One Punch Man Season 3 Review: Coped. Seethed. Malded.

Article at a glance:
Hope, crushed on a weekly schedule. Every time Season 3 showed a hint of improvement, the very next episode doubled down on everything that was wrong; cheap filters, stiff animation, and zero respect for the source.
A build-up arc ruined by incompetence. This manga arc lives and dies by its payoff, and after seeing how the anime handled major fights so far, there’s no confidence left that it can deliver even a fraction of Murata’s work.
Six years of waiting for a downgrade. Instead of elevating the manga or even faithfully adapting it, Season 3 actively makes it worse, feeling less like a troubled production and more like a complete creative failure.

What do you expect me to say? Every single time I held even a little bit of hope that things would get better, they got worse. Senkou no Flash got a good episode? Well, hopefully things will be better next week onwards. NOPE. Literally, the next episode was the same neon filter-filled nonsense the season has become known for. “Oh, maybe they are saving budget for the final fight.” Well, the final fight was straight up disrespectful to Murata’s manga. So yeah, this One Punch Man Season 3 review is going to be a rant. A LONG one.

Oh yeah, following the conclusion of Season 3 Part 1, a Part 2 was Season 3 was also confirmed for 2027. They didn’t even have the decency to draw an original promotional artwork for Part 2. They literally reused the OG Season 3 promotional art featuring Saitama and Garou. What are we doing? At this point, this is just shameless. I was rooting for the anime staff in the beginning. But over time, even that little bit of sympathy has faded away. Sure, they were working in hellish conditions, but holy fuck, this is an atrocity.

I rarely hate a product enough to say that it shouldn’t exist, but I wish One Punch Man Season 3 never got made. I don’t mean it as a hyperbole or something, yes, it gave me WEEKS worth of content. But I would’ve been a happier man if OPM Season 3 never happened. YEAH, what a start to a review, right? Welcome to my One Punch Man Season 3 review. Let’s actually get started now.

Plot

I will not pretend that this arc in the manga is a masterpiece or anything. This particular segment of OPM’s story is all about build-up. It is all about creating hype for Saitama vs. Garou, which is the finale of this arc. And in the manga, that build-up paid off because Yusuke Murata drew a GOD-tier fight. Do you REALLY think that the anime will be able to do that fight even 10% justice after seeing how they handled Saitama vs. Orochi in S3 Episode 12? Yeah, the pacing is slow in the manga too. But the anime slows it even further to a damn CRAWL.

Yes, believe it or not, the anime messed up more than just the art and animations. I am well aware that the plot for this arc isn’t that interesting in the manga either, but the anime definitely made it worse because of the slower pacing.

Now, I am going to do something unconventional for a review. I am going to dedicate a whole sub-section in the Production part to a different season of the anime. Trust me, it will make sense.

Production

Why was One Punch Man Season 1 special?

THIS is what Murata’s art looks like, by the way.

See, ONE’s own art is rather crude. The original web comic wasn’t exactly known for its art or anything. Here’s the thing, though, ONE understands framing, spacing, and positioning like no other. So even with the crude art, the web coming managed to have some good action. Then Murata came along and took ONE’s incredible framing and worked his own magic on it. He managed to add an incredible sense of scale, movement, and weight to ONE’s immaculate shot composition, and that’s how the manga became the legend it is.

What does that have to do with the anime? Well, the original team at Madhouse understood how this delicate balance worked and somehow managed to add their own influence to it. Thus giving us one of THE best anime adaptations of all time: One Punch Man Season 1. You could SEE the reverence for the source material and how they added to it instead of just adapting it. THIS right here is what made Season 1 special. Season 2 followed the manga to a T, and while Season 2 was not bad, it just lacked the charm and dedication Season 1 had. This is why.

Meanwhile, Season 3…

Which approach did Season 3 take, you might ask? Well, as you might have guessed, the answer is: NEITHER. They didn’t follow the manga, nor did they add to it; they actively made the manga worse. Season 3 is so bad that Yusuke Murata’s artwork feels more animated than some of the scenes in the anime. Of course, the immaculate art style and framing have also been completely downgraded and dragged through the mud. You see, despite having 6 years to make Season 3, the production only really started in early 2025, which gave them no time to put any effort in.

I understand that making anime is a complicated process, and yeah, it is hard to get high-demand staff members for projects, which leads to delays like these. But here’s the thing, no one said that they had released THIS year. Other than Bandai, of course. We fans would’ve been happy to wait another year if it meant getting a better adaptation. But what did we get? Entire episodes where the only movement is the mouths of people speaking, insane animation errors like depicting a male character as female, oh, and the stupid neon filters with random closeup shots.

If I didn’t know any better, I would call Season 3 straight up malicious towards Yusuke Murata and ONE’s masterpiece, but, as someone once said, “Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence.” And that’s what I genuinely believe in this case.

Summing Up

Here are my final review scores for One Punch Man Season 3:

Plot – 3/10
Characters – 4/10
Production – 2/10
Enjoyment – 2/10
Overall – 3/10

As you can tell, I hated One Punch Man Season 3 so much that I considered not even making this review. But no, I had to vent my frustration. The only thing good to come out of One Punch Man Season 3 is the memes and the sheer amount of content it has given me to yap about. And now they’re treating the Season 3 Part 2 release as an imminent threat. I don’t support GenAI, but holy fuck, even good quality GenAI would produce legitimately BETTER results than this. It is a mockery of Murata’s art either way.

Anyway, yap session over. I really need to go cool off. I will play Hades II or something now. See ya.

Also, check out my thoughts on Gimai Seikatsu LN here.