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LOS ANGELES, CA- Fifteen years gave Warner Bros. Japan Anime Production plenty to celebrate at Anime Expo, but its anniversary showcase spent surprisingly little time looking backward. Instead, the studio used the milestone to make its case for what comes next.
Inside Room 408AB, English voice actors Damien Haas and Laura Post guided a packed audience through Warner Bros. Japan’s growing anime slate. There were updates on Record of Ragnarok III, in which Post voices the Valkyrie Brunhilde, along with looks at Fist of the North Star: Hokuto no Ken and BLADE & BASTARD. But two projects ultimately emerged as the presentation’s biggest draws: STEEL BALL RUN JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and the mixed-reality nightmare Devils’ Crest.
STEEL BALL RUN: The Race Gets Bloodier
If Warner Bros. Japan’s anniversary panel was about looking toward the future, STEEL BALL RUN demonstrated just how loudly the studio intends to get there.
Over at Crypto.com Arena, the STEEL BALL RUN special panel felt less like a conventional Anime Expo Q&A and more like an event unto itself. Legendary JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure composer Yugo Kanno delivered a one-time live musical performance, joined by English cast members Daman Mills and Kaiji Tang. For a franchise whose music has become nearly as identifiable as its visual style, hearing Kanno perform inside an arena gave the presentation a scale befitting JoJo.
Then came the news fans had been waiting for.
STEEL BALL RUN will resume streaming every Friday beginning September 25, with 11 new episodes covering the brutal second and third stages of the race. The 47-minute first stage is currently streaming exclusively on Netflix.
The newly unveiled second trailer pushed Johnny Joestar and Gyro Zeppeli into the grueling 750-mile desert crossing known as the Devil’s Palm, where the race increasingly begins to resemble something far more dangerous than a competition.
The presentation also introduced three significant new characters. Tomoaki Maeno will voice Mountain Tim, the Wyoming cowboy-turned-deputy investigating a string of mysterious murders. Yoko Hikasa joins the cast as the enigmatic Hot Pants, while Tomokazu Sugita takes on Funny Valentine, the wildly popular U.S. president whose motivations surrounding the race appear considerably more sinister than his public persona suggests.
And the JoJo presence extended well beyond the arena.
The STEEL BALL RUN Booth Experience in the South Hall Lobby remained crowded with fans, many signing up for preregistration for JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Spirit and collecting promotional items. The free-to-play mobile strategy RPG is scheduled to launch worldwide, excluding Japan, on August 13, 2026.
Fans were also given another reason to look beyond Anime Expo. THE JOJO’S BIZARRE ADVENTURE WORLD, an officially licensed interactive pop-up experience, will expand outside Japan with stops planned for Los Angeles, Seattle and Phoenix this fall.
Devils’ Crest: Where the Game Stops Being a Game
If STEEL BALL RUN brought spectacle, Devils’ Crest brought something considerably more unsettling.
Based on Reki Kawahara’s 2022 Demons’ Crest light novel series and retitled Devils’ Crest for its official English release, the story moves beyond conventional virtual reality. Here, the boundaries between a fantasy survival game and the physical world begin to collapse, turning digital danger into something frighteningly tangible.
The world-premiere trailer offered the audience its first extended taste of that nightmare, but one of the panel’s biggest reactions came from its music reveal: Ado will perform the opening theme, “Shinka,” written by Vocaloid producer YurryCanon.
In a special comment shared with the audience, Ado explained that the song reflects the anime’s increasingly unstable boundary between games and reality, and the uncertainty of determining what is genuine when those worlds begin to overlap. At its core, however, “Shinka” carries a more hopeful idea: continuing to trust yourself and move forward even when reality itself becomes difficult to decipher.
Warner Bros. Japan also found a much lighter way to incorporate Ado into its anniversary celebration. In a playful “15-Second Challenge” video, the singer raced through her explanation of the song at a pace that nearly turned the exercise into a rap.
Voice actors Yuya Hirose, who plays Kenji Kondo, and Satomi Amano, who voices Minagi Sano, also shared their excitement for the series. Hirose described recording sessions in which even the cast remains uncertain about what horrors are waiting for their characters next.
That uncertainty may ultimately be Devils’ Crest’s most intriguing hook. In a genre filled with stories about entering virtual worlds, Kawahara’s latest adaptation reverses the threat: what happens when the virtual world refuses to stay there?
Fans will find out soon enough. Devils’ Crest premieres worldwide exclusively on Prime Video on November 6, 2026.
Fifteen years into Warner Bros. Japan Anime Production’s run, Anime Expo could easily have become an exercise in nostalgia. There was certainly a legacy worth celebrating. But between an increasingly dangerous cross-country race, a reality-bending death game and a slate of projects still waiting in the wings, Warner Bros. Japan seemed considerably more interested in its next chapter than its last.
At Anime Expo 2026, that future looked plenty ambitious.
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CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT MORE COVERAGE AT ANIME EXPO 2026
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CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT MORE COVERAGE AT ANIME EXPO 2026
