I Made Friends with the Second Prettiest Girl in My Class Anime Adds New Cast and Shares Fresh PV Featuring reGretGirl

If you have ever watched a quiet school year feel like a hallway with the lights half-off—familiar, a little lonely, and oddly calm—then you already understand the mood that I Made Friends with the Second Prettiest Girl in My Class carries, and now, with a new promotional video and three freshly announced cast members, you can feel that corridor widen into something warmer and more crowded.

New faces step into Maki’s orbit

The television anime adaptation of Takata’s I Made Friends with the Second Prettiest Girl in My Class (also known as Class de 2-ban Me ni Kawaii Onna no Ko to Tomodachi ni Natta) has added three cast members, each one like a new note in a song you already know by heart, subtle but unmistakable once it lands.

The newly announced roles are Rikuya Yasuda as Nozomu Seki (Maki’s classmate), Shinji Kawada as Itsuki Maehara (Maki’s father), and Yurina Amami as Kyoka Minato (Itsuki’s subordinate).

A new promo video, and music that sets the tone

The third promotional video arrives with a track that leans into nostalgia without pressing too hard: it features reGretGirl’s 2025 song "Hi no Ataru Kotoba" (Words in the Sunlight), and if you have ever let a single lyric pull you back to a specific season of your life, you will recognize the intent—soft, steady, and quietly persuasive.

For the series’ themes, reGretGirl performs the opening "Submarine Youth", while Koresawa delivers the ending "Zutto Ichiban ni Shite ne", giving the show a musical frame that feels like dusk and dawn around the same school day.

Where and when you can watch it

The anime began airing in Japan on April 7 at 11:30 p.m. JST on Tokyo MX, and it later aired that same evening on Kansai TV; it also started airing on April 10 on BS Asahi. If your routine depends on streaming more than schedules, Crunchyroll streams the anime as it airs, which—practically speaking—means your weekly watch habit can stay neatly intact.

The staff shaping the series

The anime is directed by Hideki Tachibana at CONNECT, with Keiichirō Ōchi overseeing and writing the series scripts, and Shoko Takimoto handling character designs—three roles that, together, decide whether the story feels like a simple diary entry or a scene you can actually step into.

The story: a friendship that starts in an unexpected aisle

At its center is Maki Maehara, a boy who expects to stay alone at school—no shared hobbies, no circle to drift into—until a chance run-in with Umi Asanagi at a video store changes the rhythm of his days. She is popular, often labeled the "second prettiest in class", and you can almost see the social distance between them like two different floors of the same building; yet their overlap begins with B-grade movies, and it turns into something rarer in a classroom full of noise: a direct, deliberate offer of friendship.

How the series grew before it became an anime

The story first appeared on Kakuyomu in November 2020, and it earned a special prize in the romantic comedy division of the 6th Kakuyomu Web Novel Contest—one of those small, measurable milestones that often signals a bigger wave coming. Kadokawa’s Sneaker Bunko began publishing the novels in print in December 2021, and a manga adaptation by Rin Ono launched in 2022 on Comic Alive+. The anime itself was originally announced in 2023, which means you are now watching the payoff of roughly three-plus years of steady momentum.

Yen Press publishes the manga adaptation in English, so if you are the type who likes to compare how a scene lands on the page versus on screen, you have an easy way to follow that thread—like holding the same photograph under two different kinds of light.

I still remember the first time I found a series through a detail as ordinary as a video store, and you may feel the same small pull here: the sense that the biggest changes rarely kick the door in, they simply sit beside you and ask, gently, to be friends.