I Didn’t Expect To Love Crunchyroll’s Biggest Fall 2025 Anime — It Isn’t Even From Japan

Crunchyroll just dropped a gorgeous cross-country mashup for fall 2025: a South Korean novel turned manhwa, animated in China, with both Chinese and Japanese voice tracks. It calls itself The Fated Magical Princess: Who Made Me a Princess, and yes, it is technically donghua, not anime. Labels aside, it looks fantastic and it’s already one of the standouts this season.

What it is and where it came from

This thing has been quietly building a fanbase for years. The original web novels hit in 2017 and 2018, then the manhwa adaptation ran its course and wrapped in 2022 after pulling in millions of reads on apps like Tapas through 2023. If you’ve been collecting the English releases, Seven Seas is publishing them; the most recent volume, number nine, landed in March 2025.

The hook: a princess who knows the ending

We start at square one with Athanasia, a princess stuck in a fairy-tale empire that looks lovely and treats her anything but. No spoilers, but the show dials down the loud isekai branding from the books. Instead, it plays the premise quieter: she wakes up as a baby with a frighteningly sharp mind and knowledge of how her story is supposed to end, courtesy of a storybook-style vision of the future. The goal is simple and grim — dodge the path that leads to a jail cell and a life spent chasing the approval of a father who barely acknowledges she exists. He’s the emperor. He’s cold. You get the vibe.

Part of the fun here is how many familiar tropes are present without feeling stale: frosty dads, absent moms, court politics, slightly scrappy magic users, and a doom-bearing prophecy hanging over everything. The source material helped popularize that bookish, royal-drama side of isekai, and the adaptation carries that torch with more polish than I expected.

Why it looks this good

Credit to studio Colored Pencil Animation. The production blends 3D elements into 2D character work so cleanly that the seams basically vanish, and the backgrounds are detailed enough to make you pause just to stare at them. It’s lush, saturated, and loaded with personality — the kind of high-end presentation that puts it in the same conversation as Solo Leveling when people start ranking slick adaptations of Korean hits.

How it plays

Athanasia runs the show. Even as a toddler confined to a quiet corner of the palace, she’s scheming, charming, and very clearly trying to engineer a future where she survives her own story. The vibe is bittersweet but often cozy; there’s a subtle money-and-comfort fantasy under it — watching someone with a silver spoon actually learn how to use it. We do get flashes of her older self early, but the opening stretch lives with her childhood, which is more common in web novels and manhwa and is finally starting to show up more in animation.

Dubs and where to watch

Both the Chinese and Japanese dubs are excellent so far. We rarely get a donghua with this much spotlight, so try the Chinese track at least once for a change of pace. It’s streaming on Crunchyroll as part of the fall 2025 simulcast slate.

• Origin: South Korean web novels (2017, 2018) that spawned a hit manhwa (ended 2022; millions of reads on apps like Tapas into 2023)
• English releases: Seven Seas Entertainment; volume 9 published March 2025
• Format: Chinese-produced donghua with Chinese and Japanese voice casts
• Studio: Colored Pencil Animation (heavy 3D/2D blend with ornate backgrounds)
• Premise snapshot: infant Athanasia knows the tragic ending and tries to rewrite it, with an emperor father who couldn’t care less
• Tone and tropes: refined take on royal-drama isekai — cold parents, palace intrigue, cursed future — presented with restraint
• Where to watch: Crunchyroll, fall 2025
• Reception: among the top three most-watched and most-reviewed new titles on Crunchyroll’s fall 2025 lineup; 4.9 stars after 7,200 reviews

My read after a few episodes

I’ve followed this story across formats, and this cut might be my favorite version. Colored Pencil’s pacing is confident, the world is a knockout, and the character work lands. If you’ve been curious about Korean comics or Chinese animation and want an easy on-ramp, this is a strong first stop.

If you want more picks like this, check out my running list of new anime in 2025 — there are some great sleepers in there.