Winter 2025 — What Held Up and What Didn't

Winter 2025 wasn't a bad season. It also wasn't a great one. The word that keeps coming to mind is "adequate" — which, depending on your expectations, is either reassuring or slightly depressing.

We watched twelve seasonal series through to completion or until they made it clear what they were. Below is an honest account. This isn't a ranked list — ranking seasonal anime in February feels premature and slightly absurd — just notes on what we thought.

What actually held up

Frieren continued its second cour without losing momentum, which is the main thing you'd want from it. The pacing remains unusual for a shonen-adjacent show — slow, deliberate, occasionally too quiet — and that's still working. Whether you find it meditative or dull depends heavily on what you want from a weekly watch. For what it is, it's well-executed.

Solo Leveling got a lot of attention going in, which is almost always a liability. The adaptation was polished — the production studio clearly had a budget and used it — but the source material's flaws came through clearly by episode six or seven. Not bad. Not as good as some of the coverage suggested.

What fell apart

Two series that looked interesting in their first episodes ran into the same problem: premise exhaustion around episode five. There's a pattern in seasonal anime where a show introduces an interesting concept, can't figure out where to take it structurally, and starts filling runtime with things adjacent to the core idea. Both of these did that. We won't name them specifically because it would just generate arguments, and because neither was badly made — just directionless.

Quietly better than expected

The show we'd point to as the underwritten one of the season was a slice-of-life series about a craftsperson that aired in the second half of the schedule. Unremarkable premise, patient execution, better character writing than you'd expect. It finished its run having done exactly what it set out to do. That's worth something.

What this season said about the current state of things

Winter seasons tend to be lighter, and this one was. The bigger productions arrived in spring and summer. That's consistent with recent years. The more interesting pattern is how much variation there is now in production quality within a single season — the gap between the best-looking and worst-looking shows has widened noticeably over the past two years, which reflects what's happening in the industry more broadly.

We'll have full individual reviews on the main standouts over the next few weeks.