The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Yoroi-Shinden Samurai Troopers Season 2

When the seal of the Demon Realm shatters, demon soldiers surge into the Human World, tearing through everything in their path. Five young warriors rise to meet the invasion, summoning their legendary armor and charging headfirst into battle. With every clash, they cut through the invading demon hordes, unleashing their power to drive the invasion back. They are…the Samurai Troopers!

Yoroi-Shinden Samurai Troopers Season 2 is based on the Legendary Armor Samurai Troopers media franchise by Hajime Yatate (Sunrise). The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

Is Samurai Troopers a good show? Absolutely not. Is it a fun one? Although the answer is subjective, I'd say yes – it's the kind of self-serious silliness that reminds me of Saturday mornings and a bowl of sugary cereal, or after school with a bag of chips. It's inextricably intertwined with junk food, and on that front, this first episode of the new season delivers.

Picking up three months after the season one finale, the story finds the Troopers struggling (more or less) with the losses of Gai, Mirei, and Ryusei, none of whom have come back to life, despite most other people having done so. Their new boss, Narumi, is obnoxiously hard on them while fawning all over the original Red Trooper, Jun's gone off on a walkabout, and there doesn't seem to be any place for them anymore. So naturally, a new barrier goes up around Tokyo to give them purpose.

The episode attempts to blend serious and silly, with admittedly mixed results. When the boys head off to the Demon Realm to figure out what's going on, they're met with a remarkably mundane place where they're considered the bad guys, despite having taken out the corrupt king. This is juxtaposed with them dealing with sad thoughts of Gai as they finally gain context for some of the things he said (and yes, I think he was right about Musashi and the zabiru), but also with Ramaga's former soldiers not having a clue what the humans are going on about. The mood is all over the place, as if the episode is trying to remind viewers of the various narrative tones from season one. It's fun, but it doesn't exactly work. I did love Kaito's scream-singing as he hacked at Gai's petrified corpse, though. That is the right blend of moods.

The reveal of the true villains, the gods, does make a certain amount of sense. If you look at ancient polytheistic pantheons, the gods are rarely all good, and they may not even be that invested in human welfare. Inmei's announcement that they think humans and demons have screwed up the world beyond repair and are going to start over from scratch is less of a shock and more of a shrug – I mean, they're not wrong. More surprising is that Ryusei has apparently ascended to the pantheon and has been hanging out with the gods, or at least someone who looks like him has. He doesn't strike me as the kind of person who would give up on humanity, so I suspect this is a clumsy attempt to draw a parallel between him and Gai – or rather, Ramaga in Gai's skin, with one becoming a god and the other a demon. Not World Fantasy Award-level stuff.

But you know what? I had a good time with this anyway. The new theme song can't hold a candle to the first, but this isn't a show you watch for the stellar writing and plotting. It's Saturday morning fare, and I'm ready to grab my cereal bowl and watch another season.

Given how the first cour of Yoroi-Shinden Samurai Troopers only barely managed to pull into the station, continuing was a…questionable prospect. I don't doubt that the story was planned for it in the first place, with seeds (not even present in the classic series) like the Divine World planted for further developments. But it could still be hard to square that feeling with the one gleaned from how the story actually unfolded, as Shōgo Mutō's writing felt so on-the-fly at times—skewed even further by the show's often irreverent sensibilities. It was, simply, a mess.

So it is to the new season's credit that it opts to settle down and do some housekeeping on said mess upon its return. Three months have passed since the climactic battle with Ramaga; the remaining Troopers are working to rebuild everything that got wrecked, and they're still reflecting on how they got here and who they lost along the way. Any old fans hoping for action from the now-rescued original Troopers will be disappointed, as it's declared that most of them simply went back to their old lives off-camera. Nasti and Jun have similarly been sidelined (more than they already were, anyway), with Nasti serving as a sounding board for a recap but otherwise replaced by a cute new bespectacled tsundere commander. I like her, which means the show has even odds of killing her off in a spectacularly stupid way before this block of episodes is over.

Speaking of those deaths, that's the remnant of the preceding season that Samurai Troopers is invested in analyzing a bit before this episode's action gets going. Yes, it is funny (not in a ha-ha way, but more of a cosmic sense) that all the incidental and background characters killed as puppets came back, while the main characters who were murdered stayed dead. But as Shion speculates, there is a rhyme and reason to this—and not for nothing, but calling attention to these characters like this honestly makes it conspicuous that they might be considering a comeback…which is fulfilled by the end of this episode.

Of course, even the action itself is eased back in with a bit more calculation than I had become accustomed to in Samurai Troopers. After observing AURORA BOREALIS, AT THIS TIME OF DAY, AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, IN THIS PART OF THE COUNTRY, they're ostensibly going on the offensive in the Demon World to head an invasion off at the pass. But, as with the human-world segments, this is also about observing how rebuilding unfolds. Even the Demon Soldier mooks can behave more like people now, and there are touchpoints to the aside elements of Demon World Culture that Gai peppered his speech with back in the first season. Musashi picks up a cute new pet, and there's an element of curiosity before the remaining five of the Ten Warriors show up to escalate things as expected before the premiere ends.

I mean, I'm extremely happy to see Sasuke again, alongside everyone else, and there's always something funny about the bad guys in a show like this going "Actually, it wasn't us this time" when it comes to some nefarious plot. The fight that follows is obligatory anyway, and honestly, the CGI for so much of the Trooper-fighting in this show looks even rougher than I remember it months ago. And then, of course, it just can't help itself when it comes to sudden swerves. Okay, the Divine Realm being the actual antagonists for this instance was obvious; they've been setting up their extremist approach to handling humanity for a while now.

That's an escalation built in and primed for a second wave of episodes. But then it turns out that Ramaga had a fourth health bar, and now he's back as well, which feels absurd in light of everything that happened at the end of last season. It's so exhausting in its application that it sucks the wind out of the momentum and reduces the other shocking character return at the end of this episode, Ryusei (told you about referencing those previous character deaths), to barely a "Wait, what?" moment.

In that respect, Yoroi-Shinden Samurai Troopers really is back, same as it ever was. It's action-figure logic wrapped around writing that can occasionally get the basic blocks arranged interestingly or emotionally enough—with important musical interludes still conspicuously lacking in lyric subtitles, of course. There's enough here to morbidly pique my curiosity about where this batch of episodes will go by the end, but I can already feel myself getting exhausted by it.