Anime Guild Fall 2015 Season Power Rankings Edition 2 of 4 Heyo all! This is the Anime Guild Power Rankings, where we take a group of people AND SHOVE THEM INTO A STEEL CAGE TO FIGHT IT OUT! Naw seems too violent if you ask me. The group will come together and discuss which fourteen anime to watch per season and rank them from 1-14 with 1 being their favourite in three week intervals until the end of the season. This is not what the guild feels as a whole, but rather these 3 individuals. Fall 2015 Guide Power Ranking 1/4 The group: Schizoidmouse Selinea Haxxspetten 1. Subete ga F ni Naru: The Perfect Insider [Shift: Up 3] [High: 1] Schizoidmouse: 2 Selinea: 2 Subete would run away with the number one spot if it wasn't so inundated with clues. Yes, it's predominately a mystery show, but what I enjoy most alongside the mystery are the underlying themes and character growth. Episode 6 was a welcome breather/reset, and it showed how the world kept moving even after Dr. Magata's death, but all in all, there's so much potential for more depth and development, and they're getting overlooked by the need to show the video replay of the event in slow motion again in order to give us clues. I still like Subete best out of all the new shows, but that's more the result of nothing else having a standout second quarter. I'd take a solid mystery and mostly solid characters over some of the increasing unevenness of all the rest. HaXXspetten: 2 It’s been a really damn long time since I saw an anime which I would actually call a proper mystery. Sakurako-san certainly isn’t one, nor was Rokka no Yuusha last season, and if I go back any further than that I don’t even know what the last potential one was. Either way, The Perfect Insider is certainly very slow-paced but it’s building up the mystery incredibly well. There are potential clues dropped all over the place, but it’s very unclear which ones are relevant and which ones are nothing but red herrings. It’s still impossible to say how good the story itself will turn out to be, but the potential is incredibly high, and that’s more than I can say for most shows  2. Haikyuu!! Second Season [Shift: Down 1] [High: 1] Schizoidmouse: 5 Selinea: 1 While I am still waiting for an intricate volleyball game that pulls out all the stops, volleyball technique wise, Haikyuu has been great, with nice doses of conflict and humor. And as much as the sparks fly between Hinata and Kageyama, seeing other dynamics such as Kageyama asking Oikawa for help (and Oikawa, returning to real screen time by being his equal parts cool and dorky self) is refreshing and interesting. HaXXspetten: 3 Okay first of all, I don’t like sports anime. I never have and probably never will. The number one aspect which makes sports exciting in real life is the fact that literally anything can potentially happen. The sense of the unknown is what makes you happy when the team you cheer for are winning, and what makes you sad when they’re losing. All the tension stems from the fact that you can never take anything for granted. In fiction however, this simply doesn’t exist because all the games and their respective results are scripted. There is no element of randomness; it’s all just predetermined by the whims of the author. Even if you were to throw in a curveball in the middle of a match and make it have an unexpected outcome, it’s still not the same. If that would happen in real life, people would be shocked. When that happens in fiction, people will merely be annoyed and called it forced BS. And honestly... I think that’s perfectly understandable, and this issue isn’t really something you can get around, and that’s why I try to avoid sports anime in general. Now with that being said, Haikyuu is definitely one of the best sports anime in the industry. It still suffers from the same issues as everything I just mentioned, but discounting that fact then it’s doing almost everything else correctly. So far however, the second season has still mostly been about buildup and preparation so it’s hard to really judge it as of yet. But given what it showed us in the first season, I have no reason to believe that the eventual Spring tournament games would be anything less than thrilling to watch, even with the scripting issue taken into account  3. Noragami Aragoto [Shift: -] [High: 3] Schizoidmouse: 3 Selinea: 4 Good shows simultaneously maintain continuity and an ebb/flow. Noragami is certainly trying for that continuity, which is why it goes up a few spots. Whether it succeeds is still up for debate. Characters never flat out have the conversations they need to, and Noragami is not the sort of subtle/artistic show where that wouldn't matter. Character make passing references that often feel more shoe horned than natural. The arc that just "ended" had some great drama and I love Bishamon/Kazuma, but a good arc doesn't make a good show, so I guess we'll see how the rest of the season goes. HaXXspetten: 4 The first season of Noragami was... rather overrated I have to say. I mean sure it wasn’t bad by any means but it was incredibly average. Aragoto however is clearly taking a slightly different turn by ramping up the drama and despair. Episodes four and five of the second season were the first ones of the franchise that actually impressed me a bit (though it could have been even better still had it done a few things differently), and so far I would definitely put this above the first season. That being said, as good as those episodes were... now what? We’ve already reached that particular climax, so what does the second half of the season have in store? It would be a bit anticlimactic if it simply reverted to being the same average series that it started out as after this. Guess I’ll just have to sit back and hope for the best  4. Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans [Shift: Up 1] [High: 4] Schizoidmouse: 1 Selinea: 5 There's something about sci-fi politics that's always so...odd, compared to fantasy politics. Maybe it's the sheer scale of galaxies, or that razor edge of darkness that's always more biting in sci-fi, given it's closer proximity to reality. Either way, I could never decide if I liked it or not, despite the sheer volume of sci-fi media I've tried. It's at least interesting, and I look forward to the next episode, which is more than could be said for the series rated below this one. Mikazuki and Orga probably have one of the most complicated dynamics between two characters this season, quite a feat given how stereotypical the first couple episodes were. The fact that Mikazuki's devoted to Orga but that devotion simultaneously edges Orga towards not just bravery, but recklessness, is a great thing to introduce. ((And a fun thing to ponder whether it'll blow up in their faces somewhere down the line)) HaXXspetten: 6 I’m a bit split on this series. On one hand, the world building, character development, politics and production value are all really good. On the other hand... it’s mecha. And I just... really don’t like mecha in general. Specifically the notion of having giant robots fist fighting each other in space is just too retarded for me to appreciate. Fortunately however, that has so far remained as merely a secondary aspect of Iron-Blooded Orphans, but given that we’re finally getting out into space, I’m not convinced that’ll remain true for too much longer. So it remains to be seen what I’ll think of this anime as a whole. I can only hope that it’ll take the more sophisticated approach over the mindless one  5. One Punch Man [Shift: Up 1][High: 5] Schizoidmouse: 7 Selinea: 8 Like I said in Noragami's description, good pacing has its ebbs and flows. One Punch Man doesn't do that. It runs in tight circles and hopes that frenetic energy of a dog chasing its down tail generates some laughs anyway. For me, it's more often a miss than a hit. Yes, I'm one of those scrooges who rarely likes animal videos Character development is slow and borderline nonexistent if you took out Genos. I still can't get over any crowd scene that shows people running away, that crap isn't black humor, it's just painfully bad. One Punch Man is probably the most overrated show this season, hence getting slotted into my bottom half. It has a couple good comedic moments, and thus those couple laughs vault it over the bigger disasters the rest of the season has. HaXXspetten: 1 There is nothing airing this season which I would call a masterpiece exactly, but One Punch Man is at least the closest to one. Madhouse have done a remarkable job at adapting it thus far both in terms of production value (despite the supposedly average budget) and faithfulness to the manga. Of course since the manga gets gradually more epic the longer it goes on, I might be jumping the gun a bit early with the anime but I have no reason to believe they’re going to mess it up at this point. It’s a stupid series, but amazingly entertaining  6. Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni wa Shitai ga Umatteiru [Shift: Down 5] [High: 1] Schizoidmouse: 4 Selinea: 7 Episode 6 dropped Sakurako-san from rank 4 to rank 7, that's how bad it was. It would have been an easy fix too. Rather than "I'm glad I kept searching" it could have been "I'm sorry for making such an outlandish assumption, but knowing the truth gives me the peace of mind I needed." The onus then lands on Yoriko's own mental state, rather than the show implicitly agreeing that strangers should totally high handedly mettle in other people's lives. Anyway, that's off topic for people who haven't seen the show. The episodic nature of this show is the biggest problem. You don't get to see characters change and adapt naturally across your screen, you can snap shots of them as they run into dramatic, potentially life and death situations. Unless you're a police drama, you need more screen time of characters being themselves, and that doesn't happen here. The fact that none of the characters have shown particular depth is after six episode (I essentially know the same things I knew back in episode 2), is especially awful. Sakurako-san is not a terrible show, but it's just another one floating along the sea of mediocrity. HaXXspetten: 8 This