Crunchyroll has dropped another trailer for the upcoming Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice anime adaptation, Sekiro: No Defeat, offering a look at director Kenichi Kutsuna and Studio Qzil.la’s take on the 2019 FromSoftware title.
The trailer, which was released during the SXSW Festival in Austin, shows off more of the anime’s hand-drawn art style, offering not just a fresh but still familiar take on Wolf’s journey, but also pays tribute to the game by featuring some bosses, such as The Owl, Gyoubu Oniwa, and Genichiro Ashina, now recreated in anime form.
When it comes to video game adaptations, the challenge always lies in how a studio takes the interactive format and translates it into a linear narrative, and this is no different for Sekiro: No Defeat, with director Kutsuna revealing during an interview with Variety that the goal was to “take as many elements from the underlying work of the game as possible” and that even though the anime will not deviate too much from the original source material, using every element from the games proved to be a difficult task.
“With the game, of course, you’re playing in the character, or the player’s, POV, so you have one point of view, and that wouldn’t really work for an anime, so we tried to adapt it as much as possible as an audio-visual type of medium,” Kutsuna said. “There’s a lot of respect paid to the original game, but there were some liberties taken in the sense of point of view and joining the imagery together, as opposed to being placed into the world in the first person.”
Kutsuna added that since the first trailer for Sekiro: No Defeat was released at Gamescom 2025, there have been tons of fan concerns over how well the anime would adapt the video game, which is well-known for having a narrative that’s only properly unveiled via player agency.
“We understand that the potential audience for what we’re making in this anime is going to put this under the microscope, and it’s going to be a very, very– I don’t wanna say harsh or strict lens, but you could say the audience will be looking at it,” he explained. “But I think we’ve done everything we could from the production side in terms of maintaining a level of quality that wouldn’t tarnish the FromSoftware and Sekiro brand.”
“One of the core pillars of the video game experience, I think, is that it’s not a very kind game, shall we say, to the players… I think it also allows a lot of interpretation on the player’s part in terms of how they want to proceed through the game,” he added. “So, in taking that and transforming it into an audio-visual adaptation, we wanted it to be open to interpretation in a similar way that the game presented itself to its players.”
Kutsuna also explained that Sekiro: No Defeat was developed very closely with FromSoftware, with the studio checking and approving many aspects of the anime, like its screenplay and storyboarding, to make sure it fit in the established video game lore. The anime also marks the first FromSoftware IP adaptation of its kind, and is expected to launch on Crunchyroll sometime in 2026.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
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