Half-baked - The Anime of 2016

So here we are again, finally. What a year 2016 was. But I won't bore you by adding my disgruntled voice to the millions already bemoaning it as the worst year ever. Instead I'll bore you by talking about a lot of anime.

You may or may not have seen my post about the Anime Awards, but it certainly helped jog my memory about the various winners and losers that the year provided. As before I'll try to give a brief, helpful synopsis of each along with my salient thoughts and slot it into one of the 5 tiers: God, great, good, OK, bad.

It was probably my first full year of paid Crunchyroll membership, so we'll see if that has had any impact on my viewing habits. Heck, I even tried FunimationNOW for a bit. Crazy year. Let's dive right in...

*FUTURE MIKE INTERJECTION*: It turns out that these things take a lot of time and effort to write. As such it would be March at the earliest before I'd be able to put a finished version of this post out there, and if anyone ever cared about my thoughts on last year's anime that time will have long passed. So given that myself and Ben covered off the majority of these shows and more on our FIRST EVER PODCAST and I posted that handy Anime Awards roundup I thought I'd just release this half-baked for the fun of it. Once you get past Gate 2 all you get is my unabridged stream-of-consciousness notes for each series, so enjoy that!

Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2016: My picks

Hello there! Been a while. I'm sure you'll be glad to know that I am currently in the middle of typing up my now traditional year-end summary of everything I watched in 2016, but in the meantime I thought I'd post a little appetiser.

For the first time ever, Crunchyroll are hosting 'The Anime Awards': a big community vote to decide the best shows, characters and moments from this year's anime offering. There are 14 categories with at least 4 nominees, and to mark the occasion I thought I would run you through my personal picks from the selection (and perhaps some thoughts on who/what really should have been nominated).

You can find the nominees - and watch clips! - and information about the awards here: https://www.theanimeawards.com/ 

Fading memories: The Anime of 2015

Hello, and welcome to 2016! I can see you're already incredibly excited to have one extra day added to your calendar in which to watch anime, bu- what's that you say? You somehow missed all of the anime of 2015 because you were in a coma/had a degree to do/got a life/someone called you "weeb trash" and made you cry/were living in a country with ludicrous internet restrictions/took a good long look at yourself/[insert some other terrible excuse here]? Well then, boy do I have the blog post for you!

That's right, it's time for me to honour that hallowed tradition (that I've done once before) of giving you a snapshot of all the anime I watched that aired last year. It was a hell of a year for me - what with graduating, getting a job and going to Japan for the first time - but was it a hell of a year for anime? Initially when I was thinking back I couldn't muster up more than a couple of winners, but nor could I really distinguish between what aired in 2015 and what aired in 2014. Upon further inspection, whilst compiling the list of shows I had to include in this post, it turns out that it was actually a pretty decent year! Some very special shows and perhaps fewer awful ones (that I watched, anyway). You may remember the tier system from last year's post - I'll be expanding this to a God/great/good/OK/bad tier system, because three tiers really doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room. Hopefully this might give you some indication of what is worth watching and what really, really isn't.

So without further ado, fasten yourselves in - you're in for a wild ride.

A look back: The Anime of 2014

King of punctuality that I am, I find myself typing this piece up at the very end of February. But hey, at least it's more timely than my summary of Autumn 2013 first episodes! *pause for laughter*

Inspired by my good friend Ben's post, I thought I would once again dust-off my writing hat and add some new content to this frankly depressing blog. A review of a whole year will be a first for me on here, with the closest precedent being my top 10 shows from 2011, but I'm always up for a challenge. As such, following Ben's example, I will provide my humble opinion on each of the series last year that I watched through to bitter completion. I'll also try to copy his ranking system in an attempt to force myself to make a solid judgement for once. I won't be commenting on shows that continued from the Autumn and are now about to reach their climax. Perhaps you might be encouraged to seek out or actively avoid some of the series mentioned here on the strength of my rhetoric, but I hope you might at least find it semi-entertaining to read.

So as I sit here listening to an endless loop of Flyers by BRADIO, allow me to regale you with some words about Japanese cartoons and stuff. There are a lot of them so be prepared.

Summer 2013: First episodes - part 3

The final instalment of first episodes from the new season. Will there be any more keepers?

Summer 2013: First episodes - part 2

Another set of first episodes have been weighed and measured! Hopefully you will find some of the below summaries and/or opinions helpful.

Summer 2013: First episodes - part 1

Another season, another load of anime to watch. I haven't researched this season in advance at all thoroughly so I'm expecting a very mixed bag. I do have high hopes for a couple of the series I happen to know are coming however, so if only those ones are good and the rest are dross then at least I can get on with catching-up on my backlog...