Sakamoto Days anime — how TMS dropped the ball on a great manga

I’ve been reading Sakamoto Days weekly on Shonen Jump+ since chapter 1 in 2020. It’s one of the few shonen manga I recommend even to people who don’t normally read shonen.

In January 2025, TMS Entertainment announced the anime adaptation — a 2-cour split (cour 1: Winter 2025, cour 2: Winter 2026). I waited.

Writing this after finishing cour 2. I’ll be blunt: TMS dropped the ball on this adaptation in a very specific way, and I want to explain how.

Why the manga is great

Before pointing at what the anime got wrong, you have to understand what the manga gets right.

Yuto Suzuki does three very hard things at once:

1. Cinematic fight choreography on paper

Suzuki’s fight scenes read like Tarantino on the page. Every panel:

• Clear geometry: you always know who’s where, where the weapons are, where the exits are
• Object reuse: that pen on the desk in panel 2 will become a weapon in panel 7. Everything in frame is a potential weapon
• Layered pacing: rapid-fire small panels = fast pace (combo strikes). Full-page panel = beat (Sakamoto sizing up the enemy)

Textbook example: Sakamoto vs Shin in chapter 1, using the whole convenience store as a dungeon. Laundry powder + water = slick floor. Drink cans = projectiles. Fridge door = shield. Every ordinary object becomes a weapon. I finished the chapter and immediately wanted to rob the nearest 7-Eleven.

2. Comedy beats sitting inside fight beats

Suzuki places jokes between fight beats, not before or after them. In the bullet-train arc (chapters 26–40):

• Sakamoto dodges bullets → thinks about his wife telling him to pick up eggs for the kids
• An assassin goes down → Sakamoto pockets the wallet, checks if the coupons inside are still valid

The comedy doesn’t break the fight’s momentum. It builds character: Sakamoto is a good husband through being a professional killer. Nobody else pulls off this specific combo the way Suzuki does.

3. A huge cast that’s instantly distinguishable

Slur, Heisuke, Lu Shaotang, Akao, Kashimura — each character has a unique silhouette, a unique linework, a signature moveset. Five chapters in and you know everyone, even with 20+ named characters.

Those three things are the manga’s strengths. The anime needed to preserve all three.

The TMS anime breaks all three, to different degrees

Break #1: Stiff fight choreography

TMS Entertainment has a solid adaptation track record (Detective Conan, Dr. Stone, Fruits Basket 2019). It’s not a bad studio. But the Sakamoto Days fight scenes get the standard TV-anime fight template:

• Cut to a close-up of someone’s face
• Cut to a background pan
• Cut back, fight has somehow moved to the next exchange

The manga is continuous wide shots. The anime is chopped-up close-ups. You lose the entire “I see everyone in the space, I understand Sakamoto’s strategy” feeling.

Concrete example: the bullet-train fight in manga chapter 36 has a wide-shot panel of the entire train car — you see Sakamoto, four assassins, the window positions, the exits, where Shin is hiding. You understand Sakamoto’s plan before he executes it.

In anime episode 8 of cour 1, that scene is cut into 12 different close-ups over 40 seconds. Not a single wide shot of the train car. You don’t see the space. Sakamoto’s plan becomes “he suddenly appears behind the enemy” instead of “he was three moves ahead.”

Loses the single most distinctive thing about the manga.

Break #2: Comedy isolated from action

The anime stylizes its comedy via chibi mode — turning characters into cute small-form versions for jokes. This is an industry-standard anime comedy technique (Spy x Family, KonoSuba use it). The problem: it separates comedy from action.

In the manga, Sakamoto thinks about buying eggs while dodging bullets — both emotions live in the same panel. In the anime, Sakamoto dodges bullets → cut to chibi-mode Sakamoto thinking about eggs → cut back to the fight. The two emotions are split across time.

The viewer doesn’t feel “wow this character is complex.” They feel “this anime has joke breaks.” Joke breaks are standard TV anime. Sakamoto Days isn’t standard TV anime.

Break #3: A flattened cast

The anime keeps character designs intact. This is the best thing TMS did — Slur looks right, Heisuke looks right, Lu looks right.

But the voice acting flattens. Sakamoto in the manga is quiet but precise — doesn’t say much, but every line lands. Sakamoto in the anime is voiced by Tomokazu Sugita as a generic serious man. Sugita is a great VA (Gintoki in Gintama, Switch in Sket Dance) — but the casting is off. His voice is built for comedy, not stoicism.

Compare: Akio Otsuka (VA for Solid Snake) or Hiroshi Kamiya would have been better fits. Sugita was cast for name recognition, not character fit.

