BODY: Three decades in, and Japan's most famous pint-sized detective still can't catch a break from murder. To mark 30 years of the "Detective Conan" TV anime, the franchise has unveiled a promotional video and teaser visual for its anniversary special, "Case No. 30" (30号殺人事件)—and announced a second, genuinely novel project that hands the magnifying glass to the audience.
"Case No. 30" airs September 25 at 9:00 p.m. on Nippon TV's prestigious "Friday Road Show" slot, the same primetime perch that has hosted the series' theatrical films for years. The special features actress Elaiza Ikeda (池田エライザ) as a guest voice actor, a casting choice that signals the broadcast is being pitched at a broad mainstream audience rather than just the show's core fanbase.
The bigger news for longtime viewers is the companion project: an original anime titled "The Misohitojima Murders" (三十一島の殺人)—a wordplay title where the "31 islands" reads as misohitojima—built around viewer participation. Rather than simply watching Conan unmask the culprit, audiences are invited to reason through the clues and deduce the killer themselves before the reveal. It's a format that leans directly into the appeal that made Gosho Aoyama's manga a phenomenon: fair-play mystery where every clue is, in theory, on the table.
The 30th-anniversary push arrives as the franchise remains commercially dominant, with its annual films routinely topping the Japanese box office each spring.
The insider take
Anniversary specials on "Friday Road Show" are a well-worn playbook here—Nippon TV uses the slot to convert casual weekend viewers into ticket-buyers for the next theatrical release. What stands out is the interactive whodunit. Japanese broadcasters have flirted with "solve-along" formats before, but doing it inside Conan—a property built on the promise that the mystery is solvable—is a smart, almost overdue match. Expect it to be positioned as a second-screen, social-media event, timed to keep Conan trending straight into the spring 2026 movie season.
Originally reported by コミックナタリー - 最新ニュース (Japanese).