Not everyone in the world watches the same anime in the same way.
Every week, AnimeBuzz's "Around the World" page tracks how often this season's anime are read about on Wikipedia in 12 languages: Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Korean, Indonesian, Thai, Polish and Russian. English is deliberately left out, because it's read all over the world and doesn't tell you much about any one region.
Three weeks into the fall season, the numbers show habits that popularity alone can't explain: each language has its own quirks. Here are the two that stood out most.
Two caveats first. Wikipedia pageviews measure how much people look something up, not how much they watch it. And a language is not a country: Spanish includes readers in Spain and Latin America, and Portuguese is mostly Brazil.
First, the big picture
The one title near the top almost everywhere is The Apothecary Diaries. It was in the top three in Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, Korean, Indonesian, Thai and Russian. Call it this season's worldwide hit.
That's exactly why the places where it isn't on top stand out.
Polish: one title shot up before it even aired
In week three, the Fall 2026 anime read most on Polish Wikipedia was Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2.
| Week 1 (from Sep 28) | Week 2 (from Oct 5) | Week 3 (from Oct 12) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Polish Wikipedia pageviews | 111 | 121 | 1,261 |
That's roughly eleven times week one. And the series only premieres on Netflix on October 20, so in week three, not a single episode had been released yet.
The daily numbers show exactly when it happened. Through mid-October, the Polish article was getting only a few dozen views a day. On October 15, it got 828, right after the final trailer and the premiere date were announced.
AnimeBuzz also measures how much a title is read in one language in particular: we compare its share among this season's anime in that language with its share across the other 11. For Edgerunners 2 in Polish, that figure was about 250 times the other languages. Nothing else this season, in any language, came close.
The background: the game behind it was made in Poland
The anime is based on the video game Cyberpunk 2077, made by CD Projekt Red (CD Projekt), headquartered in Warsaw. Also known for The Witcher series, CD Projekt is one of the companies in the WIG20, the index of the 20 largest companies on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, and by 2020 its market value made it the largest video game company in Europe.
So in Poland, this anime isn't only "a foreign anime". It's also a major release from one of the country's flagship companies. In fact, a thread about the Edgerunners 2 premiere date appeared on the forum of a Polish financial news site. In Poland, an anime premiere date is something investors talk about.
There's precedent for the anime moving the game, too. After the first season was released in 2022, the game's player numbers were widely reported to have jumped. In summer 2026, with the second season's announcement among the factors, the player count returned to its highest level in about three years.
Polish readers may be looking the series up before its release not only as fans, but out of interest in a home-grown company's work. Pageviews alone, though, can't tell us who read the article or why.
German, Italian and Portuguese: Dragon Ball beats The Apothecary Diaries
The second pattern showed up in European languages and Portuguese.
Dragon Ball Super: Beerus, which began airing in Japan on October 11, took first place in German, Italian and Portuguese, pushing the worldwide favorite, The Apothecary Diaries, down the list.
| Language | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Read "in this language in particular" |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| German | 1,220 | 1,142 | 1,854 (1st) | about 8.5× the other languages |
| Italian | 2,226 | 2,685 | 3,535 (1st) | about 7.2× |
| Portuguese | 427 | 548 | 1,067 (1st) | about 6.1× |
Dragon Ball Super: Beerus is not a rerun. It's an "enhanced version" of Dragon Ball Super, which first aired in 2015, rebuilt with a large number of new cuts and a restructured story.
One caution: in each of these languages, Wikipedia has a single article for the whole Dragon Ball Super series. So these numbers include interest in the series as a whole, not just the new version.
The background: Dragon Ball has been on TV for decades
These three language areas have something in common: Dragon Ball has been on free-to-air television there for a long time.
- Italy: on TV from 1989, and later on the national network Italia 1 from 1999
- Portugal: on the commercial channel SIC in the 1990s
- Brazil: from 1996, on SBT's morning children's program
- Germany: Dragon Ball Z on RTL II from 2001, rerun many times
France, for the record, aired Dragon Ball from 1988 to 1995 on TF1's popular children's program.
A generation that grew up watching it every morning or evening may be opening the article now that a new version is in the news. The English article also got more views over the same period, so interest wasn't rising only in these three languages. But compared with the other languages, the jump in these three stands out.
The "home" behind the numbers
Polish readers and Edgerunners. German, Italian and Portuguese readers and Dragon Ball.
The two cases point to different kinds of reasons. In Poland, the company that made the story is at home. In Germany, Italy and Brazil, the story has come into people's homes through television for decades.
Neither case can be explained by pageviews alone. But it's a fact you can check in the numbers that the same anime is read about in very different ways depending on the language. Follow those differences, and you start to see a map of something outside the anime itself: of industries, and of memories.
The latest week-by-week picture is always on "Around the World". We'll look at this map again near the end of the season.
Is there a title that gets read about in a special way where you live? If something comes to mind, tell us through the contact page.
Sources and notes
- Pageviews: Wikimedia Pageviews API (each language's Wikipedia, user traffic only). Week 1 = September 28 to October 4, 2026; week 2 = October 5 to 11; week 3 = October 12 to 18
- "Read in this language in particular": a title's share among this season's anime in that language, divided by its share across the other 11 languages (titles with at least 200 views in that language and 300 in the others)
- Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2: CD PROJEKT RED Press Center (premiere date, 10 episodes), CD-Action, Dark Horizons (final trailer), Bankier.pl forum, Wikipedia: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
- CD Projekt: Wikipedia: CD Projekt (headquarters, WIG20, 2020 market value)
- Cyberpunk 2077 player numbers: OpenCritic, Too Much Gaming
- Dragon Ball Super: Beerus: Famitsu (January 2026 announcement); original series dates: Wikipedia: Dragon Ball Super
- Broadcast history: French Wikipedia), Italian Wikipedia), Portuguese Wikipedia), German Wikipedia: Dragon Ball Z
Wikipedia articles cover different units (a single title or a whole series) depending on the language. The Dragon Ball figures are for the article on the whole Dragon Ball Super series.