Mera×Death brings Monster Strike back to television on 5 January 2027
MIXI's anime portal has published the key visual and promotional video for Mera×Death: Shinigami to Boku no Ijou na Koi, confirming a 5 January 2027 broadcast across ten terrestrial stations.
MIXI has put a date on the next Monster Strike anime. Mera×Death: Shinigami to Boku no Ijou na Koi begins on Tuesday 5 January 2027 across TOKYO MX and nine other terrestrial stations, with streaming to follow and the full broadcast timetable still to be published.
What has actually been announced
The franchise's anime portal published the key visual and a promotional video for the series on 27 September, along with character art for its two leads. Ten terrestrial stations are planned in total, and the portal says detailed broadcast information will be released later. Streaming is confirmed but the platforms are not.
Who is making it
Kenta Kushitani directs, with Yoshio Kato credited as advisor. Daisuke Ohigashi handles series composition and scripts. Tadashi Sakazaki designs the characters, Masayuki Honda looks after props and creatures, and Azusa Sasaki is on colour. Norifumi Nakamura is art director, Asuka Fukada leads CG and Takuma Morooka shoots it. Ichiro Chaboshi edits, Fumihiko Otori is sound director with Magic Capsule, and Masaru Yokoyama, Kana Hashiguchi and Natsuki Hamada write the music for Miracle Bus.
Two studios share animation duties: Qzil.la and studio keel, with ARCH producing. The original work is credited to Monster Strike itself rather than to a manga or novel, which puts this in the same lineage as the web shorts that have run since 2015 and Monster Strike: Deadverse Reloaded, the franchise's first terrestrial series.
The story underneath the title
The setting is the city of Ouma, where a large explosion six years earlier somehow killed nobody, and where a mysterious sphere called the Glass Sun floats overhead. Mera Kagari is a high-schooler living at the Meshia diner on the Tomisaka shopping street, introverted and prone to gloomy fantasies but honest underneath. On his sixteenth birthday he meets Thirteen, a aloof girl with a taste for spicy food, and his monochrome routine starts filling in colour at precisely the moment the city begins to misbehave.
Character visuals were released for both leads alongside the key art. The portal is also carrying the production credits in full, which is unusual this far ahead of a winter premiere and suggests the schedule is settled rather than aspirational.
Our opinion
Monster Strike's anime has always been a shop window for a roster of several thousand characters, so the notable thing about this announcement is how little it depends on that roster. Mera and Thirteen are new people with a two-line premise, and the hook is a love story rather than a tournament. That is either confident or reckless depending on how much of the audience comes for the game's regulars and how much comes for the world. The dual-studio arrangement with Qzil.la and studio keel is worth watching too: splitting animation across two houses is common on tight winter schedules, and it usually shows in consistency long before it shows in the credits. As a January slot it has room to grow, because the season's heavy hitters tend to arrive in spring and autumn. The risk is not quality but reach: a date-first announcement with no platform names attached leaves a lot of the audience waiting to find out whether they can legally watch it at all.