The TV anime of ippatu's Tsugumi Project has its first three cast members. The show's official X account announced them on Monday, and two of the three appear in a voice comic video for the manga that went up at the same time.
Masaaki Mizunaka plays Leon, Haruki Ishiya plays Dudu and Misaki Watada plays Tsugumi. If those three names sound like a deliberate teaser rather than a full cast list, that is because they are: the announcement only covers the leads, and there is no premiere date attached yet.
What the story is
Tsugumi Project has a premise that reads like a survival horror pitch. Kodansha USA Publishing, which released the manga in English, describes it this way: in the far future, a soldier named Leon is taken from his family on a trumped-up charge and dropped into a suicide mission. Recover a dangerous weapon from a deadly place. That place is ruled by huge, irradiated, mutated monsters, and 200 years earlier it was called Japan.
Leon and his teammates are not expected to survive. One of the few pieces of information they have is the weapon's name: Tsugumi. That is the character Watada is playing, so the show's title is also its mystery.
The manga's unusual path
ippatu's manga did not follow a standard route to publication. The French publisher Ki-oon began releasing it as an original manga in France in 2019. Kodansha's Weekly Young Magazine picked it up for Japanese serialization in January 2021, roughly two years after French readers had already started it.
The series ended in September 2023 and got an epilogue chapter afterward, which is a detail worth flagging for anyone planning to read along. Kodansha published the seventh and final compiled volume in November 2023. Ki-oon shipped that last volume in France in February 2024, and Kodansha USA Publishing released the English version in September 2025. Seven volumes, finished, no waiting.
That matters for a TV adaptation. There is a complete story here with a defined ending, which is not always the case when a manga gets greenlit. Any anime adaptation has to decide how much of the epilogue it uses and how it handles an ending that was written years before the anime started production.
A voice comic first, an anime after
The voice comic is worth a note. Japanese publishers have been using them more often as low-cost proof of concept: cast a few actors, put voices and light movement over manga panels, see how it lands. It gives a production committee an audition venue and gives fans something to react to while an anime sits in pre-production.
Using two of the three announced actors in the voice comic blurs the line a little, but in a useful way. It means fans can hear Mizunaka as Leon and one of the others before a single frame of animation exists.
What we still do not know
No studio, no director, no broadcast window. The cast announcement came through the anime's own X account with a link to Comic Natalie, and it stops at the three leads. For a series with a finished seven-volume story and a distinctive setting, the studio question is the big one. Tsugumi Project is built on irradiated ruins, mutated creatures and a lot of wide shots of decaying cities. That is expensive material to animate, and the studio choice will say more about the show's ambitions than the cast list does.
Filling out the rest of Leon's squad is the next thing to watch for, along with a studio and a date.
Source: Anime News Network and MyAnimeList News, citing the Tsugumi Project anime's X/Twitter account and Comic Natalie.
Source: Anime News Network and MyAnimeList News, citing the Tsugumi Project anime’s X/Twitter account and Comic Natalie
Featured image: Cast announcement art for the Tsugumi Project anime, via Anime News Network.
