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Romance fans always have plenty of options each anime season, so it takes a lot for one to stand out from the crowd. One of the most anticipated romance anime of the Fall 2024 anime season is Blue Box, which is perhaps one of the best romance series to come from Shonen Jump in recent years. The release date for Blue Box is rapidly approaching and Netflix is bringing the entire series straight to you.

Based on Kouji Miura’s popular manga, Blue Box is a touching romance story about two high school students trying to navigate the world of competitive sports and love at the same time. Taiki Inomata is a member of the boys’ badminton team while his crush Chinatsu Kano is on the girls’ basketball team. Their budding romance takes a turn when Chinatsu moves in with Taiki’s family after her parents leave Japan for work. Blue Box has a release date of October 3, 2024 and will air on Netflix at the same time as the Japanese broadcast.

Are we overly excited for a show that combines the best of both sports and romance anime genres? Absolutely, but for good reason. The manga’s art is impressive, the characters are earnest and believable, and there is just enough happening outside the romance storyline to keep it from feeling one-dimensional. The story of two young people striving to do their best and navigate the tricky arena of love never gets old.

Blue Box is set for an October 3, 2024 release date, with Netflix grabbing the international streaming rights for the anime.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

• Why the finales of My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, and One Piece feel like the end of an era in manga
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• Why One Piece's Monkey D. Luffy is the perfect anime hero for the dark times ahead
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• Gnosia, the "Among Us meets Everything Everywhere All at Once" visual novel is getting an anime adaptation that needs to be as weird as possible
• Assassination Classroom is a Shonen anime well worth revisiting, ten years on
• Sony is making big moves to own the anime industry by buying Kadokawa, publisher of Oshi no Ko, Sword Art Online, and Konosuba