The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Ranma ½ Season 3

Life's never dull for Ranma Saotome, fiancé to Akane Tendo, heiress of the Tendo Anything Goes Martial Arts dojo. Following an unfortunate training accident involving a cursed spring, Ranma's body becomes female whenever he is splashed by cold water, turning back to male with hot water. Ranma's relationships only get more complicated as he attracts suitors of both sexes, plus multiple crazy rivals, many of whom have their own cursed transformations to deal with!

Ranma ½ Season 3 is based on the manga series by Rumiko Takahashi. The anime series is streaming on Netflix on Saturdays.

Avid readers may remember I spent the entire previous season of Ranma ½ hollering about how dare they skip the Breaking Point arc. It's one of the best arcs of the manga! It has consequences for the rest of the series! It stars my sweet stupid boy Ryoga—and more Ryoga is almost always a good thing! Well, its time has finally come.

So why am I giving it a paltry 3.5 stars?

Part of the issue is that by moving the arc around in the story, MAPPA has messed with what little continuity it had. It flows naturally from the Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire arc, when Ranma was forced to train his speed and agility to be able to turn into a boy again. Shifting its spot in the story means that certain things don't make sense: Ranma saying he hasn't seen Kuno for a while, Ryoga's confusion at why Ranma was able to trounce him so thoroughly, and Ranma's revelation that he's gotten stronger. These are all direct results of his training with Cologne! While few people will probably consciously realize this, they'll probably notice that something feels distinctly off about the proceedings.

The other thing is that the Breaking Point arc, unlike the wackier storylines and one-offs, plays on Ryoga and Ranma's rivalry, Akane's stubbornness, and Cologne's manipulation to gradually build up to some of the best action the series has to offer. But for now, there's not much to go on. Yes, Ranma slapping Ryoga around so badly that his limbs become as tangled as a pair of headphones that have been sitting in a pocket for a week is a funny way to reintroduce their rivalry, but the primary joke of the episode is that Akane is bad at cooking. She joins Ranma and Genma for their training camp in the woods as “bridal training,” and makes curry for them by dumping too much of everything under the sun in the pot. She's a terrible cook! That's the joke. It's sexist, playing on the idea that as a woman, Akane should be better at cooking, because of course she's going to be a housewife in the future.

But I know it will get better. And if you've been around for two seasons by now, you're probably invested enough that one kinda-mediocre start to an arc isn't enough to put you off. The best is yet to come.

Episodes like this one really encapsulate everything I love about Ranma ½: The comedy, the characters, the messiness, the martial arts of it all, the animation, and of course, the cartoonishness. Somehow, this show manages to equal its rom-to-com ratio, in spite of how tremendously it succeeds in both aspects. I mean, the episode opens up with Kuno—the best character, I'll die on this hill—telling Akane his dating schedule for the summer, as he presumes that both she and his beloved pigtailed girl are going to want nothing more than to spend as much time with him over the summer. Oh no, did it rain? Not to worry—he's keeping Sundays open as a flex spot in case of that exact event. How can you not instantly be totally locked into this?

Still, no one is more locked in than Ryoga to his training—feeling embarrassed after Ranma absolutely wrecked him in front of Akane at the top of the episode. And after all, he loves Akane and wants to look cool in front of her—that's not only why he trains as hard as he does, but also, it's why he suffers through some of her absolutely vile homemade curry. Comedy doesn't usually age well, but there's a timelessness to comedy pertaining to “character is comically bad at cooking, everyone is forced to eat their food anyways” that still hits as hard as when the previous version of this show aired decades ago. Takahashi's expressive art style only makes it better.

Speaking of visuals, this reboot has always heavily emphasized style and bringing a lot of visual personality and flair to Takahashi's iconic romcom. That's not to say that it looked poor before (certainly not!) but the action scenes look more dynamic, and have even more style to them than usual—and naturally, I love that. It suits Takahashi's style perfectly.

Ranma ½ really is, as far as I'm concerned, the gold standard of anime reboots. The visuals look the best they ever have, and even to this day, nobody does romcoms quite like my queen, Rumiko Takahashi. It's simultaneously close enough to the original to make me feel nostalgic, while also being distinct enough to feel like its own thing. Not a lot of anime reboots can pull that off gracefully, yet Ranma ½ makes it look effortless. If this is a sign that this season will be anything like the previous seasons of this reboot, we're in for another set of fun episodes.

