Winter 2026
12 January, 2026
The winter 2026 anime season gives us seven new isekai anime, along with one second season and one anime from a heavily isekai-associated franchise which holds many a fight in ‘mirror worlds’ – but so far uses said world mostly as a pocket dimension to avoid wrecking Japan in battles. We have a harem, a BL, a hetero romance, an aristocrat given a domain young, a super difficult video game made real, a dragon egg, a villainess, and maybe even a slow life.
All of these have been done before in full-length isekai TV anime except the dragon egg (but monster reincarnation has become its own sort of sub-genre, and its inspirations therein are fairly obvious) and the BL (although stories with a large fujoshi following, or gay male side characters, are nothing new – I was watching them in the 1990s!) but this season does run the gamut in terms of variety – the only thing commonplace in this era that’s missing is a reverse isekai.
(Unless we count Digimon Beatbreak, which we probably shouldn’t given the whole Sapotama thing - there's a mirror world in that anime, but are the digimon we meet truly even from there? Or Kanagawa ni Sunderu Elf, but it’s apparently a hidden forest, not a full world – plus it doesn’t have subs and I’m writing in English.)
Tensei shitara Dragon no Tamago Datta has a lot in common with Kumo desu ga, Nani ka., which clearly inspired it. This is not a bad thing. Being reincarnated as a weak monster and struggling to survive makes for a tense story, insofar as episode one of a full season can produce such a thing, and evolutionary trees is one of those game mechanics that’s more than worth ripping off. It was fun in Digimon, fun in Brigandine, fun in Kumo desu,, fun in TenSura and it’s fun here – character development’s always better when it comes with a literal change of form!
As for the stat screens and skills… it’s become a trope of the narou-kei era, for better or worse, and at this point has become almost routine; Tate no Yuusha’s anime started seven years ago, after all.
Our protagonist starts out as… well, an egg, and those stats are every bit as bad as they look. He even dies if he breaks the shell, instead of just hatching early.
One’s reminded of Digimon’s Digitamamon, but the first half of the episode would’ve been a heck of a lot easier on him if he could’ve used Nightmare Syndrome. But he turns the tables on the worm who was trying to eat him… with a nice ‘launch yourself at the enemy’ attack!
Which gives him enough EXP to evolve immediately… turning the title into something of a lie. I mean, I guess he was an egg when he was reincarnated, but he spends the overwhelming majority of the story as an actual dragon. There’s a divine voice pressuring him to become the strongest, so he picks the weaker evolution, Baby Dragon, because of its potential. Digitamamon, shinka, Lopmon?
He spends much of the next half of the episode hunting – but the worms taste disgusting, and at one point he tries a mushroom out of desperation and starts to build a poison resistance skill… from the poison. Eventually he finds wolves, though, and the nice thing about being a dragon is that you can cook your own food with your breath.
There are adventurers, they don’t communicate with the protagonist, and just view him as a monster and try to kill him. Which is just like… all the monster reincarnation series I’ve read/watched, come to think of it. But unlike Kumoko or Rimuru, this dragon doesn’t get the benefit of a secluded location to get his feet under him; he’s attacked in the first episode, only to be saved by the kindly priestess, Myria, who burns up all her MP to heal him.
And then she runs off, much like the adventurers (soon deceased) to protect what’s left of her party from a Little Rock Dragon (C rank, perhaps the evolution of Little Dragon, which was rejected in favor of Baby Dragon?), our hero chases afterward, and the episode ends on this cliffhanger. Doratama is an exciting, action-packed series and I very much enjoy the manga; I strongly recommend following its anime!
An encounter with a cute girl you like can be a life-changing experience, if less so than finding yourself in another world. I can’t say I agree with Yuusha Party ni Kawaii ko gatta node, Kokuhaku Shitemata’s protagonist, Yoki, when it comes to his taste in women – the mage is cuter – but it’s the priestess, Cecilia, who he falls for, and hard.
