Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life Is Better Than Its Premise and Worse Than Its Talent

The best joke in the first episode of Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life is a reaction shot. Ryusei Narukami, an unemployed gamer in his late twenties with the posture of a man who has not opened a window in a week, is told by a teenage girl that she is the reincarnated hero who killed him in a previous life and she would like a rematch. Jun Fukuyama plays the response as pure exhaustion. Not shock, not denial. The specific tiredness of someone who has just been handed one more thing.

That is the show at its best, and the show is at its best fairly often. Four episodes in, I keep wanting to recommend it and keep running into the same wall.

What it actually is

Hanaori-san premiered July 12 and airs Saturdays, streaming on Crunchyroll. Liden Films is animating, Hideyo Yamamoto directs, Yukie Sugawara handles series composition, and the score is a joint job from Yukari Hashimoto and R.O.N. Masayoshi Oishi does the opening, "High Maintenance Girl," and Maaya Uchida closes it out with "Very Good Encounter."

It adapts Hekiru Hikawa's manga, which has been running in Kodansha's Morning Two since August 2021 and is ten volumes deep. Seven Seas starts putting out an English omnibus in October, which is good timing for anyone who finishes the season and wants to keep going.

The premise is a reverse isekai. Narukami is the reincarnation of a demon lord. Meteor Hanaori, a high schooler, is the reincarnation of the hero who defeated him. She finds him, in his apartment, in modern Japan, and wants to finish what they started. He does not. He then, through a chain of events the show handles briskly, ends up teaching at her school.

That last beat is the problem, and I will get to it.

The craft is genuinely above the line

Let me be specific about what Liden Films did right, because the default assumption with a light comedy like this is that the animation is a delivery mechanism and nothing more.

It is not. The character acting has weight in it. Narukami's apartment is drawn like a place someone actually lives, with the specific geography of a small space arranged around a desk. Hanaori moves like an athlete, which matters, because half the comedy depends on her physically being a threat and the show never lets you forget it. The uniform designs are clean and the school looks like a school rather than a set of hallways.

The comic timing is the standout. Yamamoto is holding shots a beat past the punchline more often than not, letting reactions breathe, and the show is much funnier for it. There is a version of this material that cuts fast and shouts, and it would have been unwatchable. This one is patient.

Hashimoto and R.O.N are also doing something more interesting than the genre requires. Hashimoto has a track record with comedies that need a slightly askew musical personality, and pairing that with R.O.N's harder rock instincts gives the fight beats an actual identity. When Hanaori goes at Narukami, the score treats it like a real fight scene while the visuals treat it like a bit, and the gap between those two registers is where a lot of the humor lives.

Fukuyama, meanwhile, is doing career-grade work in a show that did not need him to. His Narukami is not a schlub archetype. He plays the character as someone with an enormous amount of history he has decided not to access, and every so often a line lands with the weight of a man who used to be something. That reading elevates scenes that on paper are just apartment banter.

The two things holding it back

Akira Sekine's Hanaori is loud. Deliberately, characterfully loud, and I understand the choice, because the character is meant to be an unstoppable force crashing into a stagnant life. But she dominates scenes at a fixed intensity, and over four episodes the lack of a lower gear starts to wear. The moments that work best are the ones where the show lets her be quiet for ten seconds, and there are not enough of them. Whether this reads as delightful or grating is going to be the single biggest predictor of whether you finish the season, and it is close to a coin flip.

The larger issue is the teacher-and-student setup. The show wants an excuse to put these two in proximity every day, and it picked the one framing that puts a permanent asterisk on everything.

I have seen the defense, and it is not nothing: both characters are functionally centuries old, and the emotional relationship the show is building is between a demon lord and a hero, not between a teacher and a teenager. Fine. That is a coherent reading of what the story is doing internally.

It is also not how the frames look. The show is set in a high school, it draws Hanaori as a high schooler, it puts Narukami in front of a classroom, and it plays their dynamic with romantic-comedy grammar. You cannot invoke the visual and structural language of a school romcom and then ask the audience to apply an off-screen metaphysical correction to it. The manga has ten volumes to earn that. Four episodes of anime does not, and the show keeps reaching for the exact gags that make the discomfort loudest.

The frustrating part is that the premise did not need it. A reverse isekai about two ancient enemies stuck in modern civilian life has plenty of reasons to keep them in the same room. The school angle buys convenience at a real cost.

The dub note

The English localization leans hard on internet register. There are lines built out of phrases that were funny on a timeline three years ago, and they land unevenly. The performances are committed and the cast is clearly enjoying itself, which counts for a lot in a comedy, but if you are allergic to that dialect of localization, the sub is the safer choice here.

I do not think it is a failure so much as a bet. The show is being pitched at an audience that will find "extremely online" phrasing native rather than dated. Whether that audience still exists in the size the localization is assuming is somebody else's problem.

Where it sits in the season

Summer 2026 is stacked. Saga of Tanya the Evil II and Though I Am an Inept Villainess are trading the top of the rankings weekly, Bleach is closing out a decade of buildup, and Mushoku Tensei is in its third season. Hanaori-san is not going to beat any of that, and it is not trying to.

What it is is a well-made B-tier comedy with an A-tier lead performance, which is a category anime does not fill nearly as often as it should. If your season is otherwise all heavy sequels, twenty-two minutes of Jun Fukuyama being tired at a girl who will not leave is a genuinely nice palate cleanser.

Just go in knowing what the setup is. If the teacher framing is a line for you, it does not get less prominent, and I would not bet on the anime solving in twelve episodes what the manga took volumes to make sit right.