The Ranma ½ remake is back for Round 3, and it still feels like a miracle that this show has managed to stay so consistently charming. Considering that the anime still has a mountain of material from the manga to adapt, and the 1989 anime took a pretty noticeable nosedive in quality once a certain ancient sex pest started popping up in practically every other episode, I wasn't sure if it could maintain it's momentum from the first season, but against all odds the second season managed to survive Happosai's presence so it feels like the sky's the limit for what this adaptation could pull off. Since there's so much left to burn through, it's a little surprising to see this new season kick off by adapting an arc that the last one ended up skipping over, but it does look as though the team at MAPPA is opting to simply rearrange some of the material rather than cutting anything and while it's hard to know how long that'll continue to be the case, for now, it certainly seems to be working.

This new arc also lets us catch up with Ryoga, whose existence still continues to be littered with nothing but suffering. He's no closer to having his one-sided crush on Akane be reciprocated than he was last season, his sense of direction is still so bad that he couldn't make it to a door directly in front of him. Whereas he could at least manage to be Ranma's equal in combat previously (or at least one of the few people he struggles against that isn't Happosai or Colonge), that doesn't seem to be true anymore as Ranma's “training” from Cologne seems to have made him significantly stronger. All these indignities make it pretty easy for him to get tempted by Cologne's offer to train him in her latest attempt to force Ranma to marry Shampoo.

Since the last season didn't go all that heavy on the martial arts side of this show's martial arts comedy setup outside of Mousse, this seems like a pretty good excuse to watch these boys engage in some good old shonen fisticuffs. A lot of that looks like it's happening next week though and, in between all that martial arts training, we get plenty of the usual misunderstandings between Ranma and Akane when the latter offers to cook.

There are few romantic comedy tropes in anime more exhausting than that of “look at this girl who can't cook” so it really speaks to how well the anime staff is nailing the visual comedy that this whole sequence manages to actually be hilarious. Between how exaggerated the animation is with Akane dumping everything but the kitchen sink into her food and all the ghoulish sound effects, it's hard not to laugh at least a little bit—which has me pretty excited to see how far the rest of the season is willing to go with the gags. It is a little frustrating to watch this all end in another argument, but that's just a regular day for these two. Watching Ranma complain about how inedible Akane's curry is only to attempt to eat it all anyway is pretty cute—even if he probably should have just done that the first time. Even at it's most basic, Ranma ½ is a lot of fun—and although it's a little disappointing we'll have to wait a bit to see Ranma and Ryoga's big duel, if the previews are any indication, it'll be more than worth the wait.

Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma ½ was one of the very first manga I ever read. I snatched up as many Viz floppy comic issues as I could after my friend and I rented the Ranma ½ Hard Battle SNES game for a weekend, and I was won over by the insane humor, bright colors and bizarre character designs. It's not an exaggeration to say that, for a few years, I was obsessed. I'm really happy, then, that MAPPA's super-shiny and fun modern anime remake has finally got around to adapting one of my very favorite storylines: The Breaking Point arc.

I was worried they might skip it, as last season adapted some manga chapters from later volumes, but I guess it's not unheard of for adaptations to reorder chapters, especially from such an episodic source material. This particular story works so well because it centers the main trio: Ranma. Ryoga, and Akane—and their particularly weird love triangle/rivalries.

As a result of Ranma's training with Shampoo's great-grandmother Cologne, he's now so much faster than his opponents that he perceives them as slow. This is an issue for Ryoga, who feels humiliated in front of Akane when Ranma effortlessly beats him. The last thing Ryoga wants is to see a look of pity on his beloved's face.

Ever the opportunist, Cologne seizes the chance to train Ryoga in the hopes that, by besting Ranma, he can win Akane's affection, freeing up Ranma to marry Shampoo. The secret she wishes to impart? The terrifying Breaking Point technique that shatters boulders with the slightest touch. It's pure martial arts fantasy nonsense, but also about as serious and dramatic as this very silly show tends to get. Ryoga could potentially rip Ranma's body apart with such a move. Ranma does usually deserve a beatdown for his cocky attitude, but instant explosive evisceration is probably going a bit too far.

This episode's best animation sequence is easily Akane's cursed attempt at campfire cooking. The female protagonist being a poor cook is an overused trope these days, but I expect it was somewhat fresher back in the 1980s when first written. Everyone's reactions to her unintentional lethal poisoning is still very funny, and Ryoga's bloodshot eyes got the biggest laugh from my 15-year-old son whose only exposure to the series has been via this anime. Sometimes the old gags remain the best.

MAPPA's work on Ranma ½ remains top-notch, and I'm excited to see what other chapters they've planned to adapt in the upcoming episodes. As long as there's more Shampoo, please! She only appears for such a brief moment this episode, and she remains my favorite character after all these years!