The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Ave Mujica - The Die is Cast -

Sakiko Togawa recruited members for the band Ave Mujica, which was a commercial success. The band performed live and appeared in the media. A girl who lost the friends she had sworn to share her fate with and the home she grew up in. She continues to carry the burden of someone else's life and the band. Hidden behind a mask, both her past and her true face, she descends into the perfect miniature garden once again tonight.

Ave Mujica - The Die is Cast - is spin-off of the BanG Dream! It's MyGo!!!!! anime series. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

The band Ave Mujica had their core CRYCHIC origin story detailed in BanG Dream!: It's MyGO!!!!!, with their debut shown off at the end of that anime. That means their new, self-titled anime series is clear to jump right into all the wacky adventures of Sakiko and pals, but it also means there's some homework to catch up on for viewers whose interests might have been piqued by the wild-looking previews and all the online fandom chatter for this release. That's not helped by the simulcast release bizarrely opting to excise the BanG Dream! name from the title. All this is to confirm that yes, no matter what the marketing tells you, you'll want to watch It's MyGO!!!!! before you check this series out. It's worth your time!

The first episode of Ave Mujica - The Die is Cast - (that's a money subtitle, by the way) then does wind back to remind viewers of Sakiko's time in CRYCHIC with Mutsumi and the other members who would go on to form MyGO. It's actually the central feature of the premiere, but rather than feeling like a recap, it's played as a proper parallel to Tomori's flashback episode from the third episode of It's MyGO!!!!!, this time from Sakiko's point of view. Yes, this means that viewers don't have to wait long to at last get answers about Sakiko's past and what led her to disband CRYCHIC that fateful day in the rain.

Whether those answers will land for everyone after all this time might depend on the viewer. Speaking personally, I will say that the revelations of Sakiko's story weren't quite what I had predicted from the hints in the previous series. It's a pointedly tragic sequence of events and already seems to be seeking to reframe Sakiko in a more sympathetic light than before viewers had all this information. That's the point, of course, and it also means this first episode already lends itself well to rewatching Sakiko's scenes in It's MyGO!!!!! with the clearer context of what she's been dealing with all this time and, perhaps more importantly, how she's been dealing with it.

The preview screening for this premiere came out early enough, and fans have been waiting long enough, that I dare not spoil the reveals of those details. But I will bring up how this episode attempts to explicitly recast Sakiko as sufferingly suppressing a love for CRYCHIC and the group she had to abandon all this time—to say nothing of the implied noble intent of her big plan with Ave Mujica. It arguably makes her more complex than the cold and calculating musical supervillain she'd previously been built up as, while somewhat disappointingly softening the edge that made her story so tantalizing.

It all makes for a first episode that almost feels like it's covering what I would have expected the show's whole season to get through. By the end of the premiere, the status quo from before this anime started has been upended again, and there's a genuine question of where Ave Mujica will actually go from here. No spoilers again, but suffice it to say, Nyamu is precisely the kind of duplicitous little shit I was hoping for. Some logistics can be questioned in terms of the mechanics of Ave Mujica's meteoric rise. However, I think they work in service of getting the story to this ostentatious starting point. As an opening episode that many fans were looking forward to specifically for its roller coaster value, that's an ostensible success. Plus, the writing follows up enough on the deeper threads of It's MyGO!!!!! that it feels like an earned continuation (and not for nothing, but it looks like the MyGO girls will be putting in appearances in some capacity). Yuniko Ayana is writing some hefty checks for the whole rest of the season, and it feels appropriately ominous to speculate on how she might be able to cash them.

I rarely start an anime just for its music, but Ave Mujica is such a case. I wish it were heavier, but that doesn't mean I don't like it the way it is already. I wish more anime would let themselves have heavier rock or metal soundtracks in general, but since we're still waiting on that Guilty Gear anime, this seems like a pretty good appetizer.

This was a pretty fun way to open up the series. Well, I guess “fun” doesn't seem appropriate, considering maybe half the episode is spent in exposition about how rough Sakiko's home life is. That said, many more things about her make sense now. I didn't have much of an opinion on her before, but after this, I think she's a lot stronger than I gave her credit for. Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it can buy the safety and resources that allow you the time and energy to find and pursue what does bring you happiness, and it can be tough to come to terms with that—especially as a teenager. Hers is a story that hits as hard as it rings true.

As for the rest of the episode, you know, at least two people were already pretty famous in Ave Mujica. And one of them is a beauty YouTuber whose face people would look at all the time. Ghost, Powerwolf, MAN WITH A MISSION, or any other group that wears full coverage masks or heavy makeup they're not—those masks don't cover a lot. I've seen people on the internet dig deeper into things that mattered less—especially if there's a popular beauty YouTuber involved; I just can't help but laugh at how implausible it is that, especially if Nyamu already hinted at her being in Ave Mujica, it took her whole unmasking stunt for people to see who was in the band. Or at least, that's how this episode frames it—I wouldn't be shocked if next week we learned that many of their fans had already figured out at least some of their identities and Sakiko was just being stubborn. Still, what a hilarious power move from Nyamu that was. Is it too early to call her my favorite?

