It’s been about four years since Crowd Psycho 100 finished. But the series has stood the test of time and is considered one of the best anime in recent memory. Much of this is due to its message of camaraderie, perseverance in one’s innocence, and always seeing the best in everyone. During Anime Expo 2026, My city spoke with Yuzuru Tachikawa, the director of Crowd Psycho 100along with artists Setsuo Ito (Mob) and Takahiro Sakurai (Reigen), and had a brief conversation about the series’ conclusion and how they brought their characters to life.
To quickly summarize Crowd Psycho 100it is based on the manga of the same name. The series follows a middle school student named Shigeo Kageyama (Mob), who is gifted with psychic powers and often uses them to fight ghosts and other psychics. But the problem is, every time he loses control of his emotions, he experiences a massive increase in his powers, often resulting in widespread destruction. Hoping to understand his powers, he teams up with Arataka Reigen, a trickster who claims to be as strong as him. Throughout the show, the two men face various threats.
Although Reigen is a fraud in every way, he is still a beloved character in the franchise. Is he taking advantage of those in a vulnerable position to bleed their wallets dry? Yes. Is he an outright liar? Yes too. But is he, in some way, one of the best father figures on the show? Absolutely. But balancing both sides of Reigen was pretty easy for Sakurai.
“Yes, on the surface he’s a fraudster, he takes money from children and all kinds of people. But at the same time, he’s just someone trying to work. He always finds himself facing these difficulties and dilemmas,” Sakurai explains. “Then the next second, he’s helping people. So there’s a part of him that’s hard to hate. It’s even harder not to like him, because he has this awkwardness that shows he’s just human.”
Sakurai continues, explaining that his character redeems himself by taking care of Mob. Oddly, it all kind of cancels out, and it’s a net positive whenever Reigen is in the picture.
Mob’s abilities are a key plot point throughout the series. As you progress, you quickly learn that Mob is an extremely powerful individual who, as it turns out, is a middle school student who just wants to be a kid. Similar to Mob, Ito bottled up a lot of what he felt whenever he found himself in the booth recording his lines.
“Looking back on it, now that I realize, one thing I paid attention to and tried to do was not let my emotions come to the surface,” Ito tells me. “Not letting my emotions come out just as part of my daily life; that was one thing. You know, and that’s not to say that I wouldn’t feel the emotions or that I would be completely emotionless. I was especially careful not to let my emotions get the better of me. That was something that I had to be conscious of.”
Ending shows can always be a little tricky, especially when they have an audience as big as Crowd Psycho 100. But enough time has passed and the overall message is that most people seem happy with how the series ended. Interestingly, the team behind the series feels more or less the same way as the community.
“I found it very enduring how everyone protected Mob until the bitterest end to become an ordinary middle school student,” Ito said at the end of the series. “The way it ended would literally allow him to continue his daily life as if he were a normal person. I thought the way it ended was brilliant.”
Tachikawa came away with a similar feeling. Because no matter how you cut it, he has superpowers and could do a lot of things with them. One thing that partly stood out to him was that Mob didn’t have to “take these huge, giant leaps in evolution.” Instead, he chose to make these “small changes.” These small changes made all the difference for him.
Sakurai was happy with the conclusion of Reigen’s final arc. In many ways, he feels like he was “saved by Mob at the very end.” Sakurai finds it hard to imagine the series ending for his character any other way than the way it did.
Crowd Psycho 100 is one of those unique shows that has a little bit of everything. One second you’re wondering how a big fight will go, and the next you’re laughing at something Reigen pulled off. The best part is that the series only lasts three seasons, with 37 episodes in total, so you can breeze through it pretty quickly.