There are various reasons why this project of catalogueing my anime watching this year ends the way it does here, but the biggest contributing factor must be my day job. We had a bit of a death march at the end of the year as we struggled to bring a project live, but even before that it swallowed up a lot of my time and energy. Which meant I barely was able to focus on watching anime, let alone reviewing anything. so instead I’ll just make a list of everything else I watched after the Spring season here. For some anime I may write proper posts later; if so I’ll link to them here as well. Ultimately this is of course purely for my own self indulgence, so why struggle eh?
Holiday viewing
Most years I go on suimmer holiday with my parents and younger brother; this time we went to Bergerac, home town of a certain Cyrano you might’ve heard of. It was a bit of a disaster to be honest. I travelled there by train and the delays started at Amsterdam, which means I missed my connection in Paris even after crossing through town on the back of an (likely illegal) motor scooter taxi. Then my brother had to go back home because of a medical emergency with my parents bringing him back by car, which meant me being on my own for two days in the middle of the first week. Combine that with temperatures that easily reached forty degrees celsius each afternoon and it was a recipe for disaster. Afternoons therefore were mostly spent indoors, in air conditioned coolness, watching anime and Netflix series.
- Tensei shitara Slime Datta Ken 2nd Season Part 2: second part of the second season has more politics and more fights agains the Demon Lords behind the events of the first part. On the whole, the second season wasn’t as good or interesting as the first. It all blurred a bit together for me.
- Sweat Punch: five short movies created by Studio 4°C that experiment and play around with various animation techniques. Interesting and occassionally even brilliant. If you’re interested in animation for animation sake, this is for you.
- BanG Dream! Garupa Pico: Fever!: short gag comedies starring the BanG Dream! characters. Available on the official BanG Dream! Youtube channel.
- Komi-san wa, Komyushou Desu. (Season 1 & 2): I love the manga but the anime was a bit of a disappointment at first, mainly due to the bad subtitling choices. Not so much the translation itself, but the decisions in what to translate in a series that at times depends a lot on written text rather than spoken dialogue. Komi-san being too shy to speak much and who instead relies on writing her questions and such in a notebook. Once I got over that however
- Gekijouban Seitokai Yakuindomo: most comedy anime series that get a movie take the opportunity to tell a proper story. Not Seitokai Yakuindomo. This is just like an extra long regular episode, which means it’s full of the usual quick fire sex jokes and if you like that sort of thing, it’s incredibly funny.
- Gekijouban Bang Dream! Poppin’ Dream!: a sequel to the third season of BanG Dream! in which Popping Party and several other bands get to travel overseas for a concert. Comfort viewing for me.
Summer 2022
Not as good as the Spring season; I planned to watch 13 series and ended up finishing twelve. There were two outstanding shows, Lycoris Recoil and Yofukashi no Uta. The rest was decent but not spectacular.
- Tensei Kenja no Isekai Life: Daini no Shokugyou o Ete, Sekai Saikyou ni Narimashita: salary man working for a black company dies of overwork, reincarnates in the usual fantasy world and quickly gets really overpowered, fights evil. The source of this was slightly more tongue in cheek than the anime. Decent enough if you like Isekai series.
- Lycoris Recoil: a special elite of school girls keep the peace in Japan by murdering everybody who is a threat to it. Come for the edgy concept, stay for the slowly developing love story between Takina and Chisato. Loved this more for its quiet moments and the cast than for its plot and action scenes, good as the latter were. In my top ten of 2022 anime.
- Soredemo Ayumu wa Yosetekuru: the protagonist is in love with his undersized senpai, but refuses to confess until he can beat her in shogi. She suspects this and tries to trick him into confessing prematurely, only for it to backfire on her. A nice little romcom.
- Kumichou Musume to Sewagakari: violent yakuza dude is tasked with body guarding / baby sitting his boss’ young daughter. Hijinks ensue. The yakuza in this are not very gangster like, but this was a bittersweet sort of comedy about growing up, grief and becoming a family.
- Isekai Yakkyoku: after losing his sister to a rare disease, our hero has spent his life dedicated to pharmacy to prevent this from happening to other people. Naturally he dies of overwork and reincarnates in a sort of 18th century level fantasy world marked with the signs of the god of medicine after his host body was hit by lightning. Now he has a chance to revolutionise this world’s understanding of medicine. One of the rare isekai series that has the protagonist taking over an existing person’s body with the acknowledgment that this means the original person is dead.
- Yofukashi no Uta: model student gets bored with school, starts going and instead starts exploring the city at night. He runs into a vampire girl and decides he wants to be one as well. But to do so he has to fall in love with her so she can turn him. Really really good at depicting the appeal of exploring a city at night. Great music too. Also a top ten anime for this year.
- Hanabi-chan wa Okure-gachi: one of those short promotional anime, this time for pachinko gambling parlours. Fun though.
