Daemons of the Shadow Realm earns a second season after the finale
Yomi no Tsugai, Hiromu Arakawa's supernatural manga, is getting a second anime season, announced in Japan right after the season-one finale.
Daemons of the Shadow Realm is getting a second season. The announcement came in Japan immediately after the first season's final episode aired, in a super-teaser from Aniplex's own channel that runs through the cast before closing on the confirmation that season two is in production.
What the teaser actually confirms
The second season, and not much else. There is no broadcast window, no season and no streaming home attached to it, so any date doing the rounds online is speculation rather than a schedule. Crunchyroll streamed the first season with a same-day English dub and has said nothing about whether the second season follows it.
The team behind the first season
Arakawa's manga has been running in Square Enix's Monthly Shonen Gangan since December 2021 and has 13 collected volumes behind it. The anime reunites the three names that made Fullmetal Alchemist work: Square Enix, Aniplex and Bones. Masahiro Ando directs at Bones Film, Noboru Takagi handles series composition, Nobuhiro Arai designs the characters and serves as chief animation director, Koji Sugiura and Yoshiyuki Ito designed the tsugai, and Kenichiro Suehiro writes the score.
Kensho Ono voices Yuru, with Yume Miyamoto as Asa, Takako Honda and Rikiya Koyama as the twin tsugai called Left and Right, Yūichi Nakamura as Ryū Tadera, Miyuri Shimabukuro as Hana, Misaki Kuno as Gabu-chan, Akira Ishida as Asumi Kagemori, Junichi Suwabe as Jin Kagemori and Shin'ichiro Miki as Iwan Yosano. The first season ran 24 episodes across two consecutive cours on Tokyo MX, BS11, Gunma TV and Tochigi TV from 4 April.
Our opinion
Bones has now animated two Arakawa series, and the second is the harder sell: Yomi no Tsugai is quieter, stranger and far slower to show its hand than Fullmetal Alchemist ever was, and it still held its animation together across 24 episodes. Announcing a second season on the night of the finale, before the audience has had a week to miss it, reads like a studio that knows what it is holding. The worry is the calendar: Bones Film is not a large studio, and a production confirmed without a window is a promise with nothing behind it yet.