Anime Guild Fall 2015 Season Power Rankings Edition 1 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 5 individuals. For this post we will only have 4 of the 5 due to scheduling errors. All 5 will be around for the next one. If you wish to join the PRC for Winter 2016 please contact Schzoidmouse/Sean or Hibbington before part 2 is put up after week 6. The group: Schizoidmouse Hibbington Selinea Haxxspetten Sakamoto-hime Season Power Rankings 2 Season Power Rankings 3 Season Power Rankings 4 1. Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni wa Shitai ga Umatteiru Schizoidmouse: 3 Hibbington: 2 Selinea: 4 What I like about Sakurako-san is that it's a blending of tones done right. There's death, there's murder, but there's also life, peace, food, humor, and everything else. Very rarely do shows deal with loss in that way that loss actually happens. With tears, occasional painful memories, and a resilience that doesn't let death hold us back. By the end of three episodes, however, Sakurako-san is at once solid and displaying some cracks. It's solid as it doesn't suddenly take on any large conspiracy. The cracks come from the fact that we went from the middle of spring to the middle of summer in three episodes. An entire school semester that some shows spend a whole season on is reduced to an hour. Each episode individually is decently paced (barring the need for rapid fire clues), but vignettes of different tragedies happening every couple months might get a little wearing. I, for one, do not want to get fired through the span of over a year in twelve episodes. HaXXspetten: 7  1. Haikyuu!! Second Season Schizoidmouse: 4 Hibbington: 8 Selinea: 1 Prior to episode 3, there was a real chance of Haikyuu falling a few spots, possibly all the way down to 4, but just about every show besides Noragami ((and a few in the bottom half)) either had waning interest or destabilized, so welcome back to the top spot. Drama between teammates is one of my favorite types of drama, because just because people have to work together on court doesn’t mean everything is buddy buddy off court, and nothing I’ve seen demonstrates that better than the main characters of Haikyuu. The sequel is off to a great start. Characters continue to be quirky but not one dimensional. Everybody has been sufficiently reintroduced. The only thing missing in this first quarter of episodes is that we haven’t had any long matches demonstrating volleyball strategy in detail. I don’t mind it too much since I love the character development and the new character Yachi, but this is a sports anime, and I do want sports in my sports anime, so I’ll be looking forward to the next quarter of episodes. HaXXspetten: 3  3. Noragami Aragoto Schizoidmouse: 1 Hibbington: 4 Selinea: 6 Noragami is putting together a solid second season, emphasizing the past drama between Yato and Bishamon and how/why it’s all coming to a head again with some new antagonists and some returning antagonists (the show is called Noragami, after all, you can’t omit her /them). The drama between the characters have gotten better, as misunderstandings have roots in past trauma and antagonist schemes, not basic communication failures god I hated Yukine and his arc. If I had liked the first season, and the rest of the shows this season were worse, this could have been near the top. As it stands, it’s at 6/14 for me, although I like these top six shows a lot better than the bottom 8, so just think of this as this season’s cut off point for me. HaXXspetten: 8  4. Subete ga F ni Naru: The Perfect Insider Schizoidmouse: 5 Hibbington: 11 Selinea: 2 Ah Subete, you were doing so well, until episode 3 happened, when you awkwardly committed to being a mystery show instead of a psychological/philosophical one. I don’t dislike mysteries, but I mourn how good Subete could have been, if it didn’t need to get bogged down with clue presentation. The show could still recover; maybe there was just TOO much exposition and foreshadowing that needed to be done that they collapsed it into one mediocre episode, but let’s back up. Subete is/was a great show that really tackles “what is life” from both a realistic, everyday banter perspective you can see in its characters and a macro, philosopher’s level of what living is. To be “realistic” and “clever” and “more real than real” at the same time is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and the first episode of Subete pulled it off. I hope Subete returns to that, but I'm not holding my breath. Subete also ranks well due to having some of the best animation and interesting character designs this seasons. HaXXspetten: 2  5. Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans Schizoidmouse: 2 Hibbington: 9 Selinea: 7 It's a good thing this show is a two-cour, because it took awhile for the show to get into a good groove. Episode one was an overly frenetic attempt to introduce all the characters and plot threads, (and when you're a sci-fi epic/space opera, that is definitely not a good idea), to the suddenly rather dull, information filling episode two, the writers know what story they want to tell, they just don't know how to get the audience caught up to what's in their heads. I expect this show to improve, I just don't know if it'll improve in my rankings unless one of the other new shows crashes out. I'm just not a huge sci-fi classics person, serious sci-fi shows in general raises by hackles in a weird way. I guess my "future anxiety" manifests in all sorts of places HaXXspetten: 4  6. One Punch Man Schizoidmouse: 7 Hibbington: 10 Selinea: 10 Combining opposite tones can be very powerful, like what Sakurako-san does, combining peace and murder. It could also be a complete disaster, combining visual gags with scenes (more