The Psyren anime added two more voices this week. The show’s official X account announced Thursday that Reiko Suzuki is playing Elmore Tenjuin and Ayumu Murase is playing Van Tenjuin. Character art for both roles went out with the announcement, and neither part had been cast publicly before.
These are the first Tenjuin roles confirmed for the anime. With a full-adaptation promise attached to the show, casting announcements like this one are also a running measure of how far the production is preparing to go.
The rest of the cast and crew
Katsumi Ono directs at Satelight. Ono’s history runs through the Symphogear franchise, Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s and Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V, which is a resume built on shows that escalate hard and keep their internal logic straight.
Shin Yoshida oversees the series scripts after years on Naruto Shippūden and multiple Yu-Gi-Oh! entries. Akira Ōkuma designs the characters. The music is split three ways between Takashi Ōmama, Tatsuhiko Saiki and Shū Kanematsu.
CLAN QUEEN performs the opening theme “Warning!!” and Who-ya Extended performs the ending theme “ICARUS.”
The promise attached to this one
REMOW has said the anime will adapt the manga through to its conclusion. That is unusual for a series this size, and it matters more here than it would elsewhere, because Psyren is one of the better-known casualties of Shonen Jump’s cancellation cycle. Toshiaki Iwashiro’s manga ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 2007 to 2010 and was collected in 16 volumes. It ended without an anime adaptation, which for years made it a standard answer to the question of which Jump series got robbed.
Viz Media published all 16 volumes in English between 2011 and 2014. The story follows Ageha, a high schooler whose classmate Sakurako Amamiya disappears after the two of them come into possession of a strange phone card. His search for her pulls him into a death game called Psyren, run by a figure known as Nemesis Q. The game turns out to be the future itself, and the players are being tested on whether they can prevent it.
That premise is why the adaptation has room to run. A death game with a time-travel payoff gives a full-adaptation promise something to actually deliver, instead of the usual open ending.
The show is already out
Psyren premiered on October 4 on Tokyo MX and BS11, with Crunchyroll streaming worldwide outside Japan and China, and the anime had an unusual warm-up: the second episode got its world premiere at the Global Stage Hollywood Film Festival on October 3 at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood, with the first episode screening its West Coast premiere at the same event. Iwashiro attended. We covered those premiere plans when they were announced.
Crunchyroll is also running an English dub close behind the Japanese broadcast, which we broke down when the dub cast was announced. For a series with a finished manga and a promise of full adaptation, a fast dub keeps the English-speaking audience roughly in step with the Japanese one.
What is still unclear is how many episodes the adaptation will get. A complete run of a 16-volume battle manga needs a serious count, and nobody has published one yet.
Featured image: Elmore and Van Tenjuin character art, via the Psyren anime’s official X account (© Toshiaki Iwashiro, Shueisha / PSYREN Secret Society).
Source: Anime News Network; Psyren anime’s official X account and Comic Natalie.
