The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Clevatess Season 2

One of the Lords of Dark Beasts, Clevatess's reign shatters when he revives a hero he personally slew and adopts an orphaned humanoid baby—the last hope to save a dying world. Now bound together, what fate awaits this unlikely trio?

Clevatess Season 2 is based on the Clevatess: The King of Dark Beasts, the Baby, and the Undead Hero manga series by Yūji Iwahara. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

Note: The reviews below are based on an early screener provided by Crunchyroll. The anime series will premiere on July 8 at 9:00am EDT.

Clevatess was such a wonderful surprise when it premiered last year, with its excellent dark-fantasy aesthetic bolstered by genuinely compelling characters and some fascinating lore. The titular demon dog of destruction himself makes for a very cool antihero, so when the second season ended with the promise of Clevatess and his party infiltrating a private magic academy to continue influencing the development of the young Prince Luna, I was excited. If any show was going to put a unique spin on such a tired trope as Wizard School, I figured it would be Clevatess. Plus, the new mission gives the show an excuse to put Alicia in an adorable Haiden disguise. How is anyone going to complain about that?

Before we get there, the premiere has to take some time running back the consequences of Drel's defeat at the end of last season and the political fallout of this messy war across the nations of Clevatess' setting. While this is a useful bit of table-setting and recap, I must admit that even just a year removed from the first season, all the proper nouns and characters we have to keep track of as this diplomatic conference between the nations gets underway are a lot to take in. On the plus side, this all serves as a great reminder that Clevatess' dark fantasy influences are not merely skin deep. This series has put a lot of effort into developing a unique and compelling fantasy universe that stands as a cut above so much of the light-novel slop we have to put up with every season.

Once all of the politicking is out of the way, we have our setup for the season: Under the pretense of “sharing magical knowledge,” our heroes will need to infiltrate the Divine Academy Solsein to search for whatever dark secrets Drel hid away before his defeat. It also gives Clevatess the chance to learn enough about mortal magic in the two years until Luna comes of age to need a tutor. It's simple enough, and it works as a next step in Clevatess' master plan—both regarding the characters and the show.

In between the usual funny banter and fighting between Clevates and Alicia, we've got just a whole mess of new characters to meet and storyline possibilities to set up as we arrive at Solsein. This is my least favorite part of these sorts of school/training story arcs, since I already have to take notes to keep track of all the characters we already know. Adding nearly a dozen new ones in the span of just one episode always feels like overkill. Still, Solsein is brimming with promise as a new hub for the gang's adventures, and I appreciate how clearly it is tied into the overarching narrative established so effectively in season one. If Clevatess can continue building on all of this momentum, I do not doubt that Season 2 will be one of this season's must-watch anime adventures.

Has it really been a year since the first season of dark fantasy anime Clevatess began streaming? Somehow, it doesn't seem like that long since everyone's favorite snarky Beast King and his pet hero last graced our streams. The first episode of the second season heavily references the first season's events but doesn't seem interested in coherently recapping them, leaving forgetful viewers to fitfully reassemble the pieces. Starting with a random flash-forward featuring a bunch of characters we don't yet know doesn't really help either, although the visuals of Clevatess (as his alter-ego Klen) standing atop an enormous, spontaneously erupted Dark Spire are pretty cool.

It looks like this season's main setting will be a magic school, which doesn't exactly fill me with unfettered glee. Magic schools are a trope done to slow, painfully lingering death in anime, and the show will have to do something pretty damned exceptional to maintain my attention. The way that Clevatess starts this new arc, by introducing a bunch of apparently exceedingly generic cookie-cutter characters in quick succession, makes me roll my eyes.

There's Nathan Franc, a shy underdog: Tygel and Leon Blouyer, a pair of tiresome blonde bullies. Sarasa is an overconfident midget in the Teoritta (goddess from Sentenced to Be a Hero) mold. Ray Forester is a mysterious and overpowered white-haired kid who shoots Klen a stinkeye glare that could curdle milk. At least Naei Chiffonlits (yes, that's her name) is vaguely interesting. She's a former magic school student who I think did appear as a minor antagonist in season one, but I can't remember much about her. She, Klen, and Alicia share a history, and it's in none of their best interests to rat out the others' true identities.

