For Fans of Mob Psycho 100

Reigen is a fraud who charges clients for exorcisms he performs by calling in his psychic intern. He should be the villain. Instead, Mob Psycho 100 makes him the most genuinely caring adult figure in the show, the only one who consistently tells Mob that his powers are not his worth. The gap between what Reigen says and what he means, between his performance and his actual investment, is where most of the series' humor and heart lives. He is a con man who accidentally became a mentor, and the show never lets him off the hook for either.

ONE's original web manga is drawn in a deliberately rough style: stick figures, wobbly lines, zero concern for polish. Bones could have cleaned it up into conventional shonen aesthetics. They didn't. The TV adaptation kept the scraggly linework for everyday scenes and then let it explode into something completely different during psychic sequences: dense sakuga, abstract geometry, color fields that look more like experimental animation than a weekly TV series. The visual vocabulary for 'Mob letting go' is unlike anything else on screen, and that contrast is the whole argument the series makes about what power costs and what it's worth.

Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 film set the template for anime as a global art form and for psychic-power stories in particular: a teenage boy whose inner chaos manifests as physical devastation, a city that cannot contain what it has produced, a friendship that becomes a tragedy. Where Mob Psycho resolves its psychic crisis through emotional growth, Akira ends in something closer to myth. Both are asking what society does with people it cannot control, and both answer partly by making the animation itself feel dangerous. Forty years on, Akira has lost none of its force.

Persona 5 shares Mob Psycho 100's core preoccupations: high school, repressed emotion as dangerous energy, adults who fail young people, and the question of whether changing yourself means becoming someone else. The Metaverse, where mental distortions take physical form, is structurally similar to the spirit-possession cases Mob investigates: a literalized inner world that needs to be cleared out before the person can function. The combat is spectacular. The style is relentless. And like Mob, the game ultimately argues that the emotional work is harder and more important than the supernatural one.