The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life

Narukami Ryusei is your typical NEET. He spends his days shut in his room playing video games without a care in the world, living a lazy life. But the truth is, Ryusei used to be a powerful demon king in another world. He wants to spend this new life doing whatever he wants, except that he wasn't the only one reincarnated into this world. The hero who struck him down is here too—and she's a really cute high school girl.

Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life is based on the manga series by Hekiru Hikawa. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Have you ever heard the surface level pitch for a show or movie, immediately thought that it was up your alley, and then realized in growing horror that the way the work executes on its ideas is downright repellant to you specifically? That was my experience watching the first episode of Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life, a reverse isekai RomCom that's sure to appeal to any millennial or zillenial weebs who remember The Devil Is a Part-Timer! fondly, but is almost assuredly not going to reach the heights of the work it's clearly informed by. This is largely a bummer, as this work has visuals far above what is expected for this kind of genre fare, a soundtrack that manages to be distinct without being distracting, and an English Dub that's clearly having a lot of fun with the material given to them.

Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life is the story of Ryūsei Narukami, a NEET who is secretly the reincarnated Demon Lord of a fantasy world, and Meteor (yes, really) Hanaori, the reincarnated hero who defeated him. When Hanaori shows up to his home and demands that he gets his life together, Narukami becomes a teacher at the all-girl school that Hanaori just so happens to be attending. However, as the two have this secret connection that bonds them, most of the people around them just assume that the two are in a budding romantic relationship; which might not be all that far off from how their relationship is actually developing.

My biggest issue with the premiere of Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life is how the show normalizes a teacher-student relationship. Beyond the implicit power dynamic, it's really weird that most of the supporting cast sees what they think is a romantic entanglement between an adult man and a teenage girl, and their first thought is to ship them rather than call the police. Half of my issues with this premiere would be alleviated if it were instead set in an explicitly collegiate setting or in a workplace environment with a mentor-mentee dynamic, but this kind of framing just feels like a problematic dinosaur in 2026.

The English dub for this episode, while home to some very fun and energetic performances, is also filled to the brim with English internet slang and colloquialisms. There are lines in the dub like, “I choose violence” and “epic fail,” which, while fun, really make this feel like an anime made principally for the terminally online. If that's you, this will probably be a fun, breezy watch; but I can't recommend this series to anyone outside of that demographic.

After finishing the second episode of Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life, I now realize that this work is fundamentally a parody of isekai, romcoms, and tropes found more generally in anime. This is super illuminating and helps me reframe my expectations of the show now that I understand it's principally a comedy. However, this episode actively bored me multiple times and isn't all that funny.

This episode primarily sees the reincarnated hero Hanaori and demon lord Narukami reacting to transfer students Takigawa and Kuraishi sniffing out a secret relationship between the two of them. However, they are also under the impression that this adult man and teenage girl are in a romantic relationship, and because neither of them calls the police like normal people would, I immediately dislike both of them. I also don't care for this episode trapping Hanaori and Narukami in a locker together, with the former concerned about urinating on the latter. Maybe it is the consistent reluctance expressed by the lead characters to every new development in this show, but I found this scene to be super rote especially as other RomCom fair from this season, like The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You, do such better job of understanding what makes sexually charged scenes work and letting their freak flag fly.

This kind of romxom parody also feels incredibly redundant after Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! successfully subverted the genre just a few seasons ago, and parodies of isekai just feel weird considering one of the most popular isekai for the past decade, KonoSuba – God’s blessing on this wonderful world!!, is a parody of the genre! While I guess it is technically novel that Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life is a reverse iseki romcom parody featuring meta humor and characters who constantly comment on anime tropes, every part of this show has been done better elsewhere!

It also doesn't help that, while every EN VA on this show clearly has chops and I can't wait until they have better material to work with, the localization of this episode is even more “internet words” heavy than the premiere. While I'm usually a fan of anime incorporating modern slang in their localizations, as I think teenagers should actually talk like teenagers in fiction, this anime feels like said teenagers spend way too much time on forums with weird politics. Especially with the visuals and music dipping noticeably in this episode, I'm eager for Hanaori-san to fall way to the back burner of this season.