anime is really starting to annoy me. Why? Because it could have been really damn good if they didn’t waste its premise so hard. Seriously first of all it’s episodic... and you just don’t do episodic mysteries, that just doesn’t wooooork god damn it. Or at least you need to have decently long arcs if you do that, not just leave it on a 1-2 episode basis. There’s just not enough time to first introduce the premise and the problem at hand, investigating the clues, putting the pieces together, presenting the resolution, and then finally wrapping up the case in that little time. Just look at what Sakurako-san has done thus far and compare it to The Perfect Insider, it’s like night and day in comparison. The show resolves this issue by simply having Sakurako be a superhuman genius capable of figuring everything out regardless of subject in a split second, which completely kills any semblance of tension in any given situation Also the episodic nature aside, the mysteries themselves have so far been rather underwhelming more often than not. Especially the case which spanned episodes four and five really frustrated me, because the conclusion made no sense whatsoever. Yeah let’s just have the guy being retarded enough to throw away his life for a bit of money to his family even though that would make literally no wife and child on the planet happy, let’s just have him try to kill himself by chopping his own leg with an axe rather than taking an easy suicide method, let’s just have everything end with the guy suddenly landing a top job out of nowhere which completely ruins the entire premise of the mystery since he evidentially can’t have been in such a desperate position if he was able to resolve the problem as easily as with a bit of job hunting, and that’s even when injured. I mean come on now; there are way too many holes to ignore here...  7. Comet Lucifer [Shift: -] [High: 7] Schizoidmouse: 6 Selinea: 6 I view towards Comet Lucifer is both the same and complete different since last quarter. I still maintain that Comet Lucifer is like a mashup between Ghibli movie and Gurren Laggann. The difference is, by this point, it's less charming/fun and more momentum-less/lacking direction. By the halfway point, the audience should have some idea of where the story is going, but the repeated clashes between Felia and the military have absolutely no context thus far besides a few cryptic lines from an old man with a telescope. It's still pretty and it's still fluffy, but it needs to do more than that in order to really do well. HaXXspetten: 10 This is without a doubt the most inconsistent anime of this season. The first two episodes were okay-ish, the third and fourth one were absolutely terrible, the fifth one was average again, and then the sixth one was finally pretty good. So looking at the anime as a whole... it’s pretty hard to judge, let alone rate. But anyway the bottom line is that the world itself is absolutely beautiful, and the art style is very pleasing to look at as well. The characters are rather shallow, though Felia is really cute and likeable. The writing however is all over the place and I don’t really know what it’s trying to do. I’ll remain cautiously skeptical moving onwards but it still has potential to redeem itself, I just won’t get my hopes up for it  8. Concrete Revolutio: Choujin Gensou [Shift: Up 3] [High: 8] Schizoidmouse: 9 Selinea: 3 I love the themes Concrete Revolutio presents. Young Black Jack should take notes on "how to talk about issues of morality without dropping bricks on people's heads." Honestly, the first quarter did better with weaving in issues of aging and good/evil and love. Concrete Revolutio stays in place mostly because no other show really improved either. The dramatic irony is slowly being chipped away and that's always a fun experience. (For true "characters never on the same page" hell though, people should read The Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson) Otherwise, two episodes focused on kaiju (and obliquely, youkai), followed by a breather episode, haven't dazzled, especially with how flippant death was treated in episode 6. I like the characters, and I don't mind the flashbacks and flashforwards (it's still better for shows to give my brain the runaround or else I'll tear it to pieces), but I guess I'll wait for the Jiro leaving the bureau climax to really see how this show does. HaXXspetten: 14 When I give an anime a low rating, there are three possible reasons for it. 90% of the time it’s simply that I found it boring. 19% of the time it’s more that there was something about it which I found very annoying. But then there’s that remaining 1% which consists of shows which genuinely make me angry when I watch them. It’s something that only a certain kind of anime is able to make me feel, and Concrete Revolutio is one of them. It’s been almost a year since the last time I came across a series like that (the last one was Yuri Kuma Arashi), but I can’t say I’ve been missing it. It’s just this kind of awkward clusterfuck which makes me cringe so hard just by watching it and I just want to hit Alt + F4 rather than focusing on the contents... and I can’t really consider that a good thing no matter what  9. Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry [Shift: Down 1] [High: 8] Schizoidmouse: 11 Selinea: 9 Rakudai reminds me of a mediocre YA/romance novel at this point. The problem is, I've read a metric ton of YA/romance novels, so that doesn't really give it any bonus points. At least it's not a stereotypical harem, so it's not suffering big minuses unlike, cough, Gakusen/Taimadou, cough. Ikki and Stella are sort of cute. The tournament gives the audience a steady story thread to follow. It has much improved from that horrendous episode 1. But again, mediocre YA novels aren't really my thing. HaXXspetten: 7 The whole “action/fantasy/ecchi/harem in a magic academy setting” concept has to be one of the absolute worst types of anime in the industry. Not to mention there are about a million of them and pretty much all of them are disturbingly similar to each other. Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry however feels like it’s really trying to do something differently for once by replacing the harem element with romance and an actually established main coupling from very early on. And I respect that move, I truly do. But at the same time I feel like it isn’t really utilizing its own premise as well as it could. For one, there really is no need to keep introducing new girls who are attracted to the MC if you’re already insisting on not making it a harem, no? Also Stella seemingly fell in love with Ikki in a split second for no apparent reason whatsoever. On top of that, the actual fighting element of the story is terrible. So in the end, as much as I appreciate that it’s trying to have a real romance in such an overused premise... it still feels like it’d have been even better had it just been a normal romance in a non-action/non-fantasy/non-ecchi standard high school setting instead, no? Trying to be different is admirable, but sometimes there are better options available still  10. Young Black Jack [Shift: Up 4] [High: 10] Schizoidmouse: 10 Selinea: 14 You know how Hollywood often has pretty weird/bad portrayals of other cultures? Like Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai? I always thought a reverse take of that would be great, but actually, no, caricatures in a drama that takes itself seriously is always annoying to watch, regardless of which side of the power dynamic the caricature is pointing at. I still remember The Things They Carried really well (despite five years passing since the last time I read it), and frankly, I feel like YBJ hits the "how not to tell a war story" landmine head on. In a market so over-saturated with simplified, bad war stories, the fact that I have to take this from my anime? Ugh. The episodic arc-ness of the series doesn't help either. Or the outlandish characters. HaXXspetten: 5 Alright honestly... I don’t really feel like Young Black Jack is good enough to deserve being all the way up at #5, but this is just a matter of the process of elimination. It’s not anything amazing, but everything below it is even worse. It’s as simple as that. In any case, I really don’t like episodic anime very much in general, but given the circumstances then Young Black Jack is doing an admirable job at trying. I really like the setting and tone of the series, and it’s rarely boring to watch. Every so often it feels like they’re trying a bit too hard at making the surgeons look badass, but at the same time they’re kind of succeeding with it. Sure as hell beats the crap out of Gangsta in that sense at least  11. Ushio to Tora (TV) [Shift: Down 1] [High: 10] Schizoidmouse: 8 Selinea: 13 I hate time travel plots where everything in a universe winds up already set in a predetermined loop. Ushio's never been great, with choppy pacing and unsustained storylines, and the drama always feels tacky and overdone, but yeah, introducing that time travel plot in this quarter is really what killed its ranking for me. HaXXspetten: 9 I don’t really have a whole lot to say about Ushio to Tora other than that it’s fun, old-school yet quite refreshing to watch. The only problem is that it’s rather repetitive, especially the way Tora is acting about “protecting his food” which he never intends to eat anyway. There’s nothing particularly bad about Ushio to Tora, but nothing incredibly good either  12. Gakusen Toshi Asterisk [Shift: Down 3] [High: 9] Schizoidmouse: 12 Selinea: 10 Gakusen just makes me feel like it's going through the same old motions of any fantasy high school drama. Important details are told rather than shown (like the student council president's mother, imagine if that explanation came AFTER the viewer had been introduced to her mother in an "uncanny valley" sort of scene, imagine how much more effect that would have been) None of the girls have been standout, from tsundere chick to flat affect chick to the new shy chick. I don't even remember any of the character names after six episodes, and that usually a bad sign. They're all just such stereotypes with