- Extreme Hearts: a sports series concieved by one of the writers of the Nanoha series and just as matter of factly bizarre as that one. A setting that has seemingly sentient humanoid androids walking around and the only thing that’s done with them is have them play extreme versions of games like baseball and volleyball with the protagonist as she slowly builds a team to take on a competition so she can become an idol.
- Renmei Kuugun Koukuu Mahou Ongakutai Luminous Witches: set in the Strike Witches world but this time the characters are not based on famous WWII fighter aces, but rather on famous WWII singers. A diverse band of witches not good enough to actually fight is brought together for another purpose: to inspire morale at the home front by giving concerts.
- Love Live! Superstar!! (2022): seond season of this version of Love Live. Excellent quality like always, with some fun new character introduced and also the biggest, worst chickening out of all time as the last minute of the last episode undos what the rest of the season was working towards.
- Warau Arsnotoria Sun!: a slice of moe show about cute magical girls training at magic school, interspersed with edgy scenes that showed witches being hunted and heretics being murdered in a fantasy version of puritan England? I kept waiting for the two to be connected, but except for some hints it never happened.
- Durarara!!: one of those shows that when I got back into anime in 2014/15 was supposed to be known to every serious anime fan. Over the years I’ve had three-four false starts trying to watch this, but this year I finally succeeded in finishing it. There are obvious reasons why it became such a highly rated show, but on the whole I found it good rather than great.
Autumn 2022
Seventeen shows on my watch list for this season. It’s no finished yet of course but I doubt I will have finished everything on that list once Winter 2023 rolls around. Some excellent shows this season though, with three contenders of Anime of the Year for me: Do It Yourself!!, Bocchi the Rock and Yama no Susume: Next Summit
- Bang Dream! Film Live 2nd Stage: A live concert by all the bands of the BanG Dream! franchise (except Glitter Green), each getting three songs. CG animated and one of the best examples of how to do CG animation well. For fictional bands the music is rather good. All somewhat idol adjecent of course, but with some variety nonetheless.
- Tensei Shitara Ken Deshita: a guy is reincarnated as a magic sword and rescues a cat girl from slavers. Most of the fun in this series is because of Fran, the cat girl and her responses as her sword dad raises her as an adventurer.
- Prima Doll: a left over from the Summer season. Turns out this was a Key visual novel adaptation. The Black Cat cafe’s employees are all humanoid steampunk android, decommissioned after the war trying to adapt to a new life. Their latest recruut has lost her memories due to having had to undergo extensive repairs. Now she too is trying to create a new life for herself. But is the past as buried as it seems to be? Of course not and this does the usual Key swerve into angsty melodrama.
- Yama no Susume: Next Summit: this fourth season of one of the best slice of moe series ever is great for newcomers as the first four episodes retell what happened in the first three seasons. (Made possible because the first season had three minute episodes and the other two were still only half length.) The rest of the series picks up from there as Aoi tries to get over her disappointment at failing to reach the summit of Mount Fuji and prepares herself for a new attempt.
- Do It Yourself!!: the second great slice of moe show this season, about Yua Serufu, a clumsy girl who joins the DIY club at her school to get back with her childhood friend, who goes to a nearby school. This was such a sweet, lovely series, especially in how it showed that relationship between Yua Serufu and her childhood friend Purin, a classic tsundere. It takes a long time for the latter to admit she too wants to be in the DIY club with Yua Serufu and I love the series for its patience in getting her to that point.
- Bocchi the Rock: introvert middle school girl wanting to make friends sees a television programme in which a popular musician says he was introverted in high school and that playing the guitar made him popular. So she gets obsessed with playing the guitar but is still bad at communicating and reaching out to people so now in high school she’s still alone. Until somebody in a band sees her in the park carrying her guitar and invites her to join. A classic case of a four panel comedy manga being adapted into something bigger, with the obligatory references to K-On taken for granted. I loved this series, the third excellent slice of moe series coming out this season. Because it tries to break out of the gag manga format it occassionally stumbles, especially with episode seven, which is just mean spirited.
- Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon S: Nippon no Omotenashi – Attend wa Dragon desu: cute little OVA about Kanna’s friend from America coming to visit Japan.
- Akiba Meido Sensou: let’s make a classic, melodramatic yakuza movie but let’s do it as an anime series and with maids instead of gangsters. The contrast is hilarious, the pastiching of the genre is on point and the series has a heart that makes it more than just a fun high concept romp.
- Yuusha Party o Tsuihou Sareta Beast Tamer, Saikyoushu no Nekomimi Shoujo to Deau: guy gots kicked out of the Hero’s party because he’s too weak to help them fight the Demon Lord, makes contracts with various overpowered women from various non-human species, starting with a cat girl. Of course it turns out he himself is incredibly overpowered as well but just didn’t realise it. Very much a wishfulfilment fantasy, but not as creepy as most.
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