importantly, sounds) of people running away in genuine terror. I wanted One Punch Man to achieve black humor--a delicate balance is required to get people to laugh at things that aren't normally funny. One Punch Man crashes and burns in this department. Whenever I see wide spread destruction, I just cringe and feel vaguely uncomfortable for the rest of the scene. Not a good reaction during a comedy. It doesn't help that there's rarely any tension, and punchlines take too late to arrive, getting delivered long after I'd already let out a small chuckle upon realizing the joke myself. Timing is everything in comedy, and this anime adaptation definitely hasn't sync'd to mine. All the characters are too outrageous for me to be enamored with any of them, and the final nail in the coffin is that expectations for this show were so high there was almost no way there wasn't going to be a let down. Is One Punch Man a bad show? I don't think so. It's an average one, but for an overhyped comedy show, that might as well be a kiss of death in my rankings. HaXXspetten: 1  7. Comet Lucifer Schizoidmouse: 6 Hibbington: 6 Selinea: 5 Comet Lucifer looks great camera angle and style wise, which is weird as neither of the directors listed seem like they've had great previous success (although I've personally never seen any of their shows, so who knows). The low to the ground perspective and the strobe effect in episode two are the easiest examples to list. I also really enjoy the animation itself--they remind me of Ghibli movies with some of the excess "heartwarming" aspects cut out. Bright, colorful, whimsical, but also with an edge to it. I've always been susceptible to eye candy, but I've never been THIS susceptible to eye candy before, so it feels kind of strange. It felt even more strange back when I had this ranked at #2 I could go on all day about the animation, but I'm going to switch over to weaknesses. First, continuity and world building. Episode 1/2 were coherent, and then episode 3 jumped to the roof already patched up and the crest explained off screen. Also, I'm scornful of "peanut galleries" but it's more jarring when no background characters show up to express surprise or concern. Like with Sakurako-san, each episode themselves seem adequately paced, but Comet Lucifer is now several episodes in, and too much of it has been jumpy and light romps around town that I wonder if it's going to be able to get a serious plotline done in the remaining time span, because unlike Sakurako-san, Comet Lucifer has a lot of plot threads, it's not a quiet slice of life exploration of loss. HaXXspetten: 12  8. Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry Schizoidmouse: 11 Hibbington: 3 Selinea: 13 Barring Valkyrie Drive, Rakudai had the worst first episode in the past several months. Too much exposition, obnoxious characters that were all over the place. I'm not going to rehash my rant from the discussion thread, since the more important thing is that Rakudai has been improving. The main characters are a bit more well rounded, I like watching one on one tournament duels, and this romance is somehow the least cheesy in my bottom half of shows. Besides having to recover from that horrible first episode, however, the reason I can't say I like, or at least don't mind, this show is because its core narrative structure is set up like an underdog story, and I just can't buy that from a lead like Ikki. What about all the people who want to be knights who have NO magic aptitude? Sure the system is against him, and I'm all for highlighting problematic overarching structures, but the director, his homeroom teacher, Stella (best talent in the school), his sister, and others are all in his corner. That's not an underdog, that's a slightly weaker political faction trying to overturn the slightly stronger status quo. HaXXspetten: 6  9. Gakusen Toshi Asterisk Schizoidmouse: 12 Hibbington: 1 Selinea: 8 Generic magical school anime #1. Number 1 both because it beats out Rakudai and Taimadou on my list, but also number 1 because it's the most generic. Does generic = bad? No, but I can list out exactly what I liked about Strike the Blood/Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei and what I disliked about those two shows and apply them verbatim to this one. Like Strike the Blood, the characters are tolerable and occasionally very entertaining. There's a thread of backstory questions and overarching mystery. Like Mahouka Koukou, there's an interesting pseudo sci-fi/pseudo magic world building and a competition driven narrative that doesn't dominate the story (sometimes to my disappointment too because I like one on one duels). But the weaknesses would be, stories are divided into somewhat autonomous arcs, and thus the backstory and antagonists aren't introduced at a good pace. The biggest issue is that the main character(s) is a super powerful Gary Stu. More than those weaknesses though, I liked Strike the Blood and Mahouka Koukou a lot after the first couple episodes, and then they just steadily eroded my goodwill through the course of their season. Episode 3 of Gakusen was already a bit grating, and not because it's generic, it's because it goes even further with completely cheesy lines like "I will protect the princess." Because of that, I’m not going to endorse Gakusen now, both because I’ve already gone through this rodeo. Maybe it'll be better than its predecessors, but for now, it'll stay at 8/14. HaXXspetten: 13  10. Ushio to Tora (TV) Schizoidmouse: 8 Hibbington: 7 Selinea: 12 Welcome to another season of hovering near the bottom. The overarching plotline isn’t overarching enough. Sure we have a long term antagonist and the mystery of Ushio’s mother, but each episode or two episode still remain in mostly