The No Guns Life Season 3 anime will continue the story of the Resolver Juzo Inui and his friends Mary and Tetsuro as they investigate a deep and dark Weapons Vault that holds forgotten knowledge and things once thought destroyed.
But when will No Guns Life Season 3 come out? And will the anime finish the No Guns Life manga’s ending?
Madhouse, best known in recent years for No Game No Life, Overlord, One Punch Man, and The Irregular at Magic High School (the 2020 Mahouka Season 2 anime is being produced solely by Studio 8bit), animated the first two seasons.
It used to be a meme that Madhouse does not do second seasons, but in recent years they’ve defied that idea. However, many of their recent anime projects have been sequels.
There is no confirmation Madhouse will return, nor has the primary staff for No Guns Life Season 3 been announced yet. Overlord anime director Itou Naoyuki helmed the first two seasons of the No Guns Life anime series.
Writer Kato Michiya (Hellsing Ultimate, Kengan Ashura) handled storyboarding. Gou Fumiyuki was the Sound Director, and composer Kawai Kenji created the music.
The first season’s opening (OP) theme song music was “Motor City,” performed by Kenichi Asai, while the ending (ED) theme song music was “Game Over,” performed by DATS.
The second season’s opening, “Chaos Drifters,” was a collaboration between Hiroyuki Sawano and Man With a Mission guitarist Jean-Ken Johnny. The ending track, “New World,” was performed by rock band This Is Japan.
The No Guns Life Season 3 opening (OP) and ending (ED) theme song music have not yet been announced.
The No Guns Life English dub for the first two seasons was released as a simul-dub by FUNimation. The anime was also streaming on Hulu.
The second season’s finale, No Guns Life Season 2 Episode 12, was released on September 25, 2020.
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Updated April 20, 2021: No Guns Life manga’s ending announced.
This article provides everything that is known about No Guns Life Season 3 and all related news. As such, this article will be updated over time with news, rumors, and analysis. Meanwhile, let’s delve down into what is known for certain.
No Guns Life Season 3 release date predictions: Did Madhouse fire a blank?
As of the last update, Madhouse nor any company related to the production of the anime has officially confirmed the No Guns Life Season 3 release date. Nor has the production of a No Guns Life sequel been announced.
Once the news is officially confirmed, this article will be updated with the relevant information.
In the meantime, it’s possible to speculate about when, or if, the No Guns Life Season 3 premiere date will occur in the future.
The smoking gun in the room is that the first two seasons may not have been popular enough for the producer to justify greenlighting a sequel. The No Guns Life Blu-Ray/DVD sales in Japan were horrible, but the good news is that disc sales are no longer the most significant source of income for the anime industry.
If Madhouse wants to chamber the third bullet, they better hope the streaming views did much, much better. Streaming revenue can mean a series renewal, even if disc sales are subpar. Unfortunately, FUNimation Now and Hulu do not give any hints to popularity like Crunchyroll.
Even assuming the streaming numbers justify a third season, the real question is scheduling. Anime studios schedule their productions years in advance.
There’s also the fact that the manga series is ending in 2021. Therefore, the earliest Madhouse could produce No Guns Life Season 3 is 2022 or 2023.
No Guns Life Season 3 anime is the Japanese second season
Some anime fans may be confused about why this story is referring to the next season as No Guns Life Season 3. After all, the No Guns Life anime was technically a two-cour season composed of 24 episodes.
For those unfamiliar with the terminology, a “cour” is a three-month block of TV broadcasting based on the physical seasons, usually composed of 10 to 13 episodes.
No Guns Life Part 2 was a “split-cour,” which is when a single anime season takes a broadcasting break for one or more of these three-month measures of time. There was also a more significant delay between cours than usual due to the effects of COVID-19 in 2020.
In Japanese, official announcements called Episodes 13 through 24 ノー・ガンズ・ライフ 第2期, which means the second part, stage, or phase. No Guns Life Season 2 would be ノー・ガンズ・ライフ シーズン2 in Japanese.
However, the waters were muddied by how Part 2 was advertised internationally and in the United States, Canada, and the UK. Similar to how Netflix U.S. often counts anime season differently from Japan, both FUNimation and Hulu officially labeled Part 2 as being Season 2 rather than a continuation of the first season.
Therefore, the anime sequel will be No Guns Life Season 3 for the English-speaking world, and this story will refer to No Guns Life Episode 25 and on as such.
No Guns Life manga ending in 2021 with Volume 13
The story for the anime is based on the No Guns Life manga series by writer and illustrator Tasuku Karasuma (Doll’s Folklore, Shangri-La). Serialized monthly in Ultra Jump magazine since August 2014, the manga series is already up to Volume 12 as of April 19, 2021.
