Spring 2015 Season: 3/4
Currently Watching:
Diamond no Ace: Season 2 (Daiya No Ace)
Dungeon ni Deai o Motomeru no wa Machigatteiru Darou ka? (DanMachi)
Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works (UBW TV)
Grisaia no Rakuen (The Eden of Grisaia)
Gunslinger Stratos (GS)
High School DxD BorN (DxD BorN)
Kekkai Sensen (Kekkaisen)
Nisekoi:
Owari no Seraph
Plastic Memories
Shokugeki no Souma (Souma)
Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru. Zoku (OreGairu Zoku)
Yamada-kun to 7-nin no Majo (Yamada-kun)
Plan To Watch:
Arslan Senki
Ore Monogatari!!
So we’re about 3/4 through the spring season and I’ve watched most of the anime I was planning on seeing this season with the exception of the two in the plan to watch area. Overall, I think this season had a lot of comedy anime with a lack of darker tones that complement them. An overview of comedy that I’m watching:
DanMachi - While definitely humourous and light-hearted, this show is incredibly lackluster as there is nothing about it that sticks beyond the title. It does a great job of incorporating the MMO genre into a story, however, with titles like SAO, Accel World and Log Horizon having done so already it doesn’t stand out in any way. With nothing really standing out and nothing being horrible DanMachi gets a score of 6.
DxD BorN - I mean, it does things in DxD fashion. I generally rate anything of the Ecchi + Harem genre poorly because anything that requires the two combined rather than good storytelling and characters just doesn’t compare to anime that lack the Ecchi side. A great example is the World God Only Knows. DxD is usually one of the exceptions that manages to avoid being too reliant on the nature of the genres. This season however, has just been lackluster so it settles to a score of 5.
Nisekoi: - I’ve never been a huge fan of this series. For someone who’s been watching as long as I have, there is nothing about this anime that intrigues me at all. Again, it’s not bad by any means but it brings nothing new to the genre, but unlike the first season which had some great moments, this second season has been just filled with comedy, which rounds it out to a score of 6.
OreGairu Zoku (I don’t consider this comedy because it’s not really funny at all in my opinion)
Yamada-kun - This is my comedy anime of the season. I didn’t start watching this until last week and I’m glad I ended up watching it. With a detestable main character, female characters that bored me at the start, it looked like I would be in for another season of nothing to laugh at. It was definitely a more refreshing take to the Ecchi + Harem genre, similar to Strike the Blood and Campione!, two of my favourites in this genre. While it does fall short of the above two, it doesn’t really deserve a rating of 8 but it is a notch above the others in this genre.
Time for the rest:
Diamond no Ace: S2 - I rate anime like Detective Conan on different rating systems from the typical 1-2 season anime because the appeal for me is very different. Anime with large batch sizes are watched for their consistency and suspense build up. Detective Conan is the best in class for this, you can expect some of the same things in every episode and that once in a while you’ll get some plot build up that will really grip you. Diamond no Ace hasn’t failed so far at either, so it rounds out to a 7.
Fate/Stay Night: UBW - Also known as Shirou’s conversation. I’ve played the game on PS Vita, seen every season and adaptation because this is still my second favourite anime of all time. This adaptation adds the much needed flair of story telling that complemented the complex storyline, beautiful artwork and Typemoon character design. Rated at 9. Grisaia no Rakuen - I love Grisaia’s style of story telling. It gives you a thorough insight of a single character from their perspective of things. The biggest issue with this method is the nature of making other characters feel foreign and detached. It creates difficulty for the audience to feel empathy for everyone not currently in the story. This makes it lose a lot of the power that existed in the original. Overall 7.
Gunslinger Stratos - Gunslinger Stratos falls into the predicament that all anime of this apocalyptic genre fall into. The nature that the main character must save the world regardless of how hopeless it may seem. See Evangelion, Attack of Titan, Arpeggio of Blue Steel, Black Bullet, Devil Survivor - I think you get the idea. The better anime in this genre have moments of breath taking action followed by breaths of air where the explanation ensues. If the anime has too little explanation the viewer gets lost. If there’s not enough action, the viewer gets bored. Gunslinger Stratos does a fantastic job of telling a story and understanding characters but there’s just a void of action that makes it fall apart. Rated 6 cause without action you can’t really have a gunfighting anime. Kekkai Sensen - Where do I begin with this anime. It’s definitely a Studio Bones anime. It has everything I like in this kind of unique standout anime. A definitive style of story telling, an underlying plot that’s slowing building up. This is the Bones way of successful anime and it works for Kekkai Sensen. If the suspense actually turns into something I expect this to be an 8. If it doesn’t, it will flop to a 6.
Owari no Seraph - Ah, yay apocalyptic anime of the season version vampire. This is better than Gunslinger Stratos because it understands the requirement of action and explanation more. It however, has the same short falls as Attack on Titan, a plot that isn’t that complicated but takes too long to unravel in order to build unnecessary suspense. Good suspense will have you on your toes and excited. Bad suspense is a cliff hanger without good reason, where they spend half an episode doing nothing and then create a cliff hanger as opposed to so much happened and it’s not even over. Owari no Seraph is full of pointless cliff hangers which absolutely ruins the viewing experience and gets a 7.
Plastic Memories - Speaking of good use of suspense, Plastic Memories takes the award for the second best use of suspense in this season. The best of this season goes to OreGairu Zoku which I’ll expand on below. Plastic Memories starts off slow, letting you slowly fall into it before stepping on the gas and going hard. The story telling from multiple view points, the breaks to add comedic relief, and the non-stop emotion and action that follows is fluid. My biggest problem with this anime is the overuse of comedic relief and comedic relief characters because it harms the more serious overtones and questions the story asks. If not for those points, Plastic Memories would be a 9 easy.
Shokugeki no Souma - This is the best use of ecchi I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t use ecchi as the base of getting attention, rather it uses it to share another level of emotion and imagery. This by itself gets it set up for a ranking of 9. However, Souma has two fatal flaws. It’s a cooking battle anime that is basically story telling a story that just isn’t that interesting with a plethora of characters that are mostly meaningless. Like all shounen anime, when the story loses flavour and the characters are forgotten it just gets boring and Souma with probably the best first episode of any this season, has fallen off the fastest and as a result grounds out from a 9 to a 7.
OreGairu Zoku - I didn’t think Studio Feel could improve on the original. I was completely wrong. I despised the original OreGairu’s original way of story telling because it refused to show multiple perspectives of a single story and forced you into following around Hachiman, who I also didn’t like as a character but that’s a personal bias and a reason I don’t like the style because if you don’t like the character the story becomes harder to relate to. Despite this, the detailed nature of explanation and well-paced stories and interactions are what made the original shine. Studio Feel finally did the one thing OreGairu needed, multiple perspectives - short as they may be, but they make a huge difference in the quality of the story that get’s shared to the audience. Add in suspense built by these multiple perspective and you get a masterful wait - week to week that is created by simple perspective changes, not by forcing time lengths. The increased number of perspectives bumps up OreGairu Zoku to a 9.
Overall Ranking:
Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works: 9
OreGairu Zoku: 9
Plastic Memories: 8
Kekkai Sensen: 8
Yamada-kun: 7
Shokugeki no Souma: 7
Owari no Seraph: 7
Grisaia no Rakuen: 7
Diamond no Ace: 7
DanMachi: 6
Nisekoi:: 6
Gunslinger Stratos: 6
DxD: 5
