It’s hard to believe that I’d never made a crossword before this year. Now, in the time since Crunchyroll News Puzzles launched in May, I’ve produced 50 containing over 1,000 unique terms, references to nearly 300 different anime and a few early-learning hiccups, like misspelling KAMEHAMEHA (which I caught before publishing) and SIBYL (which I caught after publishing). I’ve considered penning a companion blog, as many cruciverbalists do, for a while, so I figured this milestone was as good a time as any to go into the methods, challenges and creative philosophies behind constructing the Crunchyroll Anime Crossword each and every week. Spoilers for Crunchyroll Anime Crossword #25 – Fruit Drinks below! Constructing crosswords has never been easier, thanks to today’s advanced software and a plethora of online tools. I utilize Crossword Compiler for assembly, aided primarily by Anilist, Animethemes.moe, Onelook, Wordplays and two decades of raw exposure to all things anime. I prefer to maintain some connection to the physical realm, though, so I keep a little bound book by my desk for writing in ideas for anime terms and themes that come to me during my day-to-day. My process typically starts with flipping through the pages and picking out a 10-character word or two to use as a base, and on this occasion, I went with BANANAFISH. I normally place full-width terms on the third or fourth rows, in line with general convention, but I decided to shake it up this time and try two adjacent in the middle. It was then a matter of building a reverse-symmetrical draft grid around it. BANANA FISH ended up in my book because I started going through every anime I’ve watched in alphabetical order to add any forgotten theme songs to my “Pure Anime” playlist. King Gnu, who performed the series’ first ending song, as well as notable tracks for JUJUTSU KAISEN and Ranking of Kings , was written in right below it, so I immediately noticed that they could fit through the middle. And hey, so does the song’s title, “Prayer X”! Alas, happy coincidences don’t guarantee happy endings. UY? was a pretty evident dead-end, and modifying the grid’s shape only made ?GP harder to work with, so I scrubbed PRAYERX and turned my attention back to the longer/trickier parts of the grid. Part of the fun in construction is getting distracted and filling in spaces on whims, as I did with XEBEC (defunct anime studio behind To Love Ru and Keijo!!!!!!!! ) in the bottom-right and SHIKI (2010 horror anime) in the top-left during this stage. Neither stuck, of course, but it means they go into The Book™️. I next looked at the potentially awkward ?B????, and the first thing that came to mind before going through any wordlists was OBERON. This is a good example of how a term can be clued in a way that correlates with both anime and general knowledge: [Husband of Titania in “The Ancient Magus’ Bride”] or [King of the Fae in “The Ancient Magus’ Bride”], say, in reference to his Shakespearean namesake. The Crunchyroll Anime Crossword is a themeless American-style grid, but there are occasional intentional and unintentional through lines (or I conjure one up afterward with the title). I was already set on cluing BANANAFISH as [Anime title comprised of a fruit and an animal], so when ORANGEADES turned up in a wordlist, I started thinking about what other fruits I could include. I blinked, and UME (Japanese plum) magically appeared in the grid. Recently, I’ve strived to incorporate more uncommon letters in my grids — J, Q, X, Z, etc. — so I validated the center block with AFEWZS before getting distracted by fruity thoughts again. My heart became set on making APPLES work, due to their significance in Death Note , but I decided I wasn’t vibing with MELON. Producing terms that aren’t in any pre-existing wordlist (I need to make my own at some point…) is an extra challenge, but being able to utilize a wider range of Japanese words is a massive advantage, thanks to how many start and/or end with vowels (especially U and I). As a result, fill options for ?Z??? greatly expand to include the likes of: AZUMI (e.g. voice actress Waki or protagonist of Tsukigakirei ) AZUSA (e.g. voice actress Tadokoro or Ho-kago Tea Time guitarist) AZUKI (e.g. Japanese bean variety or manga reading service) OZORA (e.g. voice actress Naomi or Captain Tsubasa himself) IZAYA (e.g. voice actress Shiori or Durarara!! information broker) IZUKU (e.g. son of Inko in My Hero Academia ) And so forth! I settled on UZAKI in the end, because I liked the idea of [Anime title character who wants to hang out] as a clue, similar to the [She sometimes hides her feelings in Russian] I used for ALYA in a previous crossword. It also allowed for TEAMSUP