The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Wind Breaker Season 2

Haruka Sakura wants nothing to do with weaklings—he's only interested in the strongest of the strong. He's just started at Furin High School, a school of degenerates known only for their brawling strength—strength they use to protect their town from anyone who wishes it ill. But Haruka's not interested in being a hero or being part of any sort of team—he just wants to fight his way to the top!

Wind Breaker Season 2 is based on the manga series by Satoru Nii. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

An advantage to Wind Breaker's first season awkwardly ending just as a new story arc was underway is that this new season can jump straight into the action. Sakura gets the boys back in town to head down to one of those warehouses where they film tokusatsu fights for a big brawl with KEEL. There's only a bit of a preamble power walk and some trash talk before the biggest group fight yet seen in this anime erupts—and that's discounting the cold open, which just throws audiences right into the most dire, dramatic moments of the throwdown that's going on. Wind Breaker immediately returns to doing what it does best.

Granted, if you were somehow coming to Wind Breaker for any reason other than snappily designed boys punching each other real good, this lack of an eased-in return might leave you wanting. The series has had other qualities, to be sure, but they aren't necessarily putting their best foot forward here. The sections of characters standing around sharing dramatic exchanges look noticeably stiff and rough—and even the big brouhaha is backed with clunky CGI extras shuffling back and forth with one another. Moreover, the dark interior of the warehouse put a murky filter over everything that didn't quite pop with energy the way I hoped for from this show.

All that said, the individual blows traded between named characters, including a whole host of new minibosses introduced for KEEL, still look pretty good, and characters show off their distinct fighting styles, like my man Kiryu's graceful moves, as well as Suo getting to fight opponents on a bit more even footing. And even as it's easy to lose track of all these guys in the smackdown sauce, the general sense of how the tide starts to turn against Furin—and how the arrival of Kaji and pals re-turns it—is palpable.

The ideas powering that turn haven't quite crystallized beyond what the preceding few season one episodes spent time setting up, though. Sakura's got an arc going alongside his first outing as grade captain—and learning to be responsible for his team subordinates is counter to his strong independent streak. This has to get drilled into him by Kaji, who swoops in to steal the spotlight for a bit this episode on Sakura's behalf. So, Sakura falls by the wayside in a premiere episode that's supposed to be a major marker on his journey.

He's not the only one hit by the efforts at ensemble focus, as this episode presumably tries to rope viewers back in from the last season—there's just a lot going on in general. Nire gets a moment to try stepping up, too, but perhaps comes off more hilariously ineffectual for his efforts. I get the sense that this is plotting a bigger arc for him in the future. But for now, it just speaks to how sacrifices like him or Anzai only seem to exist here to get dropped for the benefit of bigger, badder boys who are already competing for the spotlight themselves.

So it's a busy second-season start for Wind Breaker. It's still pretty entertaining, despite how down I may seem like I'm being on it. I think this is a symptom of putting this at the top of the new season after the trailing-off of the previous one. As an episode on its own, it's an engaging entry into the action portion of this new story—and there are at least some palpable signs of growth from these guys who can otherwise only communicate their emotions through their fists. The sense of escalation helps, and I'm interested in seeing how far it can go with that and meeting all the other good "punch pals" who will push the story along.

The Backwind Delinquents are back for another season, and it feels like they never left. I mean that literally, as this premiere picks up right where the first season left off, and since that was right at the start of a new arc, I can imagine plenty of folks might have forgotten some of the details during the break. Thankfully, the episode's content is pretty straightforward, as Sakura leads his new crew into breaking into the turf of another gang called KEEL to rescue one of its members who's been abused by his bosses. This raid ends up going south pretty quickly when the Bofurin boys end up outnumbered, and while they're able to make up the difference thanks to the team's strongest members, that backfires when Keel brings out some heavy hitters of their own. While things seem pretty dire, the situation turns back in Bofurin's favor when the second-year leaders arrive to lend a hand, and Sakura is determined to give one of Keel's leaders a well-deserved punch to the face.

If it feels like I'm doing a whole lot of recapping here, it's because there isn't a whole lot going on here beyond some good old-fashioned delinquent violence. Of course, since that's what I signed up for, I'm happy to say this episode delivers that in spades. The first season gave us outstanding fight choreography, and the team at CloverWorks consistently delivered action scenes that matched the level of intensity needed for a series centered around street brawls. That intensity carries over to this premiere as nearly all of it is a feast for the eyes, and while there is some use of 3DCG during some of the crowd shots during the raid, it's not particularly distracting, and the rest of the episode looks so polished that it hardly even matters.

Still, good action can only get you so far, so I'm happy that we also got some development for Sakura and Nirei between all the punches. Even if it mostly ended up backfiring on him, it was nice to see Nirei attempt to defend his fellow delinquents, and it was also good to see Sakura called out for his whole lone wolf routine as he can't keep trying to do things by himself now that his position will drag other people into his problems. Exactly how much growth we'll get from either this season is a bit hard to determine, but I have grown to like these boys, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they change now that they've got a bigger group behind them. Since this season is picking up mid arc, I have no idea where it's going, but if the rest of it can keep matching all the intense violence with some equally intense drama, I'm all here for seeing these boys stinking up the classroom again.