EX-ARM is a finished anime. It ran for 12 episodes on TOKYO MX, Sun TV and BS Fuji between January and March 2021, and it is remembered less for its story than for the way it looked. If you have arrived here from a search that still calls it upcoming, the broadcast ended on 28 March 2021 and nothing further has been announced since.
When EX-ARM aired, and where
TOKYO MX carried the series in the Sunday 25:05 slot, which runs from 1:05am on the Monday morning in ordinary clock time. Japanese schedules write late night broadcasts as hours past midnight attached to the previous evening, which is why the premiere is listed in some places as Sunday 10 January 2021 and in others as 11 January. Both are describing the same broadcast.
The channels were TOKYO MX, Sun TV and BS Fuji, announced by Shueisha in December 2020. Crunchyroll was the international partner and is credited as a producer, which is where the frequently repeated description of it as a Crunchyroll original comes from.
- Episodes: 12.
- First broadcast: Sunday 10 January 2021 at 25:05 JST on TOKYO MX.
- Final episode: 偉大な一歩, A Great Step, broadcast 28 March 2021.
- Animation production: Visual Flight.
- Director: Yoshikatsu Kimura. Series composition: Tommy Morton.
- Opening: Rise Again by AIRFLIP. Ending: Diamonds Shine by Dizzy Sunfist.
What EX-ARM is about
In 2014 a high school student called Akira Natsume, who dislikes machines, decides to change himself and steps out of the house. He is hit by a truck.
Sixteen years later, in the Tokyo port district of 2030, a police officer named Minami Uezono and her android partner Alma raid a deal involving an unknown class of weapon called EX-ARM. They are attacked by an enemy carrying EX-ARM No. 08, and in desperation they activate the one they have taken from him, No. 00. What is inside No. 00 turns out to be Akira.
Cast
The main cast as listed by TOKYO MX:
- Akira Natsume, voiced by Souma Saitou. The boy who died in 2014 and wakes up as the intelligence inside a weapon.
- Minami Uezono, voiced by Mikako Komatsu. The police officer who activates him and ends up carrying him.
- Alma, voiced by Akari Kitou. Minami’s android partner. Often written as Arma in older English coverage, including on this page before it was corrected.
- Alisa Himegami, voiced by Yui Ishikawa.
- Shuuichi Natsume, voiced by Kouji Yusa. Akira’s brother.
The animation is the thing everyone remembers
EX-ARM was made in 3DCG rather than drawn animation, with a separate 3D character design credit and a 2D character design credit in the staff list. The reception was severe. Its AniList average sits at 21 out of 100, which is among the lowest scores on the service for a series that plenty of people actually watched, and it has been seen by enough of them to rank 29th most popular in its season.
That combination, widely watched and almost universally disliked, is why the title keeps resurfacing in discussions of CG anime years after it finished.
Where it came from, and why it was late
The anime adapts the manga EX-ARM by HiRock with art by Shinya Komi, which ran in Shueisha’s Grand Jump and finished at 14 volumes. There is no other anime in the franchise, no second season and no film.
The series was originally scheduled for July 2020. It was postponed because of the pandemic, and the new window became January 2021. That delay is the one piece of the original version of this article that was correct.
Where to watch EX-ARM
Crunchyroll holds the licence and is the official external link carried by the series database entry. Catalogues move and vary by country, so check your own region rather than trusting a list.
Rewritten and checked on 9 November 2026. Episode count, air dates, staff and cast read from the TOKYO MX programme page for the series and from AniList entry 106503. The broadcast channels were confirmed against Shueisha’s own announcement of December 2020. This page previously carried a mistranslated series title, a misspelled broadcaster, an invented name for the source manga and the wrong pronouns for most of the cast. All of that has been corrected rather than removed, and the wrong wording is not reprinted here so that it cannot be read back off the page as a claim.