On that day, the creator announced on Twitter that No Guns Life Volume 13 would contain the ending of the story.
“No Guns Life, which has been going on for so long, will be completed with volume 13,” Karasuma tweeted. “I hope you can stay with us for a little while longer. Thank you for your patience!”
VIZ Media is publishing the official English translation of the No Guns Life manga series. Although it only started releasing in September 2019, the English manga will catch up quickly since it was up to Volume 9 by March 16, 2021.
The English No Guns Life Volume 10 release date is scheduled for May 18, 2021, while Volume 11 is set for October 19, 2021. The final chapter should be released in English by early 2022.
Unfortunately, unofficial English fan translation projects stopped in 2019 with Chapter 27.
No Guns Life manga compared to the anime
Just like the anime, the manga is a hard-boiled drama that lightens up the mood with humorous sequences where metal-headed Juzo performs a good impression of equally metal-headed Alfonse from Full Metal Alchemist. The anime adapts the manga’s art style for animation very well, which is no surprise considering its Madhouse.
What stands out a bit is that Madhouse used the video game engine Unreal Engine 4 for animating the background sequences. Using Unreal Engine allowed for more fluid action sequences, although it’s uncertain whether No Guns Life Season 3 will use the same animation approach.
When it comes to the story, manga fans should be pleased with the way Madhouse handled the adaptation. The fluid action scenes may move quickly, but the anime takes its time to develop the hard-boiled aspects of the story. Slow shots. Juzo taking a slow drag from his cigarettes. The one-liners.
The anime episodes’ scripts often seemed to borrow pacing cues from the layout of the manga chapters. While not a panel-by-panel adaptation, the anime remains faithful to the manga and does not skip major story sections or rearrange content considerably.
No Guns Life Season 2 Episode 5 and its story about the pervert John Podpie using X-ray tech may have seemed original to the anime due to its abrupt change in tone, but it was based on Chapter 28. Podpie’s Japanese voice may have seemed familiar since Minoru Aoyama is the narrator for Kaguya-sama: Love is War.
The first two seasons maintained even pacing by adapting less than two chapters per episode on average. The first season finished through Chapter 21.
Episode 22 revealed Juzo’s history as Gun Slave Unit 13 and showed why he began to make choices of his own rather than merely follow orders of his Hands and the military leaders. This story was based on manga Chapter 37 of Volume 6.
Based on this relatively slow pacing, the finale, No Guns Life Season 2 Episode 12, adapted up through manga Chapter 40 of Volume 7. It’s the best possible stopping point for the anime since it finishes the epic battle against Pepper and Seven, leaving Juzo to stare off toward the Beruhren tower off in the distance.
The good news is that English-only manga readers can read immediately read ahead of the anime series by picking up manga Volume 7. As previously noted, the English Volume 8 is coming out in December 2020.
Better yet, there are already enough manga chapters for Guns Life Season 3 to be a two cour. Since new chapters are released monthly, the No Guns Life sequel should be able to adapt the ending of the entire story.
The 2nd half of No Guns Life ended exactly how I was hoping it would!!
Fingers crossed for another season!
But either way, I'm looking forward to recording for my girl Pepper. 💗🍭 pic.twitter.com/ambXK6k8M8— Marianne Bray 🎙💜🤍🖤 (@MarianneDHobbit) September 24, 2020
No Guns Life Season 3 anime spoilers (plot summary/synopsis)
Note: This article was initially published before No Guns Life Episode 24 aired in Japan. Spoilers for No Guns Life Season 3 assume the sequel will pick up with manga Chapter 41 of Volume 7.
While much of Juzo’s history has been revealed, anime fans still don’t know who turned Juzo into a cyborg and erased his memories. It seems pretty evident that the Beruhren Corporation has a hand in it, but what is their end game?
The company is still trying to develop a new version of the Harmony device they lost to Tetsuro. Unfortunately, Tetsuro’s older sibling, Sulfur, decides to use both Juzo and Tetsuro as guinea pigs in a field test of the new device. And these battles lead Juzo and Mary to confront their pasts.
Juzo unleashes his full capabilities as a Gun Slave Unit to survive, but that’s not enough to prevent Sulfur from seriously injuring the hardened Resolver.
Juzo and Mary must travel down into the stifling darkness of the Extended detention center known as the Weapons Vault to find a way to repair Juzo’s damage. Mary hopes to find more clues about what happened to her brother Victor, but they find more in the Vault than was expected.
Sleeping in the depths is a machine from Juzo’s past that he wrongfully thought was long destroyed. This machine possesses lost knowledge that’ll help Juzo in his fight against Beruhren. And then the Resolver receives a request from the Defense Bureau, an organization that reorganized the former army.
Unfortunately, anime fans will have to wait until the No Guns Life Season 3 release date to watch what happens next. Stay tuned!