She persuades him to stop protecting the demon king – he never liked the role, was just pushed into it having been reincarnated as a demon and forced to fight for him – and now he has to makes his own way in a dramatically changed world, going from a powerful mid-boss to ordinary adventurer who hides his wings and broke off his own horn.
He ranks up to D fast enough to make headlines, but this is a problem in its own right; he has world-changing power, after all, and the world’s fallen into a power vacuum. Cecilia persuades him to quit the adventurers guild.
And he’s grateful to be called a friend, although he rejects Cecilia’s mother’s offer to marry her daughter, as everyone’s proposing to her and it’d stop the trouble... for now, because she isn’t ready yet and he wants to respect her feelings. Was just a test anyway.
These two are cute, there’s potentially some fun political developments in the background, and I look forward to seeing how their relationship develops!
The very concept of End of Service is, quite frankly, a scourge upon the video game industry. In a better world, where politicians regulated industries instead of taking bribes from them, companies would be required to at least release the code to the public for games they no longer intend to host servers for. There are Playstation and GBA single player games that people are still modding to this day, yet games from merely a couple years ago are quite literally unplayable, with people interested in the story having no alternative but to hope someone did a youtube playthrough or archived information on a wiki.
I bring this up not only because I can’t resist a good political rant, but because the protagonist of Hell Mode: Yarikomizuki no Gamer wa Hai Settei no Isekai de Musou suru sees the MMO he was playing end its service, and needs to find a new one. So he searches the internet. And the very promise of being ‘unending’ is enough to make him try this new game, albeit with some skepticism.
Naturally, he picks the weakest character class (summoner) on the hardest difficulty level (Hell Mode, hence the title; we don’t actually get the game’s name).
I’m not sure whether to call this isekai shoukan or isekai tensei – I mean, he’s reincarnated, it’s from birth and all, but he doesn’t actually die. Either way, Kenichi Yamada becomes Allen, a baby raised by loving parents in a family of serfs – and their social status is part of the challenge, it’s not just the greater EXP requirements, and there’s no charmed noble background to help him out.
If anything, Allen wants to make his family’s life a bit easier… being a peasant is hard work, and the existence of magic hasn’t fixed that. If anything, the general status of the peasantry is even worse than it was in real life, because his dad must hunt monsters in addition to the usual peasant problems… but then again, he survives the fight and it’s good food.
Allen learns to summon animals from a very young age, but hides this from his family to the best of his ability, although his grasshopper is the victim of his arachnophobic mother. We have a maddeningly familiar-looking summon card I can’t quite place, a fusion system reminiscent of Megami Tensei (no weird chimeras, alas, just a bird) and the summons themselves are quite cute.
By the episode's end, Allen is sparring with the neighbors' daughter, offering to help with the harvest, has a younger brother, and loves his family. It’s a nice upbringing, but I can’t help but assume it won’t stay that easy for him with a title like Hell Mode.
Okiraku Ryoushu no Tanoshii Ryouchi Bouei’s Van, on the other hand, *does* get reincarnated into an aristocratic background. Which is probably a bit more popular, at least in story-telling – who in their right mind wants to become a serf? This season even has a Kizoku Tensei: Megumareta Umare kara Saikyou no Chikara wo Eru, although I won’t cover it as it’s a case of same-world reincarnation.
But aristocratic wealth and power always came with a hereditary obligation to participate in high politics, with all the dangers therein.
Van comes across as a bit of a child prodigy growing up, and is a good kid who’s nice to his social inferiors and buys a slave because he’s being abused (and tries to free him, but the kid has nowhere to go; he becomes a good friend and important character.)
But when one comes from a family of fire mages, none of that is as important as demonstrating skill in battle.
For an aristocrat, the enmity of a parent, whether or not it is justified, can be life-ruining – especially when one is a younger son not in line to inherit. The part where that enmity comes about because he developed the wrong magic attribute at the age of eight, on the other hand, is entirely fictional.
