You know a blog is dead when the previous years’ top 10s share the page with the current years’ top 10. However this won’t stop anyone from making a top 10 anyway. No one should care! I don’t and neither should you!
Catsuki-sama demands it!
As usual, the rules to this top 10 are simple:
The show FINISHED in 2013
The show is not a movie or OVA
Second Seasons or whatever are fair game for this list
Then why isn’t railgun S2 on this list
Or Chihayafuru S2
…Dammit
Whatever, just write something at the end about how good Monogatari S2 is
Deal. No season 2s.
This means that shows like Kill La Kill won’t be on here. The lack of Attack on Titan is not a mistake, though.
10. Hyperdimension Neptunia
One of these is Neptunia
Yeah this one’s on my list. What? Wanna fight about it?
Neptunia is David Production’s other passion project from this year (the other one was technically from last year, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, further down this list). So like, what’s so special about this one? Why compare it to Jojo?
There’s a lot more David Production fanboying below, but somehow they manage an adaptation for the fans of the game. I don’t know what it is about this studio, but they always seem to know the fanbase better than any other studio.
Contrast this with Studio DEEN. Whatever the HECK is going through those peoples’ heads I’ll never know. They’re pretty content with taking a piss on their fans at any available opportunity. Umineko was still good though.
Man I hate studio DEEN.
This one's Neptune! Wait something's not right…
+Not made by studio DEEN
+It was made by David Production
-But seriously if you’ve never played Neptunia you probably won’t like this very much
-The fanservice is pretty blatant
9. Kiniro Mosaic
Weaponized moe. This is the most potent form of moe I’ve seen to date. There ought to be laws against shows like this. Harsh, deeply restricting moe laws.
ALL RIGHT THAT'S ENOUGH! I'LL TALK, I'LL TALK!
The show’s about an exchange student from Britain attending a school in Japan. It plays out like a pretty standard 4-panel comic adaptation would, with a series of short skits displaying some form of daily school life. Alice is the best girl. Karen is pretty ok too.
She's a pirate!
The voice acting for all the English parts is hilariously bad. It’s somewhat difficult to sit through because these scenes are very long. Bear in mind these are the Japanese voice actors attempting at English, so they have a pretty thick accent. They’re barely cute, just way too long. I’m not certain it would have been better if they hired, say, multilingual actors to attempt the parts, but it would have been a safe thing to experiment in this show. I would love to see someone try to adapt this show into English, but I don’t forsee anyone attempting it right now.
My heart can't take much more of this…
The show is cute, but obviously doesn’t go anywhere with the plot like most shows based on 4-panel comic strips. Just heaps and heaps of moe that never stops at any point.
+Cute
+Cute
+Cute
-Way too cute
8. Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Come wa Machigatteiru
This is actually from the Light Novel but I'm lazy
I was told to watch this show by a high school friend who described it as the story of his high school life verbatim. After gunning through it in about a week, he wasn’t kidding. His resemblance to the main character, Hikigaya, was uncanny.
It made the series somewhat enjoyable in that sense, but the overall ending left a lot to be desired. I guess it’s continuing? I’m not sure. It was basically a nonending, as if bridging into another season, but based on what I’ve read, this season’s over.
Kind of a bummer, because things did seem to be going somewhere. It was moving toward some sort of standard haremish end, I think, but instead it just sorta… ended.
Without revealing too much, the show did have a continuing subplot about an accident that put Hikigaya in the hospital, but it never resolved. It would be sort of a shame if this show somehow didn’t get a second season.
Also my friend told me one of the characters reminded him of me. I still can’t figure that one out.
I hope it's not the tennis kid. That'd be weird.
+Funny
-Generic
-Drags at times
7. Genei wo Kakeru Taiyou
2edgy
Magical girl shows aren’t allowed to be as light as they used to be ever since Madoka. A similar thing happened with comic books after Watchmen was released. Watchmen showed how grim and thought-provoking comic books could be, and for some reason every comic tried to emulate it in spirit. Maybe it’s just a flavor-of-the-month industry thing like the way the iDOLM@STER anime started all these idol shows, whether it’s wrestling idols, or school idols, or space idols… the list goes on and on; but idols sell in anime, and dark magical girl shows might too.
