Kimura plays Nagakura Shinpachi in January 2027 anime

The official X/Twitter account for the original television anime project Inherit the Winds (Kaze wo Tsugumono) revealed on Wednesday that Ryōhei Kimura will play Nagakura Shinpachi (historical Japanese characters’ names are rendered family name first).

The anime will premiere in January 2027 on the “Agaru Anime” programming block on CBC, TBS, and 26 other affiliated networks. There will be an early theatrical preview screening in 2026.

The anime will star (historical Japanese characters’ names are rendered family name first):

The anime takes place in the Bakumatsu era in Kyoto. A solider who has lost his memories is aided by the famous Shinsengumi member Okita Sōji. Okita Sōji names this man “Tachikawa Jinsuke.” Jinsuke’s life begins anew amidst the Mibu soldiers.

Yutaka Narui and Aniplex are in charge of the original story with cooperation by Azuki Mashiba. Tomohiro Kawamura is directing the anime at Live2D Creative Studio and Drive Inc. Narui is also writing the scripts. Fumi Ebina is the character designer, and Shigeru Kishida is composing the music.

The anime’s four-panel manga adaptation launches on Star Seas Company‘s Twi4 (read as Tsuiyon) X (formerly Twitter) account in 2026. Matsuri Muramatsu draws the manga.

Narui is a playwright and founder of the theatrical troupe Caramel Box who has previously worked on many stage plays themed on the Shinsengumi. While one of the plays was also titled Kaze wo Tsugumono, the way the title is written is different (with “mono” being written in kanji for the play and in hiragana for the anime), and the anime is still listed as being an “original” TV anime.

Source: Inherit the Winds anime’s X/Twitter account

Dead or Alive 6 Last Round is a solid game, but a fundamentally mishandled product.

This is a game that has multiple layers worth discussing. I mean, all games are more than merely gameplay. There are the aesthetics, the soundtrack, monetization, all sorts of caveats and considerations that have to be taken into account. That’s nothing novel. Dead or Alive 6 Last Round has to tangle with two additional factors, though: it is a fighting game and a revision of an older title at that.

First, the core gameplay. I played the core game of Dead or Alive 6‘s orginal release a decent amount. I was by no means an expert or even an intermediate player—it was and is a somewhat niche fighter despite the series’ overall visibility, and most folks were more eager to play other fighting games on offer. I messed around with it a bit on my own and enjoyed it well enough, but my attention moved on before I got a full sense of the game. Last Round is, from what I can tell, a faithful rerelease almost to a fault. I certainly couldn’t feel any difference in gameplay, nor could I find any notes about extensive rebalances or changes. It is the original game more or less, and that’s not a bad thing.

Dead or Alive 6 is a great game, and Last Round does nothing to change those fundamentals. It remains what the original was, a continued refinement of a long-standing series which obviously branched off from Virtua Fighter‘s fightmordial ooze and followed a unique developmental path. You have the relatively simple scheme of punch, kick, black, and hold buttons, with various combinations and directions creating bespoke attacks. Simple chains make mashing an option, with the hold/counter mechanics rewarding good reads of opponent behavior. There’s some light meter management, 3D-fighter considerations like sidestepping and orbital/homing moves, all the standard fare that one would expect.

In practice, the game feels very good to play. I can’t speak to its overall competitive integrity, of course, but the series always has had players competing, running tournaments, and exploring the system’s nuances. It has a good back-and-forth flow to the fights that keeps the attacker and defender engaged. The action looks explosive and over-the-top even when doing relatively simple strings, and there’s the obvious appeal of lots of beautiful characters bouncing about with massive… normals.

The mode selection is solid too. Versus mode is the core of any fighting game, and there are various local and online modes with ranked, casual, etc. The story mode is present and, uh, a gloriously good time, not despite but because it is a completely delirious experience. I have no clue what was going on, and frankly, I don’t want to know—it’s better that way. All that matters is that every six seconds or so, right around the time your frontal lobe is beginning to engage and you might realize you don’t know what’s going on, an absurdly dressed character will walk into frame with ragdoll physics, bouncing bazookas in directions never before imagined.

The real standout for the package is the DOA Quest mode. This is similar to World Stage mode in Virtua Fighter, where you play through a series of increasingly difficult CPU opponents. The difference here is that you have set challenges for each fight, which include winning the fight but often using certain mechanics, doing combos of a given length, or other special conditions. In effect, they are like mini-achievements, and completing them unlocks later fights as well as additional currencies to unlock costumes. It’s incredibly helpful that after each fight, if you missed a particular challenge, it provides a single button press to jump to that section of the tutorial to remind yourself of the input or practice the timing again before retrying the challenge. In short, it serves as something of an extended tutorial and single-player mode all at once, allowing you to spend a lot of time battling the entire cast, trying out new characters, and earning costume unlocks.