As far as art and animation go, it's far from the worst CGI I've seen, but I've seen way better, too. It's middle of the road by CGI standards—I neither love nor hate the visuals. But if we're going to talk about this anime's more technical aspects, there should be some mention of the subs—in particular, how the song lyrics and on-screen text have been left completely untranslated. Sadly, this is far from the first time I've encountered this happening on Crunchyroll—I'm at a point where I don't see this as an unusual outlier. But that doesn't make it any less a glaring issue worthy of being fixed.

So, while nothing spectacular, this was a good start. While I'm curious to see what happens next, I'm honestly way more excited to hear more music. I think my number one hope for this series is for Ave Mujica to go full-symphonic metal, taking more cues from groups like Nightwish and Kamelot, for example. These girls look at the visual kei part, and there's no shortage of visual kei metal bands from which they can take more direct inspiration, too, if they go further in that direction. …Oh yeah, and I guess I'd like to see how the band drama between them and MyGO plays out, too.

The first rule of Ave Mujica - The Die is Cast - is this: you need to have watched BanG Dream! It's MyGo!!!!! already. You should do this anyway because it's a 10/10 character drama with great tunes and a surplus of catharsis, but Ave Mujica expects you to have that context. You do not get a primer on who these characters are. The flashbacks contained in this premiere are meant to be parsed in relation to the perspectives seen in It's MyGO!!!!!. This is as direct as a sequel can get, so I can only recommend it in a vacuum if you are particularly susceptible to goth girls who are obsessed with both theater and metal.

With that preamble out of the way, I can earnestly say that I loved this first episode of Sakiko's wild ride. It's instructive to contrast it against the gentler and humbler beginnings of It's MyGO!!!!!. Here, we kick things off with a grandiose musical number, slither our way through the details of Sakiko's tragic backstory, and wrap up with a twist that I expected to see much further along in the story. In other words, the episode is stuffed with moxie, momentum, and high camp. Writer Yuniko Ayana has already proven she can handle a slow burn, so she's starting with a roaring fire this time.

Most of that fire can be found in Sakiko's backstory. While the cast of It's MyGO!!!!! tackled plenty of their own serious issues—neurodivergence, insecurity, dependency, depression, etc.—Sakiko's woes are more overtly tragic. Her mom loses her life, her dad loses his job and becomes an alcoholic, and Sakiko loses the band CRYCHIC. It's MyGO!!!!! presents that third point as its inciting incident, casting Sakiko in an almost villainous light, but now I see a timorous projection of strength as the rest of her life crashed down around her. This flashback also mostly aligns with my predictions about Sakiko's motivations, which is a credit to Ayana's foreshadowing and character writing. Sakiko may be a toxic mess relishing in the creation of a new band suffused with thinly veiled edgelord lore, and she should instead be honestly confronting her own sadness in the presence of her friends, but I can see where she's coming from. My heart weeps for that mopey blue-haired goblin.

The big question is where do you go from there: do you indulge in Sakiko's ornate whims, or do you make her dig up out of the hole she's made for herself? I think the anime needs and will include both, but Ayana seems interested in the latter, given how this episode ends. Despite how Sakiko conducted herself towards the end of It's MyGO!!!!!, she's not omnipotent. Nyamu, therefore, takes an early lead as Ave Mujica's most chaotic member, throwing her mask aside and throwing down the proverbial gauntlet in front of a live audience. It's a delicious reversal of Sakiko disbanding CRYCHIC—now she's the one forced to realize that she isn't in complete control. She can't turn these girls into puppets, and she can't turn herself into one, either.

Elsewhere, I love seeing Anon and the gang again. I hope they stick around, akin to how the current cast popped up throughout the events of It's MyGO!!!!!. And production-wise, the anime is on par with its predecessor. Girls Band Cry spoiled us in terms of highly expressive CG animation in service of band drama, but Ave Mujica still looks good. The heightened theatricality of Sakiko's concert direction is a fun innovation on the modest indie vibes of MyGO's performances. Tomori just wanted to voice her feelings in a way that other people could understand. Sakiko wants to start a cult.

The sole fly in the ointment is the localization. The subtitles on Crunchyroll lack song lyrics, they completely omit onscreen text that's vital to the plot, they skip over a few incidental lines of dialogue, and the subtitles that are present are often stilted or unnaturally worded. I could ascribe the lack of lyrics to licensing issues, but in combination with the other problems, it sets a worrying baseline. It's MyGO!!!!! had a good translation, and that proved especially important for its story full of distinct and multi-faceted character voices. However, the differing transcriptions of Taki's nickname—Ricky versus Rikki—further hints that the same team likely isn't working on Ave Mujica. And with Ave Mujica's writing slated to be similarly sophisticated, a sloppy translation will lose much of that vital nuance and emotional impact. I hope Crunchyroll takes note of these inadequacies and gives Ave Mujica the proper localization it deserves.