A new anime adapting 1993 manga Magic Knight Rayearth debuted last week, breathing life into a property that was featured in one of the Sega Saturn’s most beloved games.
The remake is streaming exclusively on Crunchyroll outside Japan. New episodes go up Wednesdays at 11:15 a.m. EDT. It’s set to run for two consecutive cours — anime industry parlance for three-month seasons — which means it’ll probably be about two dozen episodes in total.
Crunchyroll announced its intention to dub Rayearth into English but so far, only the original Japanese audio with translated subtitles is available. The Sony-owned company hasn’t provided a date yet for when dubbed episodes will debut.
The merchandise engine is already revving up. Over the last week, the anime’s co-producer, Kotobukiya, has shown off prototypes of figures depicting Rayearth’s three protagonists — blue-haired Umi, blonde Fuu and redhead Hikaru — at an exhibition in Japan.
Meanwhile, Good Smile revealed last week that it would sell Rayearth figures in its Nendoroid line of chibi-themed figures.
Series creator CLAMP and animation producer TMS announced a new Rayearth project more than two years ago but didn’t give more details until last April when they specified it would be an animated series debuting in October.
TMS is owned by Sega and animated the original Rayearth anime that aired in Japan between October 1994 and November 1995. This time around, it’s only producing the remake, while E&H Production handles animation. E&H is a fairly new studio that started up five years ago and has 2024 two series under its belt, Ninja Kamui and Red Cat Ramen, as well as a 2025 special for the Undead Unluck franchise.
Both Rayearth anime are based on a manga written and illustrated by the artists at CLAMP that spanned six volumes in 1993 to 1996.
The popularity of the manga and the original anime led Sega to develop and publish an RPG for the Saturn in August 1995. It was part of Sega’s early initiative to publish role-playing games on the Saturn in Japan to appeal to a wider audience, releasing alongside Shining Wisdom and two months after Blue Seed: Kushinada Hirokuden.
Working Designs licensed the rights to translate Magic Knight Rayearth into English and publish it in North America, a job they wouldn’t accomplish until December 1998, making it that region’s final retail Saturn game.
It got glowing reviews in French and Japanese magazines with scores in the 80s and 90s, but they were mixed at the time in the U.S., with magazines giving it scores of a 95, 71 and 67. Today, it’s one of the rarest and most sought-after Saturn games, with original copies easily fetching more than US$1,000 each.
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