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Takopi’s Original Sin and Lord of the Mysteries are two series that have been actively part of the discussion within the fandom. The Summer 2025 anime season has offered many titles, and while most of them are great, there can be only one that stands out as the anime of the season. Both are visually stunning, narratively ambitious, and emotionally impactful.
Between them, Takopi’s Original Sin might just be the anime of the season. Both Takopi’s Original Sin and Lord of the Mysteries are based on incredibly well-received source material.
The former is a short, brutally honest, and tragic shōnen manga from Shonen Jump+, while the latter is a sprawling dark fantasy epic with deep lore, adapted from the highly acclaimed Chinese web novel by Cuttlefish That Loves Diving.
They couldn’t be more different in style or tone, yet they share one key similarity: they shook the anime community to its core from their very first episodes.
Lord of the Mysteries is breathtaking. The animation is not just fluid, it’s cinematic. From its steampunk world to cosmic horror influences, every frame looks like it was painted by someone trying to prove that 2D animation still has a place in the industry.
With its Victorian-inspired isekai setting, mystic cults, eldritch entities, and a 22-path power system called the Beyonder Paths, the series is dense with lore and philosophical depth.
Its protagonist Klein Moretti (who reincarnates into a suicide victim) has to pretend to be the archetype his path demands, to keep his sanity and ascend in power. It is a genius narrative mechanic that blurs the line between character development and existential horror.
And then there is Takopi’s Original Sin. A seemingly innocent, cutesy alien arrives on Earth to spread happiness. Sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon, right? Wrong. This anime is an emotionally devastating series, wrapped in pastel colors.
Takopi’s Original Sin deals with bullying, child neglect, abuse, mental health, and suicide, all through the lens of a naive alien who just wants to help but doesn’t understand human complexity. With four episodes in, it has already scored higher than Lord of the Mysteries on IMDb—9.3 vs. 8.8.
Why Takopi’s Original Sin might be anime of the season?
Nobody expected Takopi’s Original Sin to be this good. It had no mainstream hype, no endless trailers, and wasn’t promoted by massive production studios. It wasn’t a franchise juggernaut like Solo Leveling or a web novel titan like Lord of the Mysteries.
Yet the emotional grip it had on the audience from Episode 1 was instantaneous. Viewers weren’t just watching, they were experiencing something deeply personal. There’s a special kind of emotional pain when you see children in despair, and the show captures that without glorifying or romanticizing trauma.
Where Lord of the Mysteries deals with philosophical concepts of identity, power, and cosmic risk, Takopi focuses on something simpler but more universally painful: the loneliness of childhood.
Finally, if we talk about the animation, the animation of Takopi’s Original Sin is clean, soft, and harmless at first glance. That’s the trick. The visual design sets up an expectation of warmth and comedy, only to pull its audience into a world where every smile conceals pain. This contrast is what makes every scene hit harder.
In contrast, Lord of the Mysteries overwhelms with technical brilliance, and Takopi stuns you with subtlety. Its strongest scenes are quiet, a pause before a breakdown, a slow walk home, a forced smile. It doesn’t employ VFX explosions to shatter your heart, only honest storytelling.
Final Thoughts
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Lord of the Mysteries will have its moment and probably multiple seasons' worth of them. It’ll go down as one of the most visually impressive and thematically ambitious Chinese anime of all time.
But in Summer 2025, Takopi’s Original Sin is the anime that broke hearts, shattered records, and left the biggest emotional crater behind. And sometimes, that’s all viewers need to be the best.
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