The visual presentation has been upgraded. The visuals seem a bit crisper and less blurry, and it’s more noticeable in direct side-by-side comparisons. That said, the original release for Dead or Alive 6 did not look bad at all, and the upgrades are not so drastic that I can actually tell while playing. I didn’t notice much improvement while playing, but when looking at older shots side by side, I can tell a slight difference. Overall, I’d call this an improvement, but it’s so subtle it’s very hard to notice. It’s especially hard to appreciate any visual fidelity upgrades given the speed of the matches—these ladies are shmooving around at Mach 1 and roundhousing kicking each other, not much time to key in on the finer details.

The game’s cost is also not bad, at least at first blush. It is currently US$39.99 at the time of this writing, and there is even a free option to try out a few core cast members before buying. While forty bucks for a rerelease of an older title isn’t exactly a budget option, it’s certainly a long way from a full-priced release, and with a free option to try before you buy, it all seems rather fair. And there will be future DLC releases with new characters, meaning the game will continue to be supported and offer fresh excitement—a necessary component of any multiplayer experience.

So we’ve got solid fundamentals, plentiful modes to engage with, and a price that won’t break the bank. What’s the catch? Isn’t this a slam dunk?

Ah… ahhahahaha… oh, no, I’m afraid not. Despite my hopes for the series to return to prominence, Dead or Alive 6 Last Round can hardly get out of the starting gate with all the albatrosses around its neck.

The game lacks rollback netcode and crossplay. These were once luxuries—certainly around the time of the game’s original release. These days, however, it basically makes the game a non-starter for multiplayer, as online play is severely compromised and the player base is isolated by platform. This was already going to be a smaller release compared to the other big fighting games dominating the space. There was already an uphill battle ahead to carve out a community for a game (and a series) that had gathered a thick layer of dust in recent years. Without rollback and crossplay to nurture the community, it’s basically a non-starter for a paid rerelease of an older game.

On top of that is the DLC framework. Having to unlock costumes through gameplay is one thing, and, to be fair, many costume unlocks are possible without paying. But the game is chock-full of paid costumes—many of which were in the original title! Mai and Kula are characters you had to pay to unlock as well, even though they were in the prior release as DLC. This adds a huge cost barrier for new and returning players, both competitive and casual. Yet another fault line that leaves the game on shaky ground when the series needs all the help it can get to build momentum.

No rollback, no crossplay, paid base roster characters, paid costumes everywhere… it makes one wonder why they even bothered with a rerelease. Sure, there might be future characters coming, but there are so many points of friction between the competitive and casual dimensions of the game that it’s hard to imagine it picking up any steam. We live in an era of abundant fighting game availability for old and new gamers, where competition for players’ time is as fierce as the early 90s heyday. Even fighting games that check all the boxes struggle to survive in this environment! Dead or Alive 6 was a good enough game when it released in 2019, and Dead or Alive 6 Last Round is that same game at its core. But Koei Tecmo has essentially rereleased the same 2019 game into the 2026 environment without making any adjustments to meet the moment, and what might have been good enough once upon a time is not sufficient for a paid product in the current market. Dead or Alive 6 was a good game, and it’s still present within this shell. But Dead or Alive 6 Last Round is a bad product.

I’m a little conflicted on whether to recommend Science SARU‘s impressively faithful adaptation of Masamune Shirow‘s 1989 cyberpunk police procedural Ghost in the Shell as a good place to start for new fans, as opposed to previous animated entries in the franchise. For fans of a certain vintage (like me), the manga, as first published in English by Dark Horse, was the obvious starting point, but it was soon followed by Mamoru Oshii‘s tremendously influential movie, which has arguably done more to cement the concept of what Ghost in the Shell is among the general population.

Where Oshii’s movie is cerebral and philosophical, with a deliberately oppressive dark green color scheme, and often blank-faced characters pondering the nature of their own existence, the manga is a far lighter affair, full of silly humor and exaggerated facial expressions. The serious bones of the story are still there, but Oshii stripped them back for his film, succeeding in producing an example of true cinematic art, but perhaps losing a little of its soul in the process.

The differences in approach to the same material between Oshii and new director Mokochan are jarring, even from the first few seconds. Both versions begin with franchise poster girl Major Motoko Kusanagi, a total body cyborg conversion special operative, assassinating a corrupt politician before falling gracefully from an upper skyscraper window, her silhouette vanishing before the eyes of astonished onlookers, concealed by her iconic thermoptic camouflage. Where Oshii’s version is dark and mysterious, enhanced by Kenji Kawai‘s atmospheric score, Mokochan‘s interpretation is bursting with light and color, accompanied by screamingly upbeat jazz. As a statement of intent to fans familiar with the franchise, it couldn’t be more clear: “We’re doing Ghost in the Shell our way, whether you like it or not.”

Thankfully, I like it. A lot. There are some caveats for new viewers, however. Although this adaptation maintains amazing fidelity to the source material, in an attempt to cram almost everything in, from every panel, snippet of dialogue, to even Shirow’s infamously dense infodump footnotes, it’s surely an overwhelming experience for those unfamiliar with the
franchise. Explanations whip past in the blink of an eye, and everything is moving, all of the time. This means it’s one of the most wildly kinetic thrill-rides I’ve ever seen in a TV anime production. The 1995 movie has some amazing action sequences, but Science SARU‘s approach is altogether much looser, their style like the free-form jazz of anime: experimental, wild, and unpredictable. Perhaps that’s why the wonderful soundtrack suits it so well. It’s not limited to jazz either – there are buzz-saw guitars, heavy rock, and symphonic orchestral compositions all thrown into the dizzyingly eclectic mix.

