The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Psyren

This story starts by introducing Yoshina Ageha, a high school student who seems to like helping people. Whatever problems anyone has, he will solve them for 10,000 yen. One night, on his way home, Ageha found a ringing public phone and answered it. A red telephone card with "Psyren" on it came out of the card slot, and as he took it, a strange woman's voice on the phone, who seemed to know much about Ageha, asked a bunch of questions, and he walked away with the card that would take him to strange places.

Psyren is based on the manga series by Toshiaki Iwashiro. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

I'm kinda torn on this first episode of Psyren! On the one hand, I love me some death games and battle shoenen nonsense. What is obviously a stand from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure shows up when Ageha, a rough around the edges high school student with a heart of hold, uses a payphone, I knew I had to give this show at least three episodes before forming a complete opinion. It's a good thing that Psyren is my kind of weird too as, outside of its one or two twists, this premiere feels like a lot of table dressing for what's barely an appetizer.

Psyren's premiere episode does a serviceable job of setting up the supernatural conspiracy and otherworldly setting that's sure to define much of the show. The “phone cards” that transport individuals to what's apparently a different plane of existence carry all the weight of an urban legend made real and are built up to be objects of incredible power and value. However, I wish we got a little bit more about every other detail of this universe, as the shady organization pursuing the cards and Ageha is pretty bland outside of being vaguely creepy which is expressed via the lead grunt licking the payphone that Ageha was talking into earlier in the episode. Sure, the dystopic world that Ageha and Amamiya are transported to at the end of the episode is intimidating thanks to its bombed out landscape and bugmonster denizens, but it doesn't make any kind of specific and immediate impression.

Oh! Amamiya is Ageha's classmate who is transported to this world slightly before him, and she's gone unmentioned thus far in this review because she really doesn't have much of a personality in this episode. Ageha is similarly bland and a pretty stock shonen protagonist so far in this story, which is understandable, but it's not great that I can watch an entire episode of what's ostensibly his show and not have a lot to say about him.

If I'm being uncharitable to Psyren I think it's because I'm struggling with the visuals a bit. All of these characters have pretty overt “early to mid 2000s” designs, and I don't think they quite work in the glossy way a lot of anime are rendered in 2026. Like I said at the top of this review, I'm willing to give it three episodes and hope it steps things up soon, but right now I think this anime is a coin toss away from being a quiet hit of the season or being entirely forgettable.

I was going to start this preview off with a quip about the timeliness of this nearly twenty-years-late adaptation, but we're in the middle of a bit of a 90s manga adaptation renaissance right now, so I guess it actually makes perfect sense that Psyren of all series would finally get its chance at prime time. This series completely passed me by when the manga was originally on the shelves back in the late 2000s, too, so I do not have any nostalgia influencing my reception of this new show, save for my general appreciation for the look and feel of manga and anime from that era. So, given that Psyren missed its opportunity to imprint on the very easily-impressed Teenage James and is now stuck with Persnickety Adult Critic James, how does it hold up?

All told, I'd say that Psyren acquits itself well, especially since so much of what it was doing back in 2007 has so routine in this, The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Six. This is a tried-and-true mixture of urban horror, young-adult action-adventure, and sci-fi murder-game thrills—which means that none of the story elements on display will shock or surprise anyone but the most fresh-faced of neophytes. Ageha is the kind of brash punk (who is also secretly a good guy and a standup brother) that we've met a hundred times before, and his descent into the world of spooky urban legends and dangerous spectres might feel quaint to anyone who has watched a random episode of Jujutsu Kaisen or DAN DA DAN. That's okay, though, because oldies can still be goodies when the song hits just right and you're in the mood to have fun.

What I think I dug the most about Psyren was how it was able to still conjure up a quietly unsettling and compelling atmosphere of spooky-ookems despite (or maybe even because of) the old-fashioned setup and the relatively modest production values. There's just something about the nature of Ageha's first encounter with the telephone-booth monster that leads him tumbling into the world of Psyren that feels very inspired by the likes of Shin Megami Tensei and the original Devilman. The music, too, does a great job of hitting those classic J-horror notes that just ooze tension. I don't know anything at all about where this story might be going in the long term, so while I doubt it will head in any directions that feel truly risky or unexpected in this day and age, I'm still plenty curious to see what poor old Ageha has in store for him.

Maybe it's just because we're settling into October and I am desperately craving anything with even the most tangential horror elements, but Psyren's premiere hit just right for me. It's less-than-perfect animation and trope-filled story setup kind of put me in the exact same headspace that I'm in when I put on a classic 80s slasher flick or an Italian giallo caper. When it comes to classic genre fare that has just been unearthed from a time capsule, sometimes a work doesn't even need to be especially good to still be good. You know what I mean?

When an older manga gets a shiny new anime adaptation, I always wonder how much, if at all, they'll update it. Sometimes it's as simple as adding in cellphones, as we see in Itazura na Kiss and From Far Away. But Psyren's story involves payphones, something that has basically vanished from most landscapes. Does that mean that the anime will set the story back at the time of its original publication?

As it turns out, no. And that works surprisingly well, because Psyren also involves an urban legend, and that kind of folklore often includes anachronistic leftovers from an earlier era. Covered bridges, abandoned buildings, old equipment…something that's wandered into obsolescence is a perfect draw for a spooky tale. So why not create an urban legend about payphones and phonecards? As you'll hopefully see in the upcoming-as-of-this-writing Horror Collector, it's a near-perfect fit. And to make it even better, when Ageha picks up a ringing payphone, we hear sounds like early dial-up internet getting started, which I feel is an inspired choice.

That, for me, is the best part of the episode. While the rest isn't bad, it also feels like a fairly pat start to a supernatural shounen action series. Ageha is the idiot with a heart of gold who channels his emotions through his fists – but only if someone asks him to fix a problem. He's not sure why his old friend Sakurako has changed so much in recent years, but when he thinks he hears her ask for help, he's more than willing to charge into scary urban-legend territory to provide it. He's not quite bright enough to figure out that using the legendary red phonecard is a bad plan, but he's able to work with the trouble he finds, whether that trouble is two adult thugs trying to beat him up or being transported to a decayed urban landscape where a monster with spaghetti hanging out of its mouth kills a guy in front of him. His sheer grit will get him through, as is The Shonen Way.

I do hope later monsters have better designs, though, because the one we've gotten so far is less “Cthulhu” and more “messy eater.” Nemesis Q fares a bit better, but we barely see her, and all of the character designs are pretty basic. For a supernatural action show, this simply isn't all that visually interesting. I do like that it's less heavy on the screaming than many of its genre brethren, though, and this is interesting enough (and it's been long enough since I read the manga) that I don't shudder at the thought of watching more. And this episode does do a decent job of lulling you into a false sense of security – the long phone call with Psyren in the middle of the episode isn't unsettling until it suddenly is.

I do hope we won't see any more people licking a public phone, though. I'm not a germophobe, but that truly made me feel a little sick. Perhaps that's the greatest hint that this was written in a pre-COVID world.