Genei is almost unreasonably dark. When I think of a typical Magical Girl, I don’t generally think “murderer,” and the show makes a point that when these girls cure “demons” that overcome the people in this show, they kill them. The magical girls themselves are also killed within the first couple episodes, or worse. This is barely spoilers with the amount of death flags that are just nonchalantly slipped in.
Pretty Cure this ain’t, where common friendship and teamwork tropes tend to take a backseat to some disgusting body horror moments, loads of uncomfortable death and torture, and even sexual assault being threatened as a punishment. The show starkly contrasts this with goofy “test of courage” filler episodes and silly elf-like creatures talking about dimensional rifts or whatever. Other people have phrased this better than I do that when things get too dark too often and very suddenly, they lose a lot of their impact and become predictable. This series loses points right out of the gate on predictability for also attempting to be a bread-and-butter mahou shoujo.
Let's agree not to call it a suicide pact
Where this series gains a lot of points is making 3d rendering of characters actually look good in an anime. Other anime all-to-often make their characters look like playmobil figurines when they computer-generate them and it was unnoticeable here, making the action scenes really good.
Another weird positive point to this series was the sound design. Seems like most magical girls take from the same sound effect pool, and even Madoka was guilty of this at the time. I didn’t notice anything like that in this show, and in fact noticed some of the unique sounds I hadn’t seen in other shows. Maybe they’re new, maybe not, but it sounded great.
+Animation
+Sound design
-Needlessly grim
-Cliché
6. Suisei no Gargantia
This is the show that Urobochi Gen wrote. It came out this year. Since I talk about his themes later in the Psycho pass review I’ll just kind of sum up.
“That mecha show” featuring that one dude from Code Geass comes to Earth to find out it’s inhabited by a bunch of Indians. He shows them how cool big guns are and accidentally gives all of them smallpox. In their itching frenzy they jump into the ocean only to find out alien squids are running the show down there. They send Code Geass guy down there with C.C. to fight all the alien squids and he kills them all with his robot. Even the baby squids and the cute kawaii squid that comes back later for some reason.
This is what the mecha probably looked like.
Then he finds out that another dude has a robot and Geass and they rule Earth forever as father and son just like Darth Vader planned it. They blow up the deathstar but that’s not enough. The alien squids were actually made by humans and so they find out they have to kill everyone on earth to satisfy the last text of the dead sea scrolls and bring about Third Impact, satisfying the requirements for the Human Instrumentality Project.
Then a rag-tag bounty hunter with his friends, an old man with a robot arm and his hot girlfriend with a kid and a dog, kill all the pirates and stop the third impact saving everyone on earth and code geass guy decides he likes earth only this time doesn’t kill himself. So he flies a bunch of gundams at the space aliens and there lasers incinerate they’re hopes. Their, that’s the end.
It was the best holy crap what a great show. No I have no idea why this is shorter than the Taiyou review. I can’t wait for season 3. Sunrise made this show.
+Robots
+Urubochi Gen wrote it
-Nothing happens for like 10 episodes
5. Girls und Panzer
This advanced form of propaganda satisfies my very basic expectations from an anime. It’s very hard for me to recommend shows like this because what I like about the show are the very same reasons someone could have for hating it.
It’s about tanks.
Everything’s realistically done but no one gets hurt when a tank destroys another tank.
There’s singing.
There are no kettenkrads
There’s also a ton of things like how unrealistic the tank fights are, and the whole plot is predictably cliché. Not to mention the vast amounts of yuri-bait.
But I loved this show. I couldn’t get enough of it. The tank battles are intense, and any history buff can really appreciate the attention to detail the series had for each of the tanks. Even goofy stuff like making the teams stereotypical of the countries their tanks came from. The theming is cute, with the highlight being the Russian team singing Katyusha (in Russian!) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIY36UbDbQQ).
Cue the same line that goes on every list: this is my list I’ll put what I want on it (also your taste is shit).
4. Vividred Operation
So if you didn’t already completely dismiss this list as being crap based on the positive review of girls und panzer, here’s another great opportunity to do so.
Vividred Operation is another example of doing things right the first time without doing anything particularly new. The stupid buzzword for that is “innovative” when in reality this show was actually “shameless.” Pretty much every element of this show was borrowed from some other show, and I do have a list of what was borrowed. This allows me to make such simile as, “It’s like Neon Genesis Evangelion meets Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha in the Strike Witches universe.”
