It’s been roughly four years since Mob Psycho 100 ended. But the show has stood the test of time and is regarded as one of the better anime in recent memory. This is largely due to its message of camaraderie, perseverance in one’s innocence, and always seeing the best in one another. During Anime Expo 2026, Kotaku sat down with Yuzuru Tachikawa, the director of Mob Psycho 100, as well as performers Setsuo Ito (Mob) and Takahiro Sakurai (Reigen), and had a brief conversation about the show’s conclusion and how they brought their characters to life.
To quickly summarize Mob Psycho 100, it’s based on the manga of the same name. The show follows a middle schooler named Shigeo Kageyama (Mob), who’s gifted with psychic powers and often uses them to fight ghosts and other psychics. But the catch is that whenever he loses control of his emotions, he experiences a massive surge in his powers, often resulting in widespread destruction. In hopes of understanding his powers, he partners with Arataka Reigen, a con man who pretends to be as strong as he is. Throughout the show, the two go toe-to-toe with various threats.
Despite Reigen being a fraud by all accounts, he’s still a beloved character in the franchise. Does he take advantage of those in vulnerable positions to bleed their wallets dry? Yes. Is he a flat-out liar? Also yes. But is he, in some way, one of the best father figures on the show? Absolutely. But balancing Reigen’s two sides was fairly easy for Sakurai.
“Yes, on the surface he’s a fraud, taking money from kids, and all sorts of people. But at the same time he’s just someone who’s trying to work. He’s always getting into these pinches and dilemmas,” Sakurai explains. “Then the next second he’s helping people. So there’s a part of him that’s hard to hate. It’s even harder to not like him, because he has this awkwardness about him that shows he’s just human.”
Sakurai continues, explaining that his character further redeems himself by looking after Mob. Weirdly, everything just kind of cancels out, and it’s a net positive whenever Reigen is in the picture.
Mob’s abilities are a key plot point throughout the show’s run. As it progresses, you quickly learn that Mob is an extremely powerful individual who, at the end of the day, is a middle schooler who simply wants to be a kid. Similar to Mob, Ito bottled up a lot of what he was feeling whenever he found himself in the booth recording his lines.
“Thinking back, now that I realize, one thing that I paid attention to and tried to do was to not let my emotions boil to the surface,” Ito tells me. “To not let my emotions out just as a part of my daily life; that was one thing. You know, and that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be feeling the emotions or that I would be completely emotionless. I paid special attention to not letting my emotions get the better of me. That was one thing that I had to be mindful of.”
Show endings can always be a bit tricky, especially when they have a following as big as Mob Psycho 100. But enough time has passed, and the overall message is that most people seem to be happy with how the show concluded. Interestingly, the team behind the show more or less feels the same way as the community does.
“I thought it was very enduring how everyone protected Mob all the way to the very bitter end to be a regular middle school student,” Ito says on the show’s ending. “The way that it ended would allow him to literally just go on with his daily life as if he were a normal person. I thought the way it ended was great.”
Tachikawa walked away with a similar feeling. Because no matter how you cut it, he has superpowers and could do so much with them. One thing that partially stood out to him was that Mob wasn’t forced “to make these huge leaps and bounds in evolution.” Instead, he opted to make these “small changes.” These little changes made all the difference for him.
Sakurai was happy with how Reigen’s final arc concluded. In a lot of ways, he feels as if he was “saved by Mob at the very end.” Sakurai has a hard time imagining the show ending for his character any other way than how it did.
Mob Psycho 100 is one of those unique shows that has a little bit of everything. One second you’re second-guessing how a big fight will play out, and the next you’re laughing at something Reigen pulled off. The best part is that the show is only three seasons long, with 37 episodes in total, so you can get through it fairly quickly.
