when she knows things are going badly. She seems to want Kurumi to chase the thrill of gambling, possibly (and this is just my take on it) to make herself feel better about her own actions or to feel like a better trader. She's willing to sacrifice Kurumi for her own ego.

Long story short, this is vastly uncomfortable and unpleasant to watch. It doesn't matter how lavishly animated Kurumi's breasts moving weirdly are (although the male gaze isn't helping; the camera zeroes in on Mochiko's breasts when Kurumi talks about her “assets”), this is about reveling in one woman's entirely preventable downfall. It disguises itself as a message about the dangers of trading on forex, but every ear-piercing, despairing shriek and pant, every zoom on Kurumi's body screams that viewers are meant, at least in part, to find this titillating. In the worst possible interpretation, it's encouraging viewers to think like Kurumi - Sure, it happened to someone else, but it wouldn't happen to me. I'm smarter than they are. I don't think that's actually the point, but at times it feels uncomfortably close.

We do need stories about how destructive addiction is. This may even be the right moment for one specifically about gambling addiction. But this show isn't it, and I am glad to be done with it.

Don't let the candy-colored visuals and cutesy character designs fool you: FX Fighter Kurumi-chan is not some magical-girl adventure or a chill slice-of-life show about adorable girls bonding over a niche hobby. This is a horror story. The very first scene of the show introduces us to Kurumi as a young woman who is already in over her head and losing oodles of money on the precarious gamble of foreign exchange. Her eyes are bugging out, her throat is going hoarse with her wails, and we already know it's just going to get worse. Before that, though, the premiere has to show us how investment trading addiction completely ruined Kurumi's childhood by driving her mother to suicide after being stuck in such a dark place of financial and personal ruin for so long.

So, yeah, this is clearly one of those shows that is trying to hook us in by contrasting its visual style and tone with shockingly dark subject matter, and I am sure many people will be turned off by that approach. For me, though, FX Fighter Kurumi-chan avoids falling flat as cheap, tasteless schlock by telling a legitimately interesting story about very relatable people. Sure, I personally have never even tried to dabble in the investment market, since my ADHD-addled brain is both prone to addictive behaviors and catastrophically bad at math. Still, I can absolutely understand the dark appeal of pursuing the get-rich-quick dream that all of those grifter influencers and self-help authors make look so damned easy. It's 2026, and money is tight for pretty much everyone. What if all you had to do was follow a couple of easy steps and put up some of your savings before you could pay off those loans, put some money down on a new car, and maybe even save up enough to get that new stove you've been dreaming about for the last ten years?

The titular Kurumi-chan's problem is that she is just smart enough to have a genuine leg-up on her competition, but she's also just young and stupid enough to believe she'll have the wherewithal to walk away while she is still on top. What makes the premiere of FX Fighter Kurumi-chan so compelling to me is how Kurumi's whole story is framed as a sick parody of a classic Greek tragedy. It's not just that we all know how badly this is going to go right from the start; Kurumi herself knows from firsthand experience. She's seen exactly what happens to the people who sit in that chair and crack their knuckles with all of the naive enthusiasm of a sucker whose ticket got punched long before they signed on the dotted line. If nothing else, I need to see where Kurumi's story goes next so that I have a fresh, painful reminder of what not to do the next time I hear an ad for one of those EZ-Trade gambling apps.

Every addict has to have a dealer. Whether it's a literal dope pusher waiting in that sketchy alley outside of the Waffle House, or a more systemic source of easily accessible gateway drugs like a welcoming casino with penny slots just a few feet away from the machines with the really big payouts, there's always going to be someone or something out there acting as a voice in the junkie's ear who whispers, “Come on, just one more fix is going to be the one that changes everything. So long as you pay up, of course.” Kurumi may have technically been introduced to the darkly tempting world of foreign exchange by watching her mother spiral out over the fickle trade market, but this week we're introduced to her classmate Mochiko, who I think is clearly the devil sitting on Kurumi's shoulder.

Mochiko isn't some investor repping a trading app or anything, but her emotional investment in the FX game is clearly an influence on our Kurumi-chan. Mochiko is the friend who can snort a bump of coke in the bathroom stall every night and still look glamorous as she parties out all of that energy on the dance floor, which means surely it will be fine if you indulge a little bit, too. So, when Mochiko casually suggests using foreign brokers to skirt Japan's regulatory guardrails and make some extra-risky bets on the currently rising value of the Australian Dollar, it doesn't take too much prodding for Kurumi to take the bait. The main difference between the two is, of course, that Mochiko has the equivalent of tens of thousands of US dollars in assets to play around with. Kurumi is still desperately trying to scrape together the money her mother lost before taking that fateful leap off of the apartment complex roof.

Then there's the fact that Kurumi simply doesn't have the constitution of a professional gambler. You see, I've known plenty of people like Mochiko who really do seem like they can keep their vices on a leash just short enough to keep it together and function in society. Kurumi is not that kind of girl. Her inability to simply cut her losses when the going gets tough is exactly the kind of mentality I would have if someone suddenly decided to hire me for some brokerage firm on Wall Street, which is why I have always steered clear of the mind-altering substances that aren't prescribed by my doctor. To return to my analogy from earlier, while Mochiko is having a grand time making snow angels at the club, Kurumi is out frantically running in her high heels to the nearest pawn shop that will take whatever is in her purse for the cash she needs to score another eight-ball from Eddy “Honey Smacks” McVie

In this case, Kurumi is just stealing money from the emergency cash that her grieving father has been stowing away after his wife ruined their lives. This is much worse than the scenario I just invented, which is really saying something, because everybody knows what happens when you owe Honey Smacks McVie a favor. As sick as it may sound, it's this final turn of the knife that convinced me that FX Fighter Kurumi-chan may actually make good on its promise to mix oddly engaging and cute edutainment with black-as-midnight social satire. I mean, clearly this is Kurumi's rock-bottom, right? There's no way that it gets any worse from here, I am sure.

