Yakusoku no Neverland

Surrounded by a forest and a gated entrance, the Grace Field House is inhabited by orphans happily living together as one big family, looked after by their "Mama," Isabella. Although they are required to take tests daily, the children are free to spend their time as they see fit, usually playing outside, as long as they do not venture too far from the orphanage—a rule they are expected to follow no matter what. However, all good times must come to an end, as every few months, a child is adopted and sent to live with their new family, never to be heard from again.

However, the three oldest siblings have their suspicions about what is actually happening at the orphanage, and they are about to discover the cruel fate that awaits the children living at Grace Field, including the twisted nature of their beloved Mama.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Ray Main

Ise, Mariya Japanese

Norman Main

Uchida, Maaya Japanese

Emma Main

Morohoshi, Sumire Japanese

Phil Supporting

Kouno, Hiyori Japanese

Isabella Supporting

Kaida, Yuuko Japanese

Sister Krone Supporting

Fujita, Nao Japanese

Gilda Supporting

Lynn Japanese

Don Supporting

Ueki, Shinei Japanese

Conny Supporting

Ozawa, Ari Japanese

Anna Supporting

Kayano, Ai Japanese

Fukushima, Yuuichi Producer

Ozaki, Noriko Producer

Ono, Shinobu Producer

Suzuki, Kenta Producer

Reviews

Sep 1, 2024

CaptainSalty

Recommended

Please Read Any Reviews After Watching Episode 1

The Promised Neverland Season 1 feels like being thrown into situations that feel greatly in the other person's favor. Time after time, the protagonists feel as though that they truly have no chance of getting out and are doomed to let this cycle continue forever after they're gone. And that creates immediate high stakes as well as making the viewer also participate, thinking of ways to outsmart the other force. It's incredibly well written in its story, world, characters, and slick problem-solving. For every step forward, it feels as though they take two steps back. I applaud Promised ... Neverland for both having such a great red herring beginning but being a genuinely terrifying premise. And to give the show more credit where its due, the withdrawal and gaining of new information every time feels rewarding, mysterious, and overall builds on this unique world. While the main characters aren't the most compelling of characters, they do their part in creating a dynamic that's engaging to watch, and shows how each of them has a very different viewpoint and philosophy of how to approach situations. This in turn creates scenarios that feel organic and natural instead of seeing characters switch approaches to further the plot and nothing else like in many other shows. The Promised Neverland is a great watch that you can't find much elsewhere in anime.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Apr 17, 2025

RemanTheArchean

Mixed Feelings

This was a fantastic show that absolutely crapped the bed in the second season. I'd give S1 an 8/10, while S2 deserves no higher than a 4/10.

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So season 1 is very good. The core of the show is a suspense-thriller and it executes this vision very well. There are lots of twists that genuinely got me, e.g. they would be attempting to sniff out a traitor with one obvious candidate and one improbable-seeming candidate. I would guess it would be the improbable candidate, since if the show is leaning so heavily towards the obvious one then I'd expect it to be a red herring. ... Turns out they were *both* wrong, and it was actually a dark-horse third candidate, explained in a way that made a lot of sense after the fact. There's several moments of this type of brilliant misdirection playing on expected tropes. Towards the end of the first season I genuinely couldn't predict where things would go, which is always a good sign in this genre.

There's also quite a bit of nuance which I appreciated. It starts out seeming like it's going to be a 1-dimensional struggle between the adults vs the kids, but it's soon revealed that everyone is playing their own game. The adults are nominally allied to each other, but are really out for themselves, and make alliances with some of the kids. The kids are mostly allied to each other but have their own side deals. It adds a lot of welcome dimensions to the struggle and makes the characters seem like real people rather than simple plot devices. There's also a fair degree of pragmatism in their plans, which I wouldn't normally expect from an anime, where they decide they can't save the youngest kids just yet.

I have a few minor quibbles. First, it's rather ludicrous that 11-year-old children are capable of doing all this, including tons of scheming and even chopping off body parts without much hesitation. I wouldn't have had to hold my suspension of disbelief so rigorously if they just made the characters the standard anime protagonist age of 16-20 years old, and nothing would have had to change that much. For the most part the characters act like this anyways, but in a few scenes the writers use their age to pretend that they're toddlers, which is quite jarring. There's also some pointless fakeout cliffhangers from episode to episode that didn't need to exist, e.g. implying characters are about to get caught where they shouldn't be, but it gets proven to be a false alarm in the first 10 seconds of the subsequent episode. These are silly and I wish they didn't exist.

Overall though, S1 gets a definite thumbs up from me.

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Then season 2 comes and bleeds out unceremoniously on the floor. Almost all of the negative reviews I've seen are mostly upset about the show not covering certain manga arcs. As an anime-only viewer, I'm fine if things need to be cut, but the end product still needs to work well, and this one just doesn't even come close.

Practically every good thing the show did in season 1 crumbles into dust in season 2. The show genre-shifts from a suspense-thriller to a generic action-adventure that's not well executed. The unfamiliar world of this show was tightly bound by the confines of the farm in season 1, which helped establish some parameters for what could reasonably happen, but once they're out in the wild it becomes clear that they're in very strange territory. At that point the suspense-thriller loses its luster because anything weird can plausibly be explained by "it's alien", and moments of tension are defused by "aliens doing alien things" that the writers could just be pulling out of their butts. After this happened a few times my interest rapidly waned.

The show has way too much lore to cram into 11 paltry episodes, and it’s clear that the creators cut far too close to the bone in which stories to keep vs exclude. The helpful aliens, Mujika and Sonju, end up being terrible characters because of this. Their backstory is left almost totally unexplained. Sonju is implied to have quite sinister motives for helping humans, but the show forgets about this and they both agree to help the humans again for no real reason. Then the commonfolk aliens decide to help the humans broadly for reasons that are barely explained, which is particularly ridiculous since it happens right after the humans commit war crimes on them. Alien society and Mujika in particular desperately needed more time to explain things. I don't think that stories need to explain every weird idiosyncracy if they're going to include aliens or demons or whatever, but there needs to be a balance since these ones ended up as little more than walking macguffins.

The nuance is stripped from the show as it becomes a basic story of good-vs-evil. At one point it starts to seem like there will be some internal dissent among the humans about the best course of action, but this is resolved in like 5 minutes. The main villain collapses after barely any resistance, and in his final monologue he implies that he was actually keeping the peace and that if the system was overthrown then bad things would be sure to happen. This is another potentially interesting plotpoint that ends up being sabotaged by time constraints, as it's shown shortly afterwards that nothing bad happened at all, therefore he was just cartoonishly evil and a stupid nihilist.

Finally, I can't really blame the show for this, but one of the major twists in season 2 (that I was already heavily suspecting) was inadvertently spoiled for me by Crunchyroll's thumbnails, so that wasn't great.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Jun 11, 2024

Xxzenoloverxx

Not Recommended

To describe tpn would be to describe it as a cheese omelette, only that the omelette has since gone cold and you can't heat it up in the microwave or it will explode. What I mean by that is it had so much potential to be sooo good. And then it wasn't. The first season wasn't horrendous and there were moments I enjoyed. Like the first episode and ray almost killing himself but after that, it just fell downhill. Also the manga is way better 4/10 don't recommend, go read the manga instead if u really like it

Now the art was pretty ok,the ... animation was pretty smooth, atleast the first season.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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