Review: “Sakamoto Days”: My Personal Favorite Anime of Winter 2025

The Sakamoto Days manga was an immensely acclaimed Shonen Jump title. Fans have declared the mangaka Yuuto Suzuki to be the greatest action choreographer since the legendary Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragon Ball. Fans were eagerly awaiting the adaptation, expecting something to compete with Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen, or Chainsaw Man. Fan enthusiasm plummeted when TMS, considered an “average” studio, was announced as the ones behind the adaptation. The visuals of the end product were indeed average to somewhat above average, but the manga’s faithfully adapted story and characters carry this show to make it well worth your time watching it. This show is available on Netflix.

So what is this show about? Well, it’s about a retired assassin named Sakamoto who opens his own convivence store and attempts to live a peaceful life in retirement. After marrying his wife and living a peaceful life, he declares to never kill again in order to please her (she says that she would be very displeased if he were to kill). The thing is that because of his past, lots of people want to kill him. Despite his retirement causing him to live a sedentary lifestyle and gain lots of weight, he still is very good at violence, just non-lethal violence this time. He fights using everyday convivence store supplies and Suzuki’s creative fight ideas are very exciting to see onscreen, even if the animation behind them is never as spectacular as the moves themselves. It’s still cool to see Sakamoto catch a bullet with chopsticks and similar ridiculous feats you see in anime.

Also in the cast are the other wacky personalities who work at Sakamoto’s store. Shin, a mind reader, and Lu, the daughter of a Chinese mafia boss who knows martial arts. A later addition to the cast is skilled sniper Heisuke and his pet parrot Piisuke. These characters are all fun additions to cast and each get memorable fight scenes to show off their skills.

So far, the series consisted of very short 2-3 episode stories featuring the “villain of the week.” None of the antagonists really stood out as much as the protagonists as they really didn’t as much screentime to shine. I anticipate the possibility of a longer-lasting overarching story and villain as it is common in battle shonen to start off early arcs as a way to introduce the main heroes and show how tough they are by outclassing minor villains before the “real story” begins.

Season one has mainly been about moving from setpiece to setpiece and joke to joke. Both setpieces and jokes tend to be very memorable and a showcase of great a storyteller Suzuki is. We have a fight scene on a roller coaster that ends up moving to a Sentai stage show, a fight scene against a dinosaur skeleton at a natural history museum, and more wild and over the top action scenes. As for jokes, we have classics like the scene at the video tape rental store and a villain of the week attempting to kill Sakamoto and Shin at a bath house. All the wacky stuff that happens in this show is amazingly entertaining. The random cliffhanger in the “casino arc” that ends this cour didn’t feel like the best cliffhanger to end on, but that’s an easy flaw to forgive as even some of the best anime tend to end their cours on awkward stopping places (Dan Da Dan cour one comes to mind).

The English dub seemed like a weird hit and miss experiment. The Matt Mercer is a well liked voice actor, but I didn’t feel like his reusing of his Jotaro voice from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure entirely fit the character even if both characters are broadly in the “tough guy” archetype. There was lots of gimmick casting for the main cast, consisting of actors who don’t normally do anime (including Dallas Liu from the live action Avatar: The Last Airbender as Shin and Rosalie Chang from Turning Red as Lu, and Xolo Maridueña from Blue Beetle and Cobra Kai as Heisuke). The performances are serviceable, albeit not particularly memorable. It’s still a listenable dub.

Overall, this was probably my personal favorite anime of Winter 2025 even if the masses seemed to flock to the more lavishly animated Solo Leveling season 2. I know expectations for animation quality have been sky high, but there are far more stiff and bad looking animated series out there. I personally had fun with the show even if TMS is no Ufotable or MAPPA. More Sakamoto Days fun coming sometime in July.