86: Eighty-Six celebrates three years without a continuation

It's already April 11 in Japan, marking three years since the premiere of the anime adaptation of Asato Asato's light novels, "86: Eighty-Six." Although the story caught viewers from its first episode, to date there has been no news about the production of any sequel. In fact, while there is a lot of material available to adapt in the original light novels, the reasons why a sequel might not occur would be more about planning issues.

When "86: Eighty-Six" premiered its anime adaptation in Spring-2021 (April-June), it was announced as a separate two-part series, with the second scheduled for the Fall-2021 (October-December) season. But it was in this second part where the problems began on the part of A-1 Pictures, the studio in charge of the adaptation.

In fact, the anime adaptation was originally scheduled to premiere in 2020, but was delayed due to production issues. Then, during the second part, "86: Eighty-Six" went through numerous suspensions stemming from production issues, causing them to "run out of TV time." To explain this, it turns out that the series aired its "Episode 21" on December 26, 2021, so they could no longer air the remaining two episodes for the two weeks following that date, because they were already going to interfere with the Winter-2022 (January-March) premieres.

This caused these final two episodes to be delayed until March-2022, and while they were quite a bit better in terms of quality (of course, the studio had an additional three months to complete the work), many had already left "86: Eighty-Six" in the past considering that the new season brought "Kimetsu no Yaiba", "Shingeki no Kyojin", and "Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru," to name a few.

Anyway, the only season so far of "86: Eighty-Six" adapted in the first part Volume 1 and part of Volume 2, while the second part finished adapting the events of Volume 2 and also Volume 3 in its entirety. As we already mentioned, there is enough content for a second season, since there are a total of thirteen volumes published to date.

While there is plenty of material, perhaps the same cannot be said for A-1 Pictures' availability for this project. Having the massive project of "Solo Leveling", in addition to other franchises such as "Sword Art Online", "NieR: Automata" and the eventual return of "Kaguya-sama: Love is War", it is certainly difficult for them to make time to produce a continuation of "86: Eighty-Six", which although it was well received by specialized critics, Blu-ray/DVD sales (the only financial aspect of a public nature), were average.

Will this franchise return in the future? All that's left to do is wait.