{"id":72769,"date":"2025-10-13T23:16:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T23:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/72769\/"},"modified":"2025-10-13T23:16:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T23:16:10","slug":"one-punch-man-season-3-premiere-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/72769\/","title":{"rendered":"One Punch Man: Season 3 Premiere Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

One Punch Man Season 3 is streaming weekly on Hulu in the U.S., Disney+ in Canda, Crunchyroll in the U.K., and Netflix and Crunchyroll in other territories.<\/p>\n

Everyone\u2019s favourite spectacle fighter gag anime is back! One Punch Man<\/a> was a knockout when Saitama first landed on our screens in 2015, and whilst its cultural cache \u2013 and animation budget \u2013 perhaps lessened in the years since when production duties changed hands from Madhouse to J.C.Staff, it\u2019s nice to see ONE and Yusuke Murata\u2019s colorful world brought to life once again.<\/p>\n

\"null\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s been quite a wait for our hero to return \u2013 six-and-a-half years versus the three-and-a-half between Seasons 1 and 2. J.C.Staff continues as OPM\u2019s production house, but the main staff credits have shifted; Shinpei Nagai takes over lead directing duties, Sakura Murakami is our new art director, and Yuki Hirose is now director of photography.<\/p>\n

Season 3\u2019s new opening theme gets the blood pumping \u2013 JAM Project (featuring Babymetal) offers an energising heavy metal sound against your standard flashy character poses \u2013 but if you’re here for the fights, you might want to sit this premiere out. One Punch Man\u2019s third season starter is all filler, no killer \u2013 or, to be more accurate, nearly 100% exposition. At least it\u2019s all in service of a quintessentially OPM punchline.<\/p>\n

One Punch Man\u2019s third season starter is all filler, no killer \u2013 or, to be more accurate, nearly 100% exposition. <\/p>\n

Beginning in medias res (Volume 17, for the manga readers, midway through the Monster Association Arc), this episode, titled \u201cStrategy Meeting,\u201d opens with exactly that. The Hero Association is faced with a crisis. Hero hunter Garou is a threat that endangers them all, so a meeting has been called to discuss how to handle the situation. Many side characters have a seat at the table, and there are few recognisable faces for casual fans. It\u2019s a great opportunity to show off the extended cast and their well-performed banter, but if this is your entry point you\u2019re going to be lost.<\/p>\n

The animation is limited in these scenes \u2013 unengaging pans across rooms with occasional character lipflaps \u2013 plus there are plot dumps galore and a lot of sitting around. For a season calling card, it\u2019s more than a little disappointing. Character designs are as appealingly varied as ever, with strong, bold outlines rendering scenes cohesive, but the visual quality overall feels like a filler episode. Budget is injected every time we cut to Child Emperor, who does his stuff from an attractive (and enviable) multi-screen setup. His search for an enemy base amid a hostage situation becomes the most interesting narrative in the first half of the episode, nearly solely because the frame comes alive when he\u2019s in it. Act one of \u201cStrategy Meeting\u201d feels a bit like preheating an oven. You know it\u2019s going to cook, but it\u2019s a slow wait for anything of note to actually happen.<\/p>\n

\"null\"<\/a>Saitama slacking off, of course.<\/p>\n

When leading man Saitama is finally reintroduced mid-episode, he is found \u2013 fittingly, and expectedly \u2013 slacking off, chilling with his bros and playing a monster-raising sim on a Game Boy. One Punch Man\u2019s anime adaptation continues to derive delightful visual humour from Saitama\u2019s deadpan face and simple design, capturing and enhancing the comedic tempo of the manga. Lounging on his side in a cutaway void, he resembles a human Gudetama. It\u2019s kind of nice to start the season this way, as it reminds us what One Punch Man\u2019s shtick is. There\u2019s a major threat, everything\u2019s a little too self-serious, and then \u2013 Saitama, put-upon slacker of the people, who gets up off his ass with a sigh to take the fight directly to the enemy.<\/p>\n

The laughs are few and far between, however, and the episode\u2019s back half takes us into decidedly darker territory. The Monster Association is growing its ranks. This B-plot turned A-plot had me leaning forward in interest from my initial bored slump, raising the stakes (and the animation budget) ahead of the end credits. The much-mentioned Garou encounters the Monster Association, and finds himself enlisted as their leader. Returning composer Makoto Miyazaki\u2019s accompanying score is fantastic \u2013 atmospheric, pulsing, and cool \u2013 and it serves the villains gallery and their ice-cold introductions well. From tentacled cyclops Gyoro-Gyoro, to latex-clad dominatrix Do-S and new recruit Machine God G5, this assembly and their machinations are comparatively riveting. We\u2019re left excited to see what they\u2019ll do next. Our heroes have some catching up to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One Punch Man Season 3 is streaming weekly on Hulu in the U.S., Disney+ in Canda, Crunchyroll in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":72770,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-72769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}