My doctor has advised me several times now to avoid any anime with the words “Next Life” (or any functionally equivalent and proximal synonyms), since the constant outbreaks of hives and shingles they induce for me are starting to get out of hand. When I learned that Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life is actually a reverse-isekai in the vein of such classics as The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, though, I told my doctor to shove off and threw the stacks of bills and release forms in the trash. The odds of this show not actively blowing chunks had just skyrocketed. Most of these reverse-isekai are at least watchable, and “watchable” is something I can absolutely work with.

The premise is still nothing new, but it's less overdone than the usual isekai trash, and Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life is allowed to lack in novelty since it's trying (and mostly succeeding) to be a wacky romantic comedy. Ryūsei Narukami was once the evil Demon King that brought wrath and ruin to a fantasy world, but now he's just a loser NEET who spends most of his time playing video games. Meteor Hanaori was once Meteor the Hero, brave and valiant foe of all things evil and wicked, but now she's just an everyday high-schooler who spends most of her time bullying Ryūsei for being too chickenshit to keep their fight going. Obviously, they are meant for each other. The English dub does a good job of sustaining the original performances' casual chemistry. Mauricio Ortiz-Segura is doing the same “Vaguely Matthew Mercer-sounding Generic Male Lead” voice that a lot of male actors are asked to fall back on these days, but he still gives the Demon King some personality. Kelly Greenshield also does well at balancing Meteor's haughty, aggressive attitude with some of the more shrill, absurd reactions she has to sell.

The one element of the pair's relationship that some viewers may find odd is the show's choice to have Ryūsei finally get a job as a teacher in the high school that Meteor attends. Given that the characters are technically both several decades older than anyone working in or attending the school, I don't really think Meteor and Ryūsei's relationship is disturbing or improper. It's just playing on an archetype that not every viewer finds especially romantic or sexy. Do with that information what you will.

When you are watching a premiere like this one for Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life, there are really only two questions that matters for most of the audience: “Is the main couple cute?” and “Will I be entertained by their antics?” In this show's case, I think the answer to both those questions is “Yes.” This is a bright, funny, energetic sitcom with a likeable pair of leads and a magical twist that ought to comfortably slot right into your schedule if a cotton-candy palette cleanser is what you're looking for.

James Beckett
Episode 2 Rating:

The first episode of Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life was a colorful if fairly standard reverse-isekai romantic comedy that was mostly anchored by the likeability of its two reincarnated leads. Meteor and Ryusei are better main characters than a lot of lesser anime get, and their chemistry goes a long way (even if the arbitrary inclusion of the student/teacher dynamic is a bit odd). Would you be surprised to learn that the second episode is basically more of the same? I didn't think so. Still, our job is to explore what these new shows have to offer beyond just the premiere, so off we go.

Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight's main goal this week is to bolster the supporting cast with all of the regular(ish) folks who populate our heroes' school and shouldn't be any the wiser about Meteor and Ryusei's shared history as fantastical warriors from another world. This, of course, leads to typical sitcom scenarios like when our main duo has to squeeze into a locker together to spy on some suspicious new girls who seem to be on to them. What saves the show from falling ill with a terrible case of been-there-done-that-itis is, again, its irreverent tone and surprisingly funny humor, especially with the English dub. The new characters go on about “rom-commerie” and the need to prevent Ryusei from developing a cliched harem while Meteor gets lost in thoughts of finally vanquishing her mortal enemy with her magical heroic urine. The show is clearly not trying to be taken even a little seriously, so we are much more likely to brush off pesky questions like “How the hell did Ryusei not get instantly fired just now?”