going down — one of the key lessons I learned from studying the craft of crossword-making is that multi-word terms are actually strongly encouraged! PSSTS and its variations are commonly found in the bottom row of crosswords (pluralization is the best friend of both constructors and solvers), and I rolled with it after the likes of PSALM and PSYCH fell through. I then went with SWISS up top, thinking I could reference the nationality of Emma Verde of Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club or Heidi, which gave me IAS, SKT and SIS. Although I liked how I could clue this area, I wasn’t sssatisssfied with the concentration of S’s. My first revision changed PSSTS to PSSST and SWISS to SWAPS, which gave me AAS, PKS and SIT. I thought AAS could be clued as a shortening for Anime Awards, but I found that just AA was more commonly used within Crunchyroll and on social media. I wanted to persist with PKS, since it could be tied to Sword Art Online , so I tweaked everything else around it to get SWEPT, EAS and TIT. The latter brought Cautious Hero: The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious ’ opening song, “TIT FOR TAT” by MYTH & ROID, to mind, so I got over my reluctant usage of PSSST. It was then I noticed a big hole I’d made in the grid: I instinctively inserted AGT earlier to reference “agent”, or even America’s Got Talent for Avantgardey’s viral dance routine set to “Idol” by YOASOBI, but that created a three-way ANA. TEAMSUP briefly became BEAMSUP, thinking I could reference DAN DA DAN , but RGB and KGB were no good either. The only other acronyms I liked within my desired difficulty range were MGT (shortening of management) and SGT (like that one frog), so I arrived at ALUMNA. I proceeded in the same area with AIOLI before exploring other fills for three reasons: handy vowels through the middle of a three-character word block, I could reference another fruit from its ingredients, and I simply like the sauce. My next instinct was RIO through the middle, which turned into LIO ( Promare deuteragonist), then the rest just kinda fell into place. The bottom row could be NOFUN or NOPUN, but I opted for the former because it’s easier to clue without using the “fill-in-the-blank” format I try not to rely on. YUZU had been swimming around my brain for a while at this point, since it’s an Asian fruit and also the name of Crunchyroll’s old mascot cat. If I wanted to keep APPLES in the top-right, it had to go into the bottom-left corner. I probed the idea by changing OBERON to OBEYME — a short anime series I recalled from my Funimation days — but quickly conceded that a Z wasn’t going to fit nicely into AN????. It was amusing coming up with “ANAZAー” (the romanized form of Another ), at least, if only punctuation was allowed. I continued playing around with Japanese syllables for RA???? in spite of regular word options, since alternating vowels and consonants would complement OBERON’s inverse pattern. Sounding out “ratata” made me think of RATTATA, which then made me think of RAICHU. This would’ve achieved another mini-goal of mine — incorporating more Pokémon — but fill options were weak. I also opted against RAIKOU as an alternative, since that was a deeper cut than I’d like. I eventually landed on RAMUNE, which I loved because it could be clued generally, fruit-ally or topically with Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle . Learning something new in a crossword and then being able to recall that word for a different puzzle is very rewarding, so it’s been another mini-goal of mine to reuse anime terms more often. I initially reused RUDO (protagonist of Gachiakuta , featured in Anime Mini Crossword #15 ) and made a satisfying fill that just fell short with NECT. ONIX remained appealing for hitting my Uncommon Letter and Pokémon goals, while OXT (4-time Overlord OP artist) went into The Book™️. I switched my focus to the tricky intersection of AN???? and EM?, where the latter would be one of EMO, EMU, EMP, EMS, EMI, EME or EMT. I did my patriotic duty and tried EMU first, for which ANUBIS was the only viable down-fill. ONIX came back in, and I was able to cleanly finish off the area with NEST and EXT. Cruising through crossword construction on instinct is fun until you absent-mindedly leave the hardest section for last. Fill options for ????DI stretched my ideal difficulty level with terms like LADYDI (as in Princess Diana), SAMEDI (French for “Saturday”) and phrases like COULDI, WOULDI and ORDIDI, which only clashed with APPLES. I was quite pleased with myself for coming up with VOSESH (slang for “voiceover session”) to go with LADYDI, which resulted in SMG (e.g. type of weapon used by LLENN in Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online ) and MAPO (e.g. tofu dish enjoyed in Angel Beats! ). Not for the first time making crosswords, I ended up with YLE, which I know as the Finnish national broadcaster from Eurovision. That obviously won’t work here, so I was back to square one. My next approach was to see if I could come up with something fresh for ???ADI, since AL? provides a lot of flexibility (ALE, ALP, ALO, ALM, ALL, ALT, ALA, ALF, ALS, etc.). The second result when I plugged ADI into Anilist’s search engine was Leorio Paradinight of Hunter x Hunter … and bang, a light bulb went off in my head: [It comes before night in "Hunter x Hunter"?] for PARADI. As brilliant as I thought it was, I wanted to do my full due diligence first. I backtracked further and tried ORANGEARMY — RI? Great for Japanese words. MS? Plenty of nouns. YH? Brutal dead-end — before working with SAMEDI and APPLES again. I managed a viable fill, but felt I could do better with PARADI. The walls were closing in at this point, thanks to my stubbornness over APPLES. ?RP? had to end with G or S, and I found that the only viable option within difficulty range was MYGOSH. ?PAM could only be SPAM, while my CAPY solution — clued as [Lead-in to bara] — is another great example of how crosswords in this context allow for unique approaches that wouldn’t otherwise be plausible. One solitary square left, and… it wasn’t ideal. My choices are SCA, SCJ, SCC and SCT, which each offer only a handful of OK-to-dodgy abbreviations/acronyms. I allow myself one or two “crosswordese” entries per grid, as long as I can make them a given for the average solver, so I settled on SCJ and JRPG. That’s the grid done — with at least one of every letter except Q and V, no less — so now we move onto cluing! I won’t go into the process for each individual entry; just a few extra principles I follow. This specific crossword is actually a little unusual. I tend to concentrate anime terms and clues on the Across side, since solvers typically go through that way first, but this one ended up being more Down-heavy. As you might have deduced, I generally have an idea of how I’m going to clue the anime-related terms before I get to this stage, so I write all those in first. I won’t always anime-ify every term that can be reasonably anime-fied, though, since my ideal crossword allows for a solver’s general knowledge and pop culture knowledge to feed into each other. For example, I could clue ALO as the shortening of ALfheim Online, but 1. I’m already intending to reference Sword Art Online elsewhere, and 2. PARADI is a head-scratcher and SCJ is a compromise, so I want to ensure the rest of the section is fairly straightforward. Here’s a “knowledge scale” I came up with to explain how I consider clue types, using examples from just this crossword: Hard Trivia – Gettable only through specific knowledge [Rock Snake Pokémon] for ONIX [Leader of Mad Burnish in "Promare"] for LIO Soft Trivia – Gettable through specific knowledge OR logical deduction [Jackel-headed character in "Oh, Suddenly Egyptian God"] for ANUBIS ["My Daughter Left the ___ and Returned an S-Rank Adventurer" (2023 anime)] for NEST Wink-Wink-Nudge-Nudge – Uses fandom terminology in a generalized sense [Old country bumpkin, say] for RUBE [Lead-in to bara] for CAPY Flavor Text – General knowledge, but with a superfluous anime element attached [Kani Beer container] for CAN [Won award after award, like "JUJUTSU KAISEN" in 2024] for SWEPT Normie – General knowledge [Unwanted email] for SPAM [Female university grad] for ALUMNA The last example is me opting against my original anime-themed intention for being too much of a stretch. I was considering [(female character) vis-a-vis (school)], inspired by the likes of [Michelle Obama vis-a-vis Princeton], but felt that any significant enough female character from a significant enough school would be defined too much by their time there , rather than their graduation from it. In short, there’s a multi-layered balancing act when it comes to setting difficulty. Finally, I brainstorm the crossword’s title. These stem from creating a punny connection between two or more key entries, like “Aim for the Hole” for QHAYASHIDA, BRAVESHINE and PGA in Anime Crossword #21 . I initially went with “Fruit Bowl” on this occasion, given the inclusion of apple, orange, banana, yuzu, melon and lemon, but ultimately decided on “Fruit Drinks” due to CAN, RAMUNE and ORANGEADES, plus “lemon juice” in the clue for AIOLI. Thank you for reading through my ramble, and thank you for playing Crunchyroll News Puzzles! You can access the archive of every Anime Crossword here , while new ones drop every Monday at 8am Pacific Time.