What has kept Ghost in the Shell relevant for almost forty years is its mix of genuinely entertaining characters, a detailed, convincing world full of just-about-plausible future tech, and a heartfelt commitment to exploring the effects of said tech on human beings, whether ground-level civilians or top-class cybernetically enhanced government operatives. It’s a
world where garbage men still patrol the streets clearing up black bags, where people still shop at physical markets, mothers walk their children in strollers, and cops return home totheir families after a hard day’s work. Beneath the high tech veneer of internet-connected cyberbrains, AI-driven multi-ped think tanks, and cyborg bodies, there’s an organic world that carries on, one with continuity to a history not unlike our own (give or take a couple of extra non-nuclear world wars).

Mokochan‘s take on the material rips all of the funny little details from the background of Shirow’s panels and places them directly on screen. Not even Kenji Kamiyama‘s justly celebrated Stand Alone Complex TV series translated Shirow’s world to this extent. What Stand Alone Complex did right, compared to Oshii’s film, was to integrate Public Security Section 9’s brightly-colored AI-powered Think Tanks to animation. Much as in the original manga, they’re known as “Fuchikomas” here, colored red, as opposed to the blue “Tachikomas” in Stand Alone Complex. Regardless, they serve the same purpose, and
function as a way for the story to explore the concepts of artificial intelligence. Major Kusanagi has always expressed a degree of caution towards these machines’ development, and there’s a particularly amusing sketch featuring them in episode three that parodies the idea of robotic insurrection. As usual, the Major is one step ahead of everyone around her, including the AIs.

These first three episodes are quite oddly structured, but that’s a result of slavish fidelity to the manga’s structure. Between them they adapt the first five manga chapters, including the short prologue and two other short skits. That means two full-length chapters, that could probably have been adapted as two episodes, are instead slightly clumsily spread across three. It makes for a somewhat bitty viewing experience that’s better consumed all in one sitting (no matter how overwhelming) rather than weekly. This is only a ten-episode series, so the seven remaining must adapt six full chapters and a short epilogue to
complete the story. Hopefully that can be achieved in a slightly more coherent structure.

One other challenge to audience understanding relates to Amazon‘s limited subtitling software, which frankly isn’t up to the job of successfully translating such an information-dense series. The subtitled version eschews any attempt to translate the myriad on-screen text, which is sadly essential to explain some of the more esoteric technical dialogue. This is less of an issue in the English dub, as the text does receive a (blink-and-you’ll-miss-it) translation. Much like with the original manga, each episode is worth watching twice in order to catch all of the details. Both casts do a great job with their performances. Maaya Sakamoto, who performs as Motoko Kusanagi, also played her in previous series ARISE, and as the child version of Kusanagi in both the 1995 movie and Stand Alone Complex. The English-language cast is entirely new to the franchise, but mostly fit their roles exceedingly well.

Movie fans will recognise many familiar story beats here, from the interactions between the core cast members of Public Security Section 9: capable leader Major Kusanagi, muscular Batou, newbie Togusa, and mature chief Aramaki, to the portentous mentions of the “Puppet Master,” who will definitely remain relevant. Even familiarity with the individual
story components and characters doesn’t mean this is a redundant production. This version of the Major is far more human and emotive, and as a result much more likeable (as well as unpredictable). I’m not too sure about the wisdom of giving the Fuchikomas human-like mouths, as they look kind of silly… and cursed, if I’m honest. The use of Fuchikomas in reference to the Dancing Pug meme in the third episode is hilarious and unexpected, though.

We even get more of a glimpse into Kusanagi’s personal life than we have in any other animated version. She’s canonically bisexual, and while Stand Alone Complex did have her girlfriends Kurutan and Ran cameo, they didn’t feature to quite the same explicit degree as they do here. Episode two features a TV-friendly adaptation of the infamous censored-by-Shirow-himself-in-some-versions VR lesbian threesome scene that somehow remains almost as uncomfortably moist and shiny as the original. I mean, if you’re going to do a full-on faithful Shirow adaptation, you need to include the pervy bits too, I’m afraid.
Ran and Kurutan also show up later in episode three, as Ran gets a new cyborg body with Kusanagi acting as a witness (a legal requirement in this world to ensure continuity of identity during body replacement procedures), and Kurutan as nursing assistant to the oddly blue-skinned doctor. The fetish-adjacent nurse uniforms are also true to the manga. The trio’s later high-spirited conversation delves into unsettling existential depths as Kusanagi expresses concerns about her own (and by extension Ran’s) human identity. Such tonal incongruity is one of the things I love most about Ghost in the Shell, and so far,
this gorgeous adaptation has absolutely nailed it. I’m sure its hyperactive, day-glo, wildly variable tone isn’t for everyone, but as far as I’m concerned, director Mokochan seems to be precision-engineering this anime specifically for me.

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The Ghost in the Shell is currently streaming on Prime Video.