The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Vertex Force

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Akira lives a peaceful life with his older sister Haruka and his mother, who runs a cafe. The family, however, harbors a secret — Haruka has inherited a power from her father called "Engine," and she hides that power from others. Akira, on the other hand, has not inherited his father's power, and he has an inferiority complex about it. Amidst this, strange events begin to occur around the world.

Vertex Force is an original anime series by director Kazuhiro Takamura and studio Shogakukan Music & Digital Entertainment. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

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Lucas DeRuyter
Rating:

Hey, so I get anime is gonna anime and all that, but can we take a second to acknowledge how weird it is that Vertex Force introduces a sixteen-year-old-girl as a main character and then immediately has an extended shot of her crotch on screen? While I do love how anime as a medium is able to more easily grapple with sexual material and themes as animation provides an extra layer of abstraction, this is extra not cool—and scenes like this are why anime as a medium still can't shake the skeezy reputation that defined it in the US for much of the 90s and 2000s. Furthermore, this creepshot appearing in Vertex Force is especially weird, as I think the show is otherwise geared towards tweens and early teenagers, making this episode feel tonally inconsistent.

Taking place in a world where an alien invader temporarily shuts off the planet's power grid, the story focuses on siblings Akira and Haruka Tōdō. The children of their more benevolent alien father, they possess the mysterious “Engine” ability. The older Haruka has a greater mastery of this power than Akira and can manifest a hovering robot but, when a creepy giant robot baby attacks them, Akira awakens his power and creates metal gauntlets that let him defeat the surprise foe.

I should probably withhold judgement until we have a greater sense of Vertex Force's powerset and characters, but this opening episode did not leave a great impression. Right now Engine powers seem indistinguishable from how Stands work in part three of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which isn't great since shonen action writing has come a long way in the thirty-plus years since the introduction of “psychic ghosts that wail on people” as a concept. Furthermore, Akira is pretty boring as a protagonist and only defined by his inability to use his powers for much of this episode, while Haruka is just kind of whiny and annoying when the show isn't sexualizing her.

I guess I'm a little curious to see what's going on with that psychic alien lady whose design looks like an exact middle ground between Tatsumaki and Fubuki from One-Punch Man, but I think that's more due to her being a pretty, weird lady than anything the show sets up narratively. While this sucks to say about one of the few original anime we get in a season, unless things shake up soon I think Vertex Force is set to be pretty forgettable.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

What's the worst part about Vertex Force? Is it the crotch-forward introduction of sixteen-year-old Haruka? The CG that can't quite handle faces? The clumsy lore-dumping? Those are all bad, sure, but for my money, the absolute worst thing here is the subtitles. Behold two examples of Crunchyroll having some serious collision issues at two different points in the episode. The latter is annoying, but there is a brief moment when you can read that the word underneath is the translation of what's written on Mom's apron. The former? Just a mess. They switched software for this?

Of course, there are probably worse shows where they could have had this issue. Vertex Force has some interesting ideas, but it's sadly lacking in execution and, dare I say, forethought. Pardon me if I sound old and cranky, but I didn't have indoor plumbing until I was six years old. I lived rurally, so we lost power all the time. And you know what? I did just fine. While I can understand that Haruka may feel like a smartphone is necessary for life and that it's inconvenient for planes not to fly, my dad was navigating to the mainland without GPS for most of his life and part of mine. (But we will not speak of the Kazoo in the Fog Incident.) Life goes on, even with the event called “Power Down.”

That, as I said, may just be me being cranky, but it really feels like the writing is straining to make the rest of its plot somewhat credible. I'm not sure that it was strictly necessary, however – Akira and Haruka's dad could have come from a different planet that suffered a catastrophe without it. EDVA, whether the living bobble-head robot or the white-haired woman we see a few times, would have been just as bad, and Haruka could have inherited her dad's Engine powers all the same. It smacks of making the worldbuilding more complex than it needs to be, and that's really too bad. I like the idea of Engine (always treated like a proper noun without an article before it), a sort of mecha marionette that hovers above Haruka and moves as she does. It's a neat take on the formula, and when Akira acquires the version that's more attached to him, it broadens the technology in an interesting way. The living robot is also pretty great in a horrifying way; it bleeds and drools but appears composed of mechanical parts. There are some genuinely good ideas here.

Unfortunately, even without the subtitle issues, the episode squanders these things. The entire middle section is composed of info dumps as the kids unironically draw a chart of what their mom told them about their dad, and there's a whole subplot with a goat that doesn't really make sense. I could see this maybe surprising me in episode two, but right now it feels like an anime designed to sell toys to a demographic that may be into rather different toys. Seriously, episode two needs to calm down about Haruka's groin.

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James Beckett
Rating:
I honestly couldn't place the name of SMDE Studios when I looked up the production credits for Vertex Force on the handy-dandy Anime News Network Encyclopedia, but then I realized that I have definitely seen their work before in works like The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim (an underrated flick) and The Duke of Death and His Maid. Now that I can add the first episode of Vertex Force to their filmography, I feel confident saying their 3D animation is pretty okay, bordering on good. In the case of Vertex Force, they're going for the effect of mimicking the look and feel of a traditionally animated TV show, so it's hard to say whether some of the stiff movement and odd shot composition is actually intentional, but either way, the end result is an action/science-fiction cartoon that looks just decent enough to get the job done for its target audience of pre-teens with money to burn on cool robot merchandise. Whether you take that as a recommendation or a warning likely depends on how much you're willing to put up with to watch robots do cool stuff for several minutes every week.

I suppose I should say that pre-teens with expendable income are the presumable target audience, since the show's camera has a noticeable tendency to get all up into the cracks of its female characters' crotches, which can only mean that the animators are doing their work with a decidedly different set of viewers in mind. I feel like most anime viewers have developed a natural autoimmune response that causes their brain to just skip over the prurient asides of otherwise innocuous cartoons, so I doubt this stuff will be a complete deal-breaker, but just go into Vertex Force knowing that it's going to be one of those anime that might be very hard to explain to your normie friends and family that sit down with you one week to check out those newfangled annie-mays that the kids are always going on about.

I'm a professional critic who has to put up with the pervy inserts no matter what, and I do happen to be a fan of big robots getting into fights, so I spent much of the meandering first half of Vertex Force's premiere anxiously waiting for Haruka and Akira to finish going through the school-day motions so we could all start playing Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Robots. About ten minutes in, I kind of got my wish, and Haruka summoned her cool “Engine” and saved her little bro from an exploding helicopter. We have to sit through a bunch more exposition and at least one more Steadicam crash straight into Haruka's large intestine before the nifty skeleton-robot-thing comes out of the ocean and demands to brawl with our heroine.

Thankfully, once the action does get going, Vertex Force ends up being perfectly acceptable junk-food entertainment. The choreography is clean, and the camera frames the all-too-brief bout well enough to make me confident the show might have a genuinely good setpiece or two up hiding up its sleeve. The jury's still out on whether the by-the-numbers story and distracting fanservice will make Vertex Force more trouble than it's worth, but it's at least worth sticking around for one more episode.

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