Sure enough, this show takes mecha fighting angels, makes it magical girl, and everyone does it in their bloomers. The fantastic elements of each come together in this show in such a way that would’ve made this an easy show to recommend, but you’ll still get the same weird looks just like that time you were recommending Strike Witches when you said, “and none of them wear pants.”
Keep digging your own grave there
At the very least, it contains some intense fight scenes between our britchless beauties and evil robot spaceships. Great art and great music add a lot to rounding out this series and I don’t regret watching it one bit.
+Art
+Fights
+Music
-Jodhpurs
3. Danganronpa
Based on the game of the same name, Danganronpa is the anime version of Battle Royale. For those that haven’t seen Battle Royale, the plot revolves around a captive group of students forced to kill each other in order to be set free. In Danganronpa, the kids are put in a high school closed off from the rest of the world, where their objective is to kill one of their classmates without getting caught so they could be set free. Those that fail to find the correct killer get killed, leaving the survivor to be the only one to be left alive.
The premise and characters are strong and noticeable right from the start, even though it’s hard to keep track of names sometimes with the sheer number of major characters introduced within the first 10 minutes of series. The main antagonist monokuma (or monobear, if you’re a gigantic idiot) berates the students and his morbid humor really keeps the series from becoming like shingeki no depression.
Or Legend of the Galactic High School
Everything else is really good from an anime standpoint, with higher-quality remakes of the soundtrack and sound effects from the game. Some of the game cg gets recycled though, which seems somewhat lazy, but doesn’t cheapen the series much.
What DOES cheapen the series is how disappointing it is simply as an adaptation. Many clues are left out of the show that existed in the game. Backtracking a bit: in the game the player is expected to figure out the mystery step-by-step until you pinpoint the culprit of the murder. The viewer doesn’t have access to all the clues that were similarly presented in the game, making it impossible to solve the mystery as the gamer did. The viewer is along for the ride, rather than encouraged to figure out the mystery themselves.
Some clues, such as the magazine being flipped upside down (sorry if that doesn’t make sense), are presented during the show, but never referred to as they were in the game. They only had 13 episodes to crunch in a lot of material, so a lot of little things got lost along the way.
+Premise
+Plot
+Soundtrack
-Subpar adaptation
2. Psycho-pass
CUZ I FEEEEEL
Urobochi Gen has the best job ever. I’m not quite certain what circumstances led to him writing/directing for these depressing shows where lots of people die, or similarly suffer in some way to simply exist in an environment he created. Then he leaves a haunting message at the end reminding the viewer that these same things could happen to them, and in fact it could be happening right now. Right now! You could be dead already, and you just don’t know it yet!
Dismissing the director and all the things this crazy mofo has made last year (or even this year with Suisei no Gargantia also falling onto his resume, and also onto this list), “Psycho-pass” takes us to a dystopian future similar to – but not quite as obsessively fleshed out as – Ghost in the Shell. This society is held together based on the namesake of this series, an individuals’ “psycho-pass,” which is basically a literal litmus test of an individual’s sanity. It’s basically a color with a numerical value attached to it (like a pH reading; I probably don’t need to compare it to a litmus test again) that says whether a person is going to kill someone or not. When your litmus test says you’re probably going to kill someone, you get thrown into jail.
When she tells you to kiss the pavement, do it.
The premise is really great because it talks a bit about what kind of accuracy this system could possibly have. I mean, grading people based on a sanity read by a supercomputer can have some error. In this series, it does. The show actually is more of a murder-mystery with our sweet protagonist Hanazawa Kana chasing a killer that takes advantage of the system, and let’s just say without spoiling too much that very, very, bad things happen. I think Chris said it best that the characters Urobochi Gen creates are his tools to use.
Some of the exposition is a little bit on the stupid side, but it still raises ethical questions about life, death, and society that the viewer is left to draw themselves. Themes that are very common in every Urobochi Gen work that I just can’t get enough of.
+Voice actors
+Dystopian futures are awesome
-Episode 11
1. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure
Jojo is the greatest thing to ever happen to the seinen genre since dragonball Z. I would compare it to the original live-action batman series on television: low-budget and totally ridiculous, but enjoyable nonetheless. From the OP (“Jojo!”) to the ED (“Roundabout” by Yes) every scene was captivating in some way. Comic-book plot twists are everywhere, and the humor, intentional or otherwise, makes the show and its characters all the more endearing.
