At Anime Frontier 2025, I had the pleasure of speaking with the producer of Chained Soldier, Yuki Watanabe. Season 2 of Chained Soldier was announced at Anime Frontier to an amazing crowd. With the hype at an all-time high, I spoke to him about how this anime came to fruition.
What originally attracted you to the story of Chained Soldier when you first encountered the manga?
So for me, the most impactful part of the manga were the drawings, the art. It’s very good. Takemura the artist, He’s able to draw great battle scenes and also very cute girls. It’s challenging to find artists that can actually do both of those well. Many finer points emerge later on. It’s a very calculated and interesting story.
When adapting from manga to anime, were there any scenes or plot points that particularly challenged you to capture faithfully — or to reinterpret for animation?
Although the directors of Season 1 and Season 2 are not the same, a core principle shared across both seasons was the importance of not cutting things out and staying as faithful to the original manga as possible. In particular, we placed great improtance on portraying the sexy, “reward”-like scenes depicted between Yuuki and the other characters exactly as they appear in the original work.
Did you or the director ever consider changing or omitting certain aspects (sexual tension, violence, dark themes) — and how did you decide what to keep or adjust?
This is kind of a repeat a little bit of what I said earlier, but our first and foremost goal is to be as faithful to the manga as possible, especially when it comes to the reward, the sexy scenes. But of course, there are some things in the manga that if we adapted exactly as is, we couldn’t exactly broadcast on tv. So it became a question of not what we cut, but how we can adjust it in a way that is true to the world that it takes place in. And it seems natural.
Chained Soldier touches on power imbalances, consent (in some contexts, given the “Slave” mechanic), and moral dilemmas. How do you hope viewers interpret these themes?
I think that the original writer and creator of the manga Takahiro sensei is very good and very kind of well thought out the system because obviously Yuki gets a reward after he works really hard as in his slave form to fight. So in the end, I feel like fans probably feels like it balances out because he gets his reward and he’s ultimately happy, which is an exchange for all the hard work he does when he’s fighting.
If the anime continues, are there particular arcs or scenes from the manga you’re most excited (or apprehensive) to animate?
My first thought is that in the story, the action kind of gets more heavy, more intense. I think that could be hard from an animation perspective. If the anime continued into a third season or something, there will be as part of the story where all the commanders come together to decide who the next Supreme commander will be. And that’s not actually very action heavy, it’s actually a lot more talking and it’s a lot more of a mental battle between the characters. And so that could be difficult to portray in animation. So we’re thinking about that and what would be a good way to make that interesting.
HIDIVE currently streams the first and second seasons of Chained Soldier.