We also get some more insight into the lives Meteor and Ryusei lived before they reincarnated, which is cute, but here is an aspect that I honestly wish the show was doing even more with. The fantasy twist to the leads' relationship is the main thing that separates it from the competition, but all of the details of Meteor's heroics and Ryusei's villainy are mostly relegated to snappy dialogue and a few barely-animated flashbacks, save for one very brief monster attack at the end of the episode. It's still good fun, but I can't help but feel like there's still a lot more entertainment value that the show can mine from the past and present fantasy fare. The reveal that Meteor's new classmates are secret mages is a start, but I hope Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life takes some even bigger swings as the season continues.

How much loud can you tolerate? If the answer is “lots, and make sure it's a pink-haired girl doing the yelling,” then please add a least one star to the score. If the answer is the opposite of that, probably you'll want to skip this one, because it's mostly about Meteor (the pink-haired girl) yelling. Whether or not you think she comes by it honestly is an open question. In the past, she was the hero in a JRPG world, tasked with defeating the demon king…who has also been reborn in modern Japan, as a NEET (and later teacher) named Ryusei. She's either bored enough or determined enough that she thinks she still ought to fight him. He's, shall we say, less convinced.

Honestly, I find this set up rather annoying, but that's mostly because Meteor herself is so irritating. She's not very good at listening to other people and very good at denying her own feelings, which means she's on Ryusei's case a lot and busy denying that her wall-slamming him has any meaning beyond their past lives. To his credit, Ryusei is pretty good about just sort of letting her nonsense wash over him, even if he wishes she'd tone it down at school. He is her homeroom teacher, after all. (So add a student/teacher romance to the reverse isekai genre!) The one scene that made me laugh in this episode was when he and Meteor were talking (mid wall slam) and agreed to keep their past lives “between the two of them,” at which point another teacher walked by, misunderstood the secret, and said it was between the three of them, at which point the camera zooms out and it's between the four of them, and by the time the scene ends, even the campus cat is in on what isn't actually the secret at all. It's a wonderful escalation and hopefully means that the show will quiet down and be funnier going forward.

Apart from one aspect of Meteor's design (those yellow specks in her hair, like she just walked through a forsythia bush), this does look nice and slick. I like the uniform designs and Ryusei's transformation from NEET to teacher, and the two scenes where his sister walks by his open door at just the wrong moment are pretty great. But for the most part, this left me cold and annoyed. I guess I'm just striking out with the comedies this season, with the notable exception of Bungo Stray Dogs Wan!.

Have you ever wished you could mute just one character in a show? That's how I feel about Meteor. Sub or dub, the girl is just so loud that she sucks all the air out of the room. While I wouldn't say I love the rest of what's on offer here, she's definitely the biggest barrier to me enjoying what jokes I do find funny. Although, in all fairness, her realizing that she was less “hero” and more “outside observer” for most of her missions in her past life was one of the gags that made be chuckle this week.

If there's one thing that can be unequivocally said about this show, it's that it absolutely knows its genres and tropes. As far as I'm concerned, that's the best piece of it; whether it's Meteor having flashbacks to her past and recognizing what archetype she actually fit, the subtitles gleefully pointing out what tropes are currently in play, or Kuraishi's impressive devotion to turning this into a Class S yuri series without icky man people, there's a real breadth of knowledge underlying the jokes. This is a show by genre nerds, for genre nerds, and I appreciate that as an unabashed genre nerd who once went on a tear about how “romance” and “love story” are not the same thing. (This, it must be said, pales in comparison to a friend's hill to die on, that “sci fi” and “science fiction” are two separate genres.) It's here that the gags really work best – Takigawa pulling out a bottle opener as her wand before casting the world's most basic attack spell genuinely made me laugh. And hey, that's one more laugh than episode one!

That said, this is still a lot, a hodgepodge of jokes, images, and references thrown at your face at high speed. It feels like about four different shows stitched together, and unlike actual crazy quilts, the lack of cohesion is not a feature, it's a bug. To a degree, it's as if someone heard that attention spans are shrinking and decided to make a full-length anime based solely on that tidbit. The result is a lot flying at you with only a few things sticking the landing. It's overwhelming, and while this episode is better, it's still very much not tickling my funny bone.