Klen and Alicia are attending magic school in the hostile foreign nation of the Boelate Empire as part of a peacekeeping deal. Last season, main antagonist Drel caused all kinds of havoc, though his emperor claims not to have known about his actions. Beis Werz, the Boelate Emperor, seems like an untrustworthy sort, especially as the attendant he takes to the meeting between the three main countries' rulers is a slavering thug, a bandit leader high on the thrill of violence. I find one-note characters like that deeply uninteresting.

Drel apparently had a creepy secret lab somewhere in the grounds of the magic school where he experimented on the children of animals and beasts, so Klen and Alicia are sent undercover to investigate, while also learning magic. Klen did agree to teach baby Luna magic, but he has to learn it first! How better to do that than as a transfer student? Also, poor Alicia's body is “carved down” to child-size by Klen without consent. He still didn't fix her damaged eye, though. Aww, at least she looks kind of cute.

I have to admit, I'm not super enthused by the promise of this rather pedestrian first episode, and I'm not overly interested in the setting or plot so far. Perhaps things will look up in the second episode?

Dark fantasy can be a difficult genre to get right, and especially so in anime and manga, where Berserk has cast a long shadow for decades, with many a series failing to imitate it. Whereas Berserk manages to balance its hefty amount of suffering with a sense of humanity towards its characters, many of its contemporaries end up reveling a bit too much in suffering for suffering's sake, with the resulting edge tending to come off as childish rather than mature.

With that track record being so spotty, I was pretty happily surprised at just how much I ended up enjoying the first season of Clevatess. A lot of that ended up coming down to its choice in protagonist, as rather than strictly following the hero Alicia and her doomed quest to slay the dark beast Clevatess, we instead follow the perspective of Clevatess himself who doesn't quite get why all these humans keep trying to kill him, and decides to try more about them by looking after an infant prince in the midst of an ensuing war. That lense largely works in the show's favor as while its certainly not free of the gore or sexual violence that dark fantasies tend to be known for, using it all as a vehicle for Clevatess to slowly understand the negatives and postives of human nature help it to use some of that darker material for some solid storytelling, while also keeping it from reveling too much in said darkness for the sake of it.

With all that going for it, and its visual style doing a fairly good job of replicating the look of a late '90s fantasy anime, it's not too much of a surprise that it ended up doing well enough to get a second season, but I was more than a little surprised to see the shift in setting for this new season. Rather than continuing from the three-way conflict that took up most of the first season, this one goes for…a magic high school set-up. Now, to be fair, it is a good deal more complicated than that implies, and much of the premiere is spent carving out those details.

While “Klein” (Clevatess) might have managed to save baby Luna from being killed by the Boelate Empire, and secured a job as his magic tutor, the aftermath of the war comes with its own problems as the king of Boelate has no real interest in entertaining the idea of offering any reparations, and attempts to mostly wash his hands of his commander Drel's actions in aiding one of the other Dark Beasts, Vordin. He does, however, offer up the opportunity to investigate what kind of magic Drel was dabbling in, and to track down the secret lair where he was performing magic experiments, which just so happens to be located on the grounds of Boelate's magic school, Solsein. All this leaves Klein and Alicia trying to pose as students to find it, while also giving Klein a chance to learn how magic works so he can actually do his job as a magic tutor when the time finally comes. It's certainly not a bad setup. I do like some of the subterfuge going on with just how many of the new faculty members are spies, but this does still mean trading a high fantasy setting for a more restrictive magic high school one. And while magic high school shows can certainly be good in their own right, that does feel like a bit of a downgrade, which the back half of this premiere doesn't do too much to help with.

While it's pretty funny to see Naie from last season continuing to be a failgirl and being coerced by Boelate's king into posing as a teacher so she can find Drel's lair before the Hidens do, the students here don't make a great first impression, and especially the pair of blond twins Tygel and Leon, who so far don't really have anything going for them beyond being loud and annoyingly aggressive. Still, Clevatess did enough in its first season to win me over, so I'm willing to see where it goes in this new direction. Hopefully, whatever lies in store for this new semester is worth attending summer school.