Crunchyroll announced on Sunday that it will stream an English dub for the Psyren anime, and the first dubbed episode went up on Monday, one day later.
The dub is directed by Dani Chambers, with Zach Bolton producing, James Cheek adapting the scripts, William Dewell mixing and Jose Sandoval handling engineering.
The cast
Dylan Ray Owen leads as Ageha, with Kelly Greenshield as Amamiya and Katelyn Barr as Fubiki. Kevin D. Thelwell voices Hiroki, Jacob Browning is Miyake, Abigail Blythe plays Nemesis Q, Derrick Snow voices Okumura, Mauricio Ortiz-Segura is Saka and Daniel Van Thomas plays Usui.
A dub arriving this quickly is worth noting. Psyren only premiered this month, so Crunchyroll is running the English version close behind the Japanese broadcast rather than waiting a season or two. For a series with a completed manga and a promise of full adaptation, that pacing matters: viewers who prefer dubs won't spend the next year behind spoilers.
The show itself
Psyren adapts Toshiaki Iwashiro's manga, which ran in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump from 2007 to 2010 and was collected in 16 volumes. Viz Media published all of them in English between 2011 and 2014.
The premise starts small and gets strange fast. High schooler Ageha Yoshina picks up a mysterious red phone card left in a public telephone booth. A few days later his childhood friend and classmate Sakurako Amamiya, who had the same card, disappears without a trace. Looking for her pulls him into rumors about a nationwide string of vanishings, all credited to a secret organization called "Psy ren." When he makes contact, he's dropped into a deadly game.
Katsumi Ono directs at Satelight. Ono's credits include Symphogear AXZ, Symphogear G and several Yu-Gi-Oh! series. Shin Yoshida, who worked on Naruto Shippūden and Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, oversees the scripts, and Akira Ōkuma designs the characters. The music is split three ways: Takashi Ōmama, whose credits include Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, Tatsuhiko Saiki of My Next Life as a Villainess and I Parry Everything, and Shū Kanematsu, who also worked on Villainess and The Café Terrace and Its Goddesses. CLAN QUEEN performs the opening theme "Warning!!" and Who-ya Extended performs the ending, "ICARUS."
REMOW has said the anime will adapt the manga through to its conclusion. That's a promise a lot of adaptations make and few keep, especially with a 16-volume source, but it does mean viewers going in now are being told the ending is planned rather than hoped for.
No episode count has been announced. Sixteen volumes is a heavy compression job either way, and the pacing will be obvious within the first cour.
Most dubs get announced a season after a simulcast starts, with casting revealed long after the first episodes have aired. This one came out the day before release, which points to a dub that was already in production when the Japanese version premiered.
Where it premiered
The anime screened its world premiere at the Global Stage Hollywood Film Festival on October 3 at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood, showing the second episode, with the first episode getting its West Coast premiere at the same event. Iwashiro attended.
Crunchyroll streams the series worldwide except Japan and China.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: Key visual for the Psyren anime, via Anime News Network.