not much to recommend them. There's also been way too much prep work and introductory episodes. I don't want to be introduced to any more main/side characters, just get me to the festa already. HaXXspetten: 11 Well this is just one of the most generic anime ever. I really don’t have much to say about it that I haven’t already said about every other anime of its kind before, and Asterisk is not better whatsoever. The first five episodes all sucked, but the sixth one was actually not that bad. Specifically it felt better paced, had less forced fanservice, and also focused on Toudou Kirin whom is quickly proving herself to be by far and wide the best girl of this anime. If she had been the main heroine this series might have had a bit more potential, but as is I really wouldn’t expect her to be given enough screen time moving onwards to be able to save this anime as a whole  13. Taimadou Gakuen 35 Shiken Shoutai [Shift: Down 1] [High: 12] Schizoidmouse: 14 Selinea: 11 Taimadou Gakuen reminds me of those bad fanfics that aren't the My Immortal levels of laughably bad, but those that take good existing character concepts and tries to inject way too much extra drama and raggedly jumps from one dramatic/action scene to the next, since they think further character building's not needed because it's a fanfic. And they tweaked the setting until logic is only hanging by a string. Oh yeah, those are all things I see in bad fanfics. But as annoying and cheesy as those fanfics are, the fact that Taimadou is, you know, not a fanfic, but a published series of work popular enough to gain an anime adaptation? How? Is it just a super horrible adaptation that cut out literally all the non dramatic/action parts? I don't understand how a show can be this choppy and shallow by episode 6. This quarter was also the arc on Usagi, and she's probably the worst character of the lot (the rest of them are mostly just wasted potential rather than straight up awful), so there's that too. I'm honestly surprised that Garo and Ushio crashed and burned worse during this quarter. HaXXspetten: 12 The fanservice in this anime is terrible. Really it would be so much better if it didn’t exist at all. When are people going to learn that half assedly slapping on ecchi moments when it doesn’t make sense is a bad idea? Well that aside, the pacing isn’t particularly on point either, and the drama is nothing to cheer for either. Currently the only thing I find this anime worth watching for is Mari, who is actually a pretty cute and likeable character. Other than that… yeah there’s not much to cheer for  14. Garo: Guren no Tsuki [Shift: Down 2] [High: 12] Schizoidmouse: 13 Selinea: 12 As if the first few episodic episodes weren't bad enough, this quarter took the momentum that episode 3 build and...threw it out the window. We learned nothing more about Ashiya Doman and his motivations, nothing more about the family history behind the golden armor, nothing more about the complexity of politics, nothing more about the relationship between Makai knights and the populous. There was literally nothing I wanted to know revealed in these three episodes. Instead, we got a couple terrible romance plotlines (the worst attempt at romance this season goes to episode 4 of Garo and it's not even close, which is made more ridiculous given this season has Taimadou), a super basic "politicians are corrupt and bad," and ever more grating main characters. From a charisma standpoint, Garo would be dead last, and this wouldn't even be close either. If it wasn't for Ushio and YBJ running into my pet peeves (okay, it's more than a pet peeve when it comes to YBJ), Garo definitely wouldn't be this "high" at 12. There's some leeway after three episodes, but after six, even if Garo does everything perfectly to my satisfaction for the rest of its run (doubtful), I don't see this getting rated any higher than a 7/10. If the ceiling is a 7, there's a pretty low floor to fall towards. HaXXspetten: 13 I really don’t know what Guren no Tsuki is playing at... what happened to all the things that made the first Garo so much fun to watch? There’s basically none of it in here. Yes, the animation has improved, but everything else has declined. I feel like I keep waiting for that one moment which will justify everything up to this point and make the whole thing start to get good for real, but that moment still hasn’t happened and at this point I’m not sure it ever will. Granted there’s still a lot of time left given that this is a 26-episode anime, but that’s still not really an excuse at this point. I’m just... disappointed with it  Individual Rankings Schizoidmouse Selinea HaXXspetten |
Akuma-chiApr 5, 2019 1:35 AM
| I can definitely see where my absence has affected in Gakusen falling a lot and Young Black Jack rising a good amount XD. |
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| What happened to Sakamoto btw |
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HaXXspetten said: What happened to Sakamoto btw She is doing career training classes. |
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