The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Teogonia

---

In the harsh region known as the borderlands, humans must fight an endless battle against demi-human creatures that come at them relentlessly, intent on taking their land and their gods. A young boy named Kai, fighting to defend his village, sustains a life-threatening injury that causes him to regain memories from a past life. Kai's newfound knowledge gives him a new sense of the unfair “rule set” that governs the world around him. One thing is clear: For those without a god to serve as their guardian, life is a constant struggle for survival.

Teogonia is based on a light novel series by Tsukasa Tanimai. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

---

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Everything has an explanation, and Teogonia's first episode wants to ensure you're aware of that. In its defense, it does try not to be strictly an infodump – there is action that goes along with the explanations. But so much of it is handled clumsily that it feels like a thin attempt to animate what may well have been paragraphs of descriptive prose in the original light novel. It's not really a triumph of presentation.

That's too bad because there are some interesting elements to this story. Kai, the protagonist, is the sort of scrappy redheaded orphan we've seen before, but that's not a bad thing. He's intensely aware of the inequalities of his home village, where the nobles eat better and get the lion's share of “godstones” looted from the corpses of fallen demihuman enemies. He's reasonably sure that if he can't find a way to stand out, he'll never move up the social ladder. But he's also coping with intrusive memories of a different world, something not entirely unknown in his culture but not something he cares to share with the class. It's too early to tell if this is stealth isekai or a situation where he travels between worlds while he sleeps or something similar, but it could make a major difference in how interesting the story becomes.

It could also just be another point of confusion because Kai's otherworld is like ours but with magic. In a deviation from how the rest of the episode runs, we're not shown Kai using magic in our world, but he seems pretty sure he can, or should be able to, shoot flames from his fingertips. That appears to be a significant difference from how “divine power” works in his present reality. However, it may be a strictly semantic issue since both come from the godstone, which, it turns out, is the heart, but instead of muscle, it's a shell filled with gold liquid.

Simply put, this episode is an odd combination of over and under-explanation. Characters spout off world-building details in stilted conversations, but the really interesting bits are left out. Orgs look like the evil cousins of the Three Little Pigs, Lady Jose is sidelined because of her gender, and other boilerplate fantasy elements undercut Kai's plot, at least so far. This isn't without potential, but it needs to figure out how best to tell its story because what it's doing right now isn't working.