Even Speedwagon is endearing!
I can’t really nail down anything wrong with this show. It’s a completely faithful adaptation with an amazing soundtrack and a western feel. Sometimes speedwagon says really stupid and obvious things, but that’s part of his character. The show’s just got style, from the borderline ridiculous outfits, the goofy poses, the over-acting voice actors, the gogogos, it’s a thrill ride from start to finish.
David Production is quickly turning into my favorite studio right now. Their anime are all simply works of passion, and that shines through in everything they do. The painstaking detail spent on being as accurate as possible to the original work really hit home when they even included the same artistic errors from the manga.
Like, why even include that? Probably because Jojo fans are crazy.
+SHOCKU
+DURIVU
+STYORU
+MOTTO KOGEKI
-OH NO!
-MUDA MUDA MUDA
-BYE BYE JOJO
Now the part we talk about Monogatari: Season 2
An anime for people who watch anime. It’s this kind of pretentiousness that makes the monogatari “franchise” really difficult to approach for people who want to know more about the great shows in the medium. Anime isn’t really supposed to be like that, if you look at it. They’re basically cartoons that show a lot of color on screen and some funny dialogue and maybe it’ll have a good soundtrack and better voice acting. Don’t believe me? Look at my number 1.
I constantly complain about shows that appeal to the lowest common denominator, but that’s what makes an anime successful. Monogatari was pretty thick with dialogue this time around, and I don’t think any other anime has done this better (Garden of Sinners comes CLOSE, I think, as well as Mushi-shi). I just don’t like shows that still throw in some fanservice just for the sake of keeping people interested.
Not to say that Monogatari is free from blame on the fanservice scale – it’s not – but it always felt justified, in my mind, that the series would have lost something that made it uniquely anime if it didn’t. I’m kind of disappointed that the series would cease to be an anime if it didn’t include the harem tropes or the fanservice, rather than the fact that it was simply an animated show from Japan. However, this is how an anime elitist tends to put things into some sort of context to criticize a show. “Monster” gets a bad rep for those precise reasons, and to add insult to injury it’s potentially getting a live-action adaptation on none other than the academy award-winning factory HBO.
What I’m finally and roundaboutedly getting at is that this is a hard show to recommend, but I loved it a ton. I understand why this would be a hard pill for any fan to swallow, but it encompassed a lot of what I love about anime, while showboating a lot of what I really hate as well.
I think I’m just bitter about SHAFT making things I love so darn well.
Your Top 10 review is 3 months late, yet still one month early? What is this shit? We run a tight ship around here!
Time for thoughts (not FEEEEELS!):
10: You mean not any of those OTHER video game shows made the cut? It’s a shame that studios must have “passion” just to make a reliable adaptation. And by “passion,” I mean a violently rabid fan base.
9: So moe, even Brolly couldn’t keep them out of the door.
8: Does it and shows like Nichibros become funny because it imitates real life so well, or does it become stale because it doesn’t feed the escapist realism that we’ve come to practically demand from anime? Mmmm, deep.
7: Sometimes “deep” walks a fine path between subtle, dramatic, and melodramatic. When you hit melodramatic, “deep” becomes “loldeep.” That was this. Also, cards.
6: The robots, Indians, and squids were supposed to unite against our common enemy: the jellyfish. Sadly, it never came to be. Then everyone died.
5: You’ve found your Hentalia, Gene. We’re all…so proud…
4: Why don’t the evil robot spaceships go Topless?
3: Ah Derpenronpa, where almost no one gets character development. I wonder if the producers had to justify to anyone how a survival game with 15 people takes 13 episodes. Like many other seasons, 2-cour would have fleshed the show out much better. But then Uni-kun would ruin it all with a couple bear puns.
Also, Junko derp. This show was severely lacking in Junko derp.
2: Dropped in Episode 2 for including a jellyfish. Besides, everything Gen makes is a plot device. Even plotless Illyasviel.
1: So about that “passion…” Regular passion involves rabid fans. JoJo passion requires rabid fans, you, and gunpoint.
Let’s see how long before anyone else notices your article. *Breaks out calendar*
