PSYREN #01 — Tonguing Public Pay Phones
October 5th, 2026
Someone has a taste for diseases.
Impressions:
Very slow first episode where, once again, you could've skipped probably the first 19 minutes and only improved things. Certainly the extended self-introduction about all the ills of modern society and how they don't matter to him because he's a bad dude with a heart of gold was something we could've done without, as was the initial mysterious phone thingy only to have a second mysterious phone thingy only for him to just randomly stumble into magic land anyway. It's finally time to fight… aaaand we have no animation budget. Sorry. Have a couple stills.
Not an exciting start, and doesn't seem to have any kind of budget either. There isn't a lot that you expect from shounen, but those two feel like the absolute bare minimum. We don't even get to the magic powers or the setting. Something to do with phones, I guess. The girl has a sword? That's really it. Stay tuned for the next episode for the actual info dumping. …Nah.
Next Episode:
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Judging by these images, the extended plot and 1/3 of chapter 2 were adapted, so the adaptation’s pacing is reasonable. It’s the source material that meanders, but no one stopped the studio from improving it. Shonen Jump’s Bleach × Seinen Jump’s Gantz colliding into a PG manga is such a 2000s idea, and it has a rushed ending. The ultimate 5/10 manga. Shueisha couldn’t be bothered to make sure their medium hits had enough time to wrap things up until fairly recently, so this one got an epilogue light novel by another author to provide some closure, with the artist involved. Just like Bleach.
The Bleach revivial sidesteps the LNs, aside from featuring overlapping backstory material from Kubo himself not in the rushed final arc that the LNs could use, so who knows how Satelight will conclude this 16 Vol series plus the 2 LNs. Add the gaiden/epilogue novels, and suddenly you have 50 episodes staring you in the face—and only kids’ shows or mega hit adaptations get runs that long now. Or a functional 39 episode compromise, like a lot of JoJo, with a revised final arc, like Bleach. But make this a full adaptation with only 26 ep and you might as well not bother.