Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu (Re: Life in a different world from zero)
Watch if you liked: Steins;Gate, Sword Art Online
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFfXjuVA1Jk
Anime fans really like Groundhog Day-style stories with repeating events. There's been Steins;Gate, Madoka Magica, Erased, and even that Tom Cruise movie where he died a lot was based on the Japanese light novel All You Need is Kill. Re Zero is another one of those. The story is about a generic teenage boy suddenly finding himself in a fantasy world (it is still a light novel after all). There he meets a princess and thinks he's going to have a wonderful romance, only for events to go south and he's forced to relive that meeting over and over so everything doesn't go wrong again. The studio doing the animation is White Fox, the same studio that made Steins;Gate, so that's some solid pedigree right there. If the upcoming season didn't look quite as packed as it currently does I'd say this was a shoe-in for the anime to catch on with fans. Perhaps it still will?
Joker Game
Watch if you liked: Psycho Pass, Senkou no Night Raid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tILWSrPcBsY
Well this is different. Instead of featuring a bunch of teenagers as the main characters, Joker Game is about a group of adults wearing fancy suits. Instead of being set in a world very similar to that of a fantasy MMORPG, it's set during pre-World War 2 Japan. Instead of being about how a guy's abilities in a video game translate eerily well towards fighting baddies in this new world so he can win the heart of the pretty lady, it's about a spy organisation working under the Japanese Imperial Army. That would be because it's not a light novel. It's a regular old-fashioned novel. I get weirdly excited about that piece of information nowadays. They're usually more mature and target an older audience and have a lot less focus on boobies than their lighter counterparts. The animation is being handled by Production IG, the studio behind Psycho Pass, Eden of the East, and Haikyuu!!. They're a pretty great studio all round to handle this sort of material. The one reservation I have is whether the anime will accurately portray Japan in that period. They weren't exactly on the right side of history in that time period and have a history of glossing over their crimes. Let's hope they deal with the subject properly.
Netoge no Yome wa Onnanoko ja Nai to Omotta? (And you thought there is never a girl online?)
Watch if you liked: Accel World, Log Horizon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48IZRi4mQWs
Are you petrified of the idea that you might confess your love for someone in an online game only for the person on the other side to turn out to be a guy playing as a girl online? No? Well that's probably because you're not a 12-year-old boy who still considers being called “gay” to be the worst insult known to man. But that's what's happened to the main character of And you thought there is never a girl online and he's been mentally scared by the result. But then he agrees to an offline meeting with his MMORPG clan and they all turn out to be hot babes. You can sorta see the appeal here. If you're a teenage boy, as soon as you are within 1 metre of a person of the opposite sex, your higher body functions collapse and you can't talk with them at all. But what if you bypassed all of that by interacting with them in an MMO, and here's the key part, without realising they were hot babes from the start! It bypasses all the awkwardness of having to make friends with a girl first, kind of like the imouto or childhood friend archetypes.
Hundred
Watch if you liked: Infinite Stratos, Magical School Boob Grab 5000
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pNPWOTYgsY
Welcome to the new season of "Magical School Academy Battles Plus Accidental Boob Grab On Student Council President"! In it, our main character gets transferred into a magical school where they use a magical martial arts to create battle suits and he gets surrounded by a bunch of hot anime babes. Like that one other anime, Infinite Stratos. No wait I meant Dragonar Academy. No wait what I really meant was Seirei Tsukai no Blade Dance. No wait I meant pretty much every other light novel adaptation that has come out over the past few years. The trailer ends with the main character doing that thing where he's not entirely sure if what he's fallen on top of is a breast or not so he gives it a little squeeze to check. You can't blame them for advertising their product accurately, I'll give them that.
