Side Quest #004

Welcome back to Side Quest #004 — your nerdy little dispatch covering anime, JRPGs, and the stranger corners of Japanese folklore. We land every other Friday (ramping to weekly soon), so grab a coffee, queue up your soundtrack, and let's get into it.

This issue: the summer anime season's actual top three, Bleach's final cour going to air, a JRPG calendar correction we owe you, a thunder beast that sleeps in your navel, and the fight argument that refuses to die.

Continue? — what's worth your time right now

We're deep enough into Summer 2026 now that the season rankings have stopped shuffling, and the podium is not where most people predicted it back in June.

Saga of Tanya the Evil II is sitting at the top of the season. Nobody had that on their bingo card after a nine-year gap, and yet here we are — it came back sharper than it left. Right behind it is Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Season 3, which premiered July 5 and had already topped Japan's summer anticipation polls before a single frame aired. It's earning it. Rounding out the top three is Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia, which is the exact kind of show that would have slipped past you entirely if you weren't checking the charts — so consider this your nudge.

And quietly running underneath all of it: Re:Zero Season 4. It started back in Spring and it's still going, and it is currently the second-highest-rated anime on MyAnimeList. Not second of the season. Second, period. If you dropped off Re:Zero somewhere around Season 2, this is the arc that makes the case for going back.

Want the wider map? Our ranked list of the best anime to watch in 2026 is the backlog-clearing companion to all of this.

The Long Game — one ending, one arrival, one slowing down

Seasonal rankings are one thing. The long-runners are another story entirely — and right now three of them are each at a genuinely interesting structural moment.

Bleach is ending. Thousand-Year Blood War Part 4 — subtitled The Calamity — premiered July 25, and episode 2 landed on August 1. It's a 13-episode cour, and it is the last one. After twenty years of stops, starts, a filler wilderness and one of the great anime resurrections, Bleach's anime finishes here. Tomohisa Taguchi is back as chief director at Pierrot Films. It's on Hulu in the US, Disney+ most everywhere else, new episodes 7:30am PT.

If you want to know what this cour is actually driving toward, we already broke down the ending: Ichigo vs Yhwach, explained — how Bleach's final fight ends →. Spoilers, obviously. Read it after, or read it now and enjoy watching it land.

Arakawa is back. Daemons of the Shadow Realm — Yomi no Tsugai — is the first major anime adaptation of a Hiromu Arakawa manga since Fullmetal Alchemist, and if that sentence doesn't make you sit up, we can't help you. It premiered April 4 and its second cour started July 4, so there's a real chunk to binge. Masahiro Andō directing at Bones, on Crunchyroll. The setup is pure Arakawa: a boy named Yuru in a locked-down mountain village, a twin sister taken, and a world underneath the one he was told about. It is the most under-discussed show of the year and we'd like that to change.

One Piece is deliberately slowing down. The Elbaf arc is mid-Part-2 — episode 1172 hits Crunchyroll today, with Netflix trailing about a week behind and the Part 2 finale set for October 10. The bigger news is structural: Toei has cut One Piece to a maximum of 26 episodes a year, down from the usual 40–50, and moved to roughly one manga chapter per episode. That's the fix for the pacing complaints — fewer episodes, denser ones, and enough runway for Oda to stay ahead. If you bailed during the padding years, this is the version of One Piece you were asking for.

And if watching Bleach end makes you want something to put on a shelf: our guide to the best Bleach zanpakutō to 3D print → is the natural next move.

New Game+ — a JRPG calendar correction

Time for some honesty. For most of this year the JRPG conversation has been framed as "2026 is going to be huge" — and somewhere along the way a lot of us (this newsletter included) kept talking about games that had already shipped as though they were still on the horizon.

So, the record, straightened out:

• The Legend of Heroes: Trails beyond the Horizon — out. English release landed January 15, 2026. The West is, for the first time ever, fully caught up with Falcom's monster of a series.
• Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection — out since March 13, 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2 and PC.
• LumenTale: Memories of Trey — also out, and genuinely interesting: 158 Animon, thirteen types, made by people who cut their teeth on a Pokémon fan game. Reviews are split, though. It's ambitious in ways that occasionally trip it up.

If you were waiting for those, stop waiting. Go play them.

What's actually still ahead: the next genuinely big one is Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave on September 17, 2026 — six weeks out, Switch 2 exclusive, $69.99. It's set in the world of Three Houses and runs a multi-route structure around four leads: Cai, Theodora, Dietrich, and Leda. There's a special edition (the Dagdan Collection) with a steel case, character art cards, and a map of Dagda if you're the type.

