Anime review: New Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt (2025)

15 years after Gainax's legendary shitposting, Trigger (aka Gainax 2) finally decided to give us a second season. The expectations were simultaneously high and low. High you can guess why but low? Because we're in 2025, the unfiltered craziness that fueled PSG1 couldn't possibly be used as-is in CY+10 and the economic situation makes anything else than cookie cutter shonen/isekai hard to justify, let alone a license that was already relatively obscure like PSG…

So I'll make it simple: it was simultaneously not as good as the first one and much better than expected. The reasons for that are as follow:

• The FLCL tier craziness and accompanying fluid animation were there, we weren't ripped off on that point.
• The second most important ingredient, the soundtrack, was disappointing. Because 4/5 of it was the (amazing) old one with only two new tunes not as good as the originals and a passable remix.
• While the first season had its share of external references, the reference:original gag ratio remained tasteful. Can't say the same here, even if the picks aren't bad at all.
• The demon sisters, Scanty & Kneesocks, really got shafted here. Relegated to the role of sidekicks bordering on fillers while the rival role was taken by the new boys; thankfully, we got a bit of backstory for our troubles.
• Said boys weren't bad - amusing zoomers vs millenial thing and visually interesting - but simply not as good as the redskins they replaced, really. The other new character (Gunsmith Bitch) was cruelly underdeveloped in my opinion. She could even have saved Brief from his cuckold position.
• The ending plot spawning 1.5 episodes really left me cold.

But while I have these overall complaints, PSG remained an extremely episodic thing with multiple independent skits (often done by different people) stuffed into episodes and we got plenty of very good ones. Super Guy Jin and his Magic: The Angry Uncle parody, Baywatcher and the Inferno Cop cameo were loads of fun, for example.

The tl;dr is that despite these problems, it's the best thing we got in 2025 and I'd love a 3rd season with that level of quality. Around 8~8.5/10.