Psyren starts with a red telephone card left behind in a public phone. A few days after first-year high school student Ageha Yoshina picks it up, his childhood friend Sakurako Amamiya, who carried the same card, disappears. To find her, Ageha contacts Psyren, the secret society rumoured to be behind a string of disappearances across the country, and a game with lives at stake begins there.
Toshiaki Iwashiro ran the manga in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2008 to 2010. Shueisha published volume 1 of the Jump Comics edition on 2 May 2008, and volume 16, out on 4 March 2011, was the last. The blurb for volume 16 puts the final battle with Miroku up front and ends on a present day without Ageha and his friends, where the collapse of the world is drawing near.
When the anime's official site introduces the series, it opens with the fact that Psyren was nominated three times in AnimeJapan's fan vote for the manga people most want to see animated. The site adds that the series is still popular some fifteen years after it ended. An announcement on 28 March set the broadcast for October and said the anime would adapt the story all the way to its ending.
Broadcasts begin on Monday 5 October at 11pm JST on Tokyo MX and roll out to other channels after that, with streaming services following in turn. Satelight is producing the animation, Katsumi Ono is directing and Shin Yoshida is handling series composition. Rikuya Yasuda voices Ageha and Mayuko Kazama voices Sakurako, with Shunsuke Takeuchi as Hiryu Asaga and Soma Saito as Oboro Mochizuki. On 11 September the main PV, the key visual and the opening theme, WARNING!! by CLAN QUEEN, were released together.
In English the manga is published by VIZ Media under the title Psyren. Since the anime has said it will reach the ending, all sixteen volumes are ground the broadcast plans to cover.
