Toshiaki Iwashiro’s supernatural battle manga ended its weekly Shonen Jump run in 2010. For years it existed in that strange category of series that anime fans kept bringing up whenever the conversation turned to manga that deserved an adaptation. Now after all that waiting PSYREN has finally made the jump to television.
The anime premieres in Japan on October 5 with international streaming available through Crunchyroll outside Japan and China. More importantly the production has confirmed that the anime is planned to adapt the manga all the way through its conclusion.
PSYREN isn't a short manga, the original series ran for 16 volumes following high school student Ageha Yoshina after discovering a mysterious red phone card connected to the disappearance of his childhood friend Sakurako Amamiya. What starts as a strange missing-person mystery quickly turns into something much bigger, involving the organisation known as Psyren and a dangerous world where survival is very much part of the game.
The anime is being produced by Satelight with Katsumi Ono directing and Shin Yoshida handling series composition. The cast includes Rikuya Yasuda as Ageha and Mayuko Kazama as Sakurako along side Shunsuke Takeuchi, Soma Saito and Yukihiro Nozuyama also joining the main cast.
Infact PSYREN was nominated three times for AnimeJapan's Manga We Want to See Animated poll and that's a pretty good indication of how long fans have been asking for this. The manga may have ended more than a decade ago but people never completely stopped asking what an animated version could look like and now we finally get to find out.
For longtime fans this is the adaptation they kept asking for but everyone else, it's a completely new series arriving from an era of Weekly Shonen Jump that produced plenty of titles people still talk about today.