What a good adaptation looks like

To make the problem concrete, three recent adaptations that got it right:

Vinland Saga (WIT 2019 → MAPPA 2023)

WIT’s cour 1 and MAPPA’s cour 2 both preserved manga pacing without cutting a single important chapter. The Askeladd vs Thors choreography in episode 7 (WIT) is a 1-to-1 translation of the manga panels to animation. Two different studios, same commitment: respect the manga.

Frieren (Madhouse 2023–2024)

Madhouse gave each chapter a ~25-minute episode. The slow-burn pacing of the manga is preserved in the slow-burn pacing of the anime. No “joke breaks.” No “compression arcs.” Every line gets room to breathe.

Vagabond (manga, not anime — for the principle)

Inoue Takehiko in a 2021 interview, declining adaptation: “Vagabond can’t be animated because its panels are intentionally still. Animating them would break the pacing.” That’s a director admitting some manga shouldn’t be adapted.

Sakamoto Days can be adapted — Suzuki’s panels are motion-friendly. The problem isn’t the manga’s nature, it’s that TMS chose the TV-fight template instead of going cinematic.

Why TMS did this

This part I can’t prove, only infer from industry patterns:

1. Budget. Continuous wide-shot fight scenes cost 3× the animator-hours of cut-up close-ups. TV anime budgets are tight. TMS likely chose the cheaper approach to fit the budget.
2. Schedule. Two-cour split with only ~12 months of production per cour. Not enough time for cinematic choreography.
3. Risk aversion. TMS is a “safe” studio — they’ve made 1000+ episodes of Detective Conan. They don’t have a tradition of cinematic fights. They went with the familiar template.

From the business side TMS isn’t wrong. They delivered the anime on schedule, with decent profit. Sakamoto Days anime sells fine on Blu-ray, streams well.

But from the manga reader’s side, the result is a mediocre adaptation of a great manga. And Sakamoto Days deserved better.

Some things still work

To be fair:

• OP/ED are great. Cour 1’s OP “Hashire” by Vaundy has the right Tokyo-streets vibe. Cour 2’s ED by ano is also solid.
• Background art is gorgeous. The Sakamoto family store is rendered in detail — shelves, neon signs, price tags. Captures suburban Tokyo perfectly.
• A few cour-2 fights are genuinely great. Specifically, Akao vs Sakamoto + Shin in episode 9 of cour 2 has 3 minutes of continuous wide-shot animation. TMS can do it when they choose to — they just didn’t, for the other 80%.

If you haven’t read the manga — is the anime watchable?

Yes. The Sakamoto Days anime is a 6/10 adaptation. Still watchable, still has comedy and fight moments that land. But if I were you, I’d:

1. Watch 2 episodes of the anime to get the premise and cast
2. Stop the anime, start the manga from chapter 1
3. The manga is now at 220+ chapters and beats the anime on every axis

If you really don’t want to read manga, watching the anime is fine — just know you’re getting maybe 60% of the actual Sakamoto Days experience.

Closing

A good adaptation isn’t about a higher budget — Frieren was made on a standard TV-anime budget. A good adaptation is about the director understanding what the manga wants and protecting that through every production compromise.

TMS didn’t protect it. They made Sakamoto Days like every other Saturday-night anime slot. The manga isn’t every other manga — it’s one of the best shonen action manga of the last five years.

That’s the gap between manga and anime here. The gap isn’t because the manga was “too hard” — it’s because the studio chose not to push.

I’ll still watch cour 3 if it happens. But I’ll keep recommending the manga first to anyone who asks. Until TMS proves me wrong.

Sources

• Sakamoto Days manga free on Manga Plus. First 3 and latest 3 chapters always free.
• Sakamoto Days anime on Netflix globally, Crunchyroll in regions without Netflix.
• TMS Entertainment credits list at tms-e.co.jp. Prior projects: Detective Conan, Dr. Stone, Fruits Basket 2019.
• Yuto Suzuki interview on manga choreography: Shonen Jump+ blog (2023), translated by Mangamo Notes.
• Vinland Saga adaptation comparison drawn from “Why Vinland Saga’s Adaptation Worked” — Gigguk (YouTube, 2024).
• Inoue Takehiko Vagabond interview at Comic Natalie (2021), regarding anime-adaptation refusal.
• Illustration: izakaya alley in Kabuki-chō, Shinjuku, Wikimedia Commons, Izakaya alley in Kabuki-chō by Ximonic (Simo Räsänen), CC BY-SA 4.0 (a stand-in for Tokyo’s night streets — not a still from the show).