Van’s father's disappointment that his most talented kid couldn’t follow in his military footsteps is understandable, especially given his family background and hereditary position. But he completely ignores the potential of production magic, to the point of pulling a sword on his own son, and it comes across as pure stupidity. It’s a stupidity not unheard of in fantasy anime, or in narou-kei LNs – watch something with “weakest class” in the title and finding it feels like a 50-50 chance, rising to a virtual certainty in the case of “kicked out of the hero’s party” – but I must admit that I am not fond of tropes which require important characters, or an entire setting, to act in a frankly idiotic manner.
In all fairness to this title, however, the hereditary, arbitrary, and fragmented nature of aristocratic power meant that when someone *was* both a ruler and a complete idiot, there was not much of anything that their subjects could do about it. And getting exiled to govern a remote but strategic village isn’t the worst fate; Van’s brother, Murcia, did have to intervene, but an idiot lord being talked out of terrible decisions by his competent son ultimately makes for a competently governed realm.
I quite enjoyed Tensei Kizoku, Kantei Skill de Nariagaru, I enjoyed the non-food parts of Okashi na Tensei, and Okiraku Ryoushu looks to be a story in a similar vein, with a good reincarnated kid trying to exercise political power. It should be fun.
Isekai no Sata wa Shachiku Shadai somewhat reminds me of Salaryman ga Isekai ni Ittara Shitennou ni Natta Hanashi - both protagonists are working adults whose considerable administrative skills transfer over to a pre-modern state in desperate need of their assistance. Both involve elements of romance. But there’s one major difference between the two. Salaryman Shitennou’s Dennosuke is surrounded by beautiful, scantily clad women… while Iseshachi’s Seiichirou is surrounded by good-looking, well dressed men.
Well, that and the fact that Seiichirou’s working for humans and not a maou, and an accountant’s a different role than a diplomat. But this is a country with serious budgetary and embezzlement problems – it just summoned a heroine, after all - and his efforts to fix them are enough to attract the prime minister’s attention.
The forms in the above image were previously being waved through.
Regarding the romance itself, one can see hints of what’s coming, and not only in the gender composition of the cast, but one can watch the first episode without realizing it’s a BL title, especially when one doesn’t know what to look for. There’s a difference between a friendly and helpful coworker… or another weirdly aggressive and good-looking one, for that matter – and a kiss or sex or whatnot.
This is still an isekai, and it’s worth noting there’s more to the story than just accounting and BL. Our hero is summoned by mistake – the heroine was the real target, but he heard her calling for help and came to rescue her. The country is extraordinarily apologetic, offers him whatever he needs as compensation, but the man is a workaholic who can’t stand the thought of time off. Which is a good thing for the country – it has serious budgetary problems, much of which came from a fund dedicated to supporting the heroine and protecting the country from long-dormant miasma – but on the other side, Seiichirou enjoys magic potions which let him not need sleeping, the guy’s drugging himself to get more work done.
He doesn’t get along well with the actual heroine – his attempt to warn the underage heroine (which seems unjustified anyway, this doesn't look like a sinister country with ulterior motives) seriously offends her; she’s a kind-hearted schoolgirl who wants to save people.
The miasma’s spreading at last, and our hero gets a promotion at episode end and collapses from exhaustion. I guess it’s kind of like evolving again. Anyway, there’s a lot going on here, and this should be a title with plenty of crossover appeal, even if you’re not into the romance part. (Then again, I didn’t get hooked on the manga...)
From what I’ve been able to determine on the internet, Odayaka Kizoku no Kyuuka no Susume is *not* actually a BL, but it, too, has a good-looking and overwhelmingly male cast.
And perhaps a paradigmic example of an isekai city.