FX Fighter Kurumi-chan~, AKA “Cute Girls Playing the Stock Market,” is an absolute gut punch of a first episode that does not sugarcoat how much of an adrenaline junkie or degenerate gambling addict you need to be to get into day trading. Pulling a Madoka Magica and using an aggressively cutesy aesthetic to drive home the impact of its aggressively serious subject matter through shocking juxtaposition, this is likely to be the most surprising premiere to drop this season. Whether or not FX Fighter Kurumi-chan~ can perpetuate its critique of financial investment as a get-rich-quick scheme for an entire season or if it ends up valorizing it by focusing on the practice for an entire season is unclear, but this opening episode makes me extremely hopeful that this anime is about to take that entire community down a few pegs.

Opening in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis with the titular Kurumi being in middle school, she comes home from school one day to find that her mother has blown all of their family's money on foreign exchange trading. Shortened to FX or forex at different points in this episode, this is the practice of buying and selling currencies with their value fluctuating relative to each other. Having placed such a bad bet, Kurumi's mother begins working herself to the bone to recoup her losses and commits suicide when she realizes that she can't dig her way out of this hole. Distraught by her mother's passing, Kurumi spends the next several years saving and studying foreign exchange trading markets to make this money back and beat the system that killed her mother.

As someone who was also in middle school during the Lehman Shock, this anime hits surprisingly close to home for me. I distinctly remember the anxiety induced by money conversations that cropped up between my parents and feeling powerless to address any of them, even if my folks were never in anywhere near as dire straits as Kurumi's family. I also used my dad's name to start my own stock portfolio when I was fourteen, and a precocious sixteen-year-old played hooky from my civics class so I could get in on Facebook's IPO on my high school's library computers. I personally felt the elation Kurumi experiences in the closing moments of this episode when she realizes she's made a day's wage in just a few seconds, as well as the throat-catching anxiety when she sees her hard-earned seed money start to plummet.

While more famous media like Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street like to sensationalize day trading, this first episode of FX Fighter Kurumi-chan~ is the most accurate take on the highs and lows of this legalized gambling that I've ever seen. Honestly, it'd be a perfect premiere if there wasn't some clunkiness in the subtitles of the screener I viewed. There's a line where the subtitle text reads “You have to be at least eighteen…” after the episode just established that in Japan you need to be twenty years of age to participate in FX trading, meaning this is likely a mistranslation of something like, “You need to be an adult.” Eyebrow-raising blunder aside, I'm very curious to see where Kurumi goes from here, and I hope it continues to critically, through its accuracy, depict the seedy and uncomfortable world of day trading.

Uuuuuuuuuuuugh, the second episode of FX Fighter Kurumi-chan~ gave me a stomach ache in the best way! While works like Kaiji -Ultimate Survivor- and Kakegurui aren't exactly pro-gambling, they do make games of chance, and the people who participate in them look really cool and/or sexy. Between gambling being low-key valorized in anime over the past several years and US culture being in a place where I can't watch a game of football without a minimum of three different gambling platforms yelling at me to play the spread, it feels so SO GOOD to watch a piece of media that thoroughly depicts the gross and disgusting impact gambling has on people.

This episode begins with Kurumi a few months into her FX trading venture, and up a small but respectable sum of money. Seeing no circumstances that would allow her to increase her profits relatively safely, she's been idling and just monitoring the exchange market. Feeling the need to scratch the gambling investment itch, it doesn't take much pressure from her university classmate Mochiko to place a slightly riskier bet on the AUD/JPY exchange, which is the same market that bankrupted her mother. Rationalizing that she'll both operate in a tighter gains/loss window to mitigate the potential risk of this investment, she casually buys into the market from her phone and the ride begins.

The way this episode of FX Fighter Kurumi-chan~ covers the highs and lows of gambling, which this episode makes clear is what Kurumi is doing by playing the FX markets, is nothing short of emotionally resonant and true to my own experiences in the stock market. Seeing the high Kurumi rides as she generates what feels like a life-changing amount of wealth passively mimicked my own rush of hitting winning penny stocks based on forum tips from when I was in college. The all-consuming anxiety and dread she feels when the market takes a turn on her, and she feels compelled to ride it out, is also evocative of what I would see in some of the worst gambling addicts around me while growing up.

The way Kurumi immediately forgets she's playing with fun money that she's tucked aside for investment and sees any financial loss as a personal failure is so genuine to what it feels like when a bet goes bad! The episode ending with her ideating on stealing from her father so that she can afford to have her account sink lower on the belief that the market will bounce back soon, and thereby just fully repeat the mistake her mother made, is the most weighty and suspenseful ending I've seen to an anime episode this year. FX Fighter Kurumi-chan~ has rapidly become my surprise breakout hit of the season, and I feel like we need this depiction of just how sickening gambling can be now more than ever.