After that you're into 2027 territory — Persona 4 Revival on February 18, 2027, and Xenoblade Genesis on Switch 2 sometime that same year. Both real, both confirmed, neither of them 2026. Plan your PTO accordingly.

In the meantime, our definitive ranked list of the best JRPGs of all time is a decent way to fill six weeks.

One Deep Cut

The Raijū: Thunder's Restless Beast

Most people reach for ghosts when they think of Japanese folklore, but the raijū — a creature made of lightning itself — is one of the weirder and more electrifying entries in the yokai bestiary. Descriptions vary wildly: a white wolf, a tangled ball of fire, occasionally a cat whose claws rake the sky open into thunder. The one consistent detail is that it cannot stay still. It rides storm fronts, tears through trees, and supposedly nests in the navels of sleeping humans — which is the actual, documented origin of the old folk advice to sleep face-down during thunderstorms.

The raijū doesn't travel alone. It's the companion beast of Raijin, the thunder god — the wild-haired figure above, caught mid-leap inside his ring of taiko drums in Tawaraya Sōtatsu's 17th-century gold-leaf screen, now a National Treasure at the Tokyo National Museum. Every drum in that ring is a thunderclap. The raijū is what runs loose while he plays.

You see raijū energy all over games — Pokémon's Raikou is basically a direct lift, and the crackling wolf imagery pops up in everything from Ōkami to Genshin Impact's Electro Archon storyline. In our own Neon Yokai lore at Geeky Inc, the raijū archetype maps onto restless, high-voltage spirits that short-circuit modern tech — creatures that were always chaotic, just wearing new clothes now. The storm didn't change. The city just grew up around it.

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Boss Fight — the argument that refuses to die

Every few months the internet relitigates Gojo vs Sukuna, and every few months it goes exactly the same way: someone posts a power-scaling chart, someone else says "that's not how Domain Expansion works," and forty replies later nobody has changed their mind.

The reason the argument never resolves is that people are usually arguing about two different things — what happened in the fight, and what the fight meant. So we split it in two:

• Gojo vs Sukuna: every chapter of the fight, explained → — the blow-by-blow, in order, with the chapter numbers, so you can stop arguing from memory.
• The power-scaling explainer → — why the outcome was structurally inevitable, and why that's the part people actually hate.

If you'd rather just read the whole thing properly, the complete Jujutsu Kaisen collection covers Vol. 0–30 plus the guidebook — which is the only way to have this argument with actual authority.

Play / Watch This

Six weeks until Fire Emblem is a perfectly good window for one more big RPG. Two we'd point you at:

• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — if you somehow still haven't. Our beginner guide covers which edition to buy and how to survive the opening hours. Short answer: yes, it's worth it, and yes, the opening is meant to feel like that.
• Elden Ring, still — because a shocking number of people are running a build they picked in their first three hours and never revisited. Our best builds guide for 2026 is the fix, beginner through advanced.

From the Forge

3D printing season never ends — and the multi-material lineup just got confusing enough to need a referee. We put the three current Bambu heavyweights head to head: H2D vs H2C vs X2D — the full comparison →. If you only read one section, read the one on which of them actually earns the price gap.

Ready to commit? The Bambu Lab H2D is the one we keep coming back to, and a spool of Bambu PLA Basic in black is the least glamorous, most useful thing you can keep on the shelf.

And if this issue's thunder beast got in your head: articulated prints are the closest a printer gets to something that moves like it's alive. Our roundup of the best articulated dragons, creatures and fidget toys is where to start on a yokai shelf.

Join the party

The real conversation happens in the Discord — anime recommendations, print progress pics, JRPG hot takes, and the occasional deep lore rabbit hole. Come tell us we're wrong about Gojo vs Sukuna: join the Geeky Inc Discord.

Until next time — keep your save file backed up and your lore book open. ⚡

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Disclosure: Side Quest contains Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, Geeky Inc earns from qualifying purchases — at no extra cost to you. We only link things we'd actually recommend.

Image credits: Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Season 3 key visual © Studio Bind / MF Books. Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War — The Calamity key visual © Tite Kubo / Shueisha / Pierrot. Daemons of the Shadow Realm © Hiromu Arakawa / Square Enix / Bones Film. One Piece Elbaf arc visual © Eiichiro Oda / Shueisha / Toei Animation. Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave key art © Nintendo / Intelligent Systems. Wind God and Thunder God screens by Tawaraya Sōtatsu, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.