This story doesn’t involve our world at all – it’s about a royal chancellor, Lizel, who goes from one fantasy world to another one, a man whose noble bearing and clothes give away his social status, but who has no territory or family with which to back it up, and sells his gorgeous, ornamented sword to supply himself with money. He’s even able to join the Adventurer’s Guild, forbidden to nobles to avoid political entanglements, after challenging their decision on the grounds that he has no legal noble status. He hires a powerful adventurer as a bodyguard/guide to this world/party member/definitely not a boyfriend, and spends his time trying to familiarize himself with his new setting – to the point of even wanting to buy books from the guild’s library (they’re free to browse, but he also gets pointed to a bookstore.)
It seems at first like a pleasant slow life story, but his fellow party member, Gil (nickname the Blade) does get into a fight with his former party members towards the end of the first episode. It might still basically be one, though, we don’t get much about what’s coming next week. I guess I’ll be discovering this world along with its protagonist, albeit through very different eyes.
Akuyaku Reijou wa Ringoku no Outaishi ni Dekiai sareru, unfortunately, does little to distinguish itself from other villainess titles in its first episode. An otome game fan is transported into a game she’s enjoying as the villainess, Tiararose. She loses her fiancee to the heroine, gets chewed out for bullying her, despite her attempted justifications of actions taken by her character before she actually got sucked into the game (of course you should bow, he’s the crown prince!)
Despite being the prime minister’s daughter, she's even sentenced to exile.
If anything stands out so far, it is not the otherworldly heroine, but the other character mentioned in the title – we’ve seen the rest of this opening episode many times, but not the part where the prince of a neighboring country intervenes, chews out the crown prince for dumping his fiancee at a graduation ceremony (it’s supposed to be a happy occasion!) and proposes to her.
I must admit that I’m not impressed by the first episode, but this story still has eleven to go, and the events in the rest of them can not be so easily predicted by the title. If nothing else, there aren’t any other villainess titles for it to compete with this season, so if you like the genre you might as well see how this one develops.
Mato Seihei no Slave feels quite different than most of the anime I’m chronicling – it’s a manga adaptation, not a light novel, and I can see no influence whatsoever from Shousetsu ni Narou! titles. But our Earth-born cast is still protecting isolated strongholds in another world full of demons called Shuuki. Including our hero’s older sister, who he learns towards the end of the last season has been... demonized? Demonicized? Anyway she's a Shuuki now.
As the 2nd season of a series whose first aired two years ago, much of the 1st episode is focused on reintroducing the cast; if you go back later and watch it all at once it’ll feel superfluous, but watching week-to-week, I do appreciate the reminder.
This is an ecchi harem, but the title character is a slave of many a superpowered warrior woman – and much of the ecchi comes from Yuuki’s magically enforced rewards.
And some of it does not; there’s only one proper way to show rivalry between women in this genre.
The character pictured above docking with Kyouka, Mira Kamuiten, is new. We’re meeting all the squad commanders, and the war is stepping up – all the squads meeting, headquarters under siege. It’s like a battle harem, Sekirei or something, but the girls are battling monsters in another world. With sinister human forces behind them. Good times.
Finally, Digimon Beatbreak, much to my chagrin, has not (yet) dragged its cast into the digital world for a prolonged period of time. It has introduced a “Mirror World”, which I think technically qualifies this for inclusion, but so far it’s just a pocket dimension they use to *avoid* wrecking Tokyo in digimon fights.
And yes, I know how backwards that sounds from a Digimon perspective. But we had the protagonist's strong emotions triumphing over an elite squad which preaches calm last week, in its 14th episode. We have a repressive government and orphaned bounty hunters – there’s a lot to like about its futuristic, cyberpunk real world, and plenty of themes in common with the rest of the franchise.
At least it looks cool! We even got a special maze in episode 13 when they were fighting BomberNanimon.
I’m very much enjoying this anime… but I'm still holding out hope for a full-fledged Mirror World (digital world) arc.
As I write this, the winter is cold and snowy, but at least we have nine other worlds to spend some time in – and I think literally all of them have a nicer climate. Stay inside. Watch anime. And enjoy!