My first must-watch anime for fall 2025 is also the highest-rated new season on Crunchyroll so far: one girl pummeling dudes into mush, and with better animation than I ever expected

An early standout in the fall 2025 anime season has quickly soared to the top of Crunchyroll's simulcast rankings and, now, my own personal watchlist. The anime adaptation of May I Ask for One Final Thing is, so far, an excellent and therapeutic punch-up.

Building on the novel series by Nana Otori and a manga adaptation illustrated by Sora Honoki, May I Ask for One Final Thing, animated by Liden Films of Call of the Night and Insomniacs After School fame, has racked up 8,400 user ratings on the Crunchyroll fall 2025 simulcast list. At a score of 4.9 stars, it's currently the highest-rated new season by volume and rating.

The only two series that can match it right now are My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero's and The Fated Magical Princess: Who Made Me a Princess, which are also sitting at 4.9 stars but with fewer total reviews. On MyAnimeList, the series is already Liden Films' fourth highest-rated TV series with just two episodes out.

May I Ask for One Final Thing has one of the best and most concise opening episodes we've seen all year. Within minutes, we get the message that this is going to be Feudalist One-Punch Woman.

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Heroine Scarlet El Vandimion, the daughter of a duke in a classical fantasy empire, faces a trope that's become increasingly common in villainess anime as more novel and comic stories are adapted. Publicly dumped by a royal fiancee who's become smitten with another girl, Scarlet sidesteps the defeated desperation expected of her and instead socks that cheater right in her mouth, and hard enough to send her flying like a sack of laundry.

Her long-smoldering rage finally ignited, Scarlet quickly proves that her hands are rated E for everyone in a ballroom brawl that sees dozens of corrupt noblemen smeared across the floor, the final blow embedding her ex-fiancee in a stone wall. This is a series that writes transparent chauvinism and naked corruption on white paper that turns out to be bandages, wrapped around the fists of its heroine and jammed straight through the teeth of anyone unlucky enough to cross her.

The would-be villainesses of this wave of fantasy stories are typically empowered intellectually or economically, but rarely physically, at least not in the way that male-led power fantasies like Solo Leveling tend to go. It's refreshing to see Scarlet, a brilliant student and mage in her own right, skip all the scheming and theatrics and just get straight to the only two plot points that matter: her right hand, and her left hand.

With better animation than I expected even with Liden Films' pedigree, May I Ask for One Final Thing has thus far delivered a simple but satisfying beatdown and a healthy inversion of tropes. Of all the villainess stories waiting in the wings, this was arguably most deserving of an adaptation simply due to all the prolonged action scenes so enlivened by motion, and the anime is as gleefully bloody as I'd hoped.

You'll find more standout recommendations on our list of new anime in 2025.