self-contained arcs. It reminds me of Fallout (and other video games) where you’re supposedly searching for water for your fallout shelter but you spend weeks and months doing these nice side quest arcs. Not as big of a deal when exploring a video game. Pretty annoying as an anime pace. There is also the ever-growing collection of damsels-in-distress and awkward fan service scenes how come it’s almost never the guy that’s naked, I wouldn’t really mind if this was just an equal opportunity nudity show because shit happens when fighting. I'll just keep reminding myself that I gave Nurarihyon a full 24 episodes to be bad before it got better, so I'll extend the same courtesy to Ushio to Tora. Doesn't mean it won't keep getting hammered in PRC by me for awhile. HaXXspetten: 9  11. Concrete Revolutio: Choujin Gensou Schizoidmouse: 10 Hibbington: 12 [center]Selinea: 3 This season's Ranpo Kitan? XD I like shows that keep my mind busy, and the mess Concrete Revolutio has made of its timeline presentation certainly keeps me on my toes. ((What happens when you give me time to think like Heavy Object does? Huge rants about logic errors happen)) The other thing is that the main characters are surprisingly likeable. I usually don't like main characters, between the plot armor, the extra stereotypical personalities, and trumped up drama. On that last point, Concrete Revolutio is likewise a drummed up angst fest, but it's an angst fest I can get behind due to so many different themes different characters are agonizing over. The biggest selling point is that character archtypes are twisted to an extreme degree. Episode 2 is the best example, as the mischievous childish ghost character is both a ridiculous irritant and a complex moral question about aging and seeing things in black and white. By stretching the caricature on both ends, Concrete Revolutio did more with the character in one episode than Noragami managed to do with Yukine over the span of several episodes, because Noragami played it straight. Concrete Revolutio played it to extremes. The weaknesses are, everything is a bit too choppy, and different episodes have different levels of impact. Episode 2 was amazing. Episode 3, while dealing with the questions of robots versus life, seemed a little lackluster and overwhelmed by its subject manner. Overall though, I love Concrete Revolutio, and how it brings its disparate pieces together (or fails to bring those pieces together) will determine how well it'll score. HaXXspetten: 14  12. Taimadou Gakuen 35 Shiken Shoutai Schizoidmouse: 14 Hibbington: 5 Selinea: 11 Disappointed expectations is a bitch, and I only have myself to blame because I’m pretty sure I was the only person on MAL who thought Taimadou was actually going to have an in-depth exploration of science versus magic with science just edging magic out, and a diverse reaction to government/cultural prejudices. Man, that sounds like a ridiculously high bar now that I type it all out, but that’s honestly what I thought even coming out of episode one. Obviously, that's not what happened. Instead, we have magic versus magic, two tsundere characters, a suddenly overly powered-up main character, and overly thin world building. *face palm* All of this is compounded by the fact that Taimadou is one of the most poorly paced shows this season, jumping from scene to scene with no transitions, exposition, or anything that would make sense. The reason this doesn't rank lower is because somehow, I neither seethe nor get bored when I'm watching Taimadou. Certain scenes make me laugh (sometimes I'm laughing with the show and sometimes I'm laughing at it), other scenes are exciting little bits of choreography. If it wasn't for the fact that everything about this show fails at a macro level, this would be more entertaining than Gakusen. I really want to read the LNs, because I feel like I can chalk a lot of it up to being a bad adaptation. HaXXspetten: 11  12. Garo: Guren no Tsuki Schizoidmouse: 9 Hibbington: 13 Selinea: 9 The most annoying thing about Garo right now is that the politics are simplistic. I put up with it in Arslan because it had military strategies and some other entertaining bits, but family strife and individual power plays are killing Garo. What happened to complex conflicting ideologies that have no right answer? I'm not here for the campy power ranger transformations, I'm here for the plot, and thus far, Garo has not introduced a complex weave of plot lines (although episode 3 shows a little promise). The other annoying thing is the voice acting/character designs. A lot of atmospheric things are done really well, and then the main characters come in with their ridiculous hair and voices and ruin it. I don't dislike Garo, but there's a lot of room for improvement. Let's see if it manages that next quarter. Also, for the last time, please do not directly bite into persimmons, that is a terrible idea HaXXspetten: 10  14. Young Black Jack Schizoidmouse: 13 Hibbington: 14 Selinea: 14 I like shows that make me think. On the flip side though, I hate shows that try to shove an agenda in my face. I'm not here to watch anti-student-protest propaganda and get bludgeoned over the head about the evils of money and greed. I like those as themes to explore. I don't like that YBJ clearly takes a stance on those themes. Lay off, learn some subtlety, and let me draw my own conclusions. Because right now, I'm drawing very different conclusions than the ones the show wants me to, and it makes the entire show laughable as opposed to deep and intriguing. Individual plot points have been exceedingly dumb, from the kid being unable to get off the tracks to presenting the dilemma in episode 3 as a dichotomy. The main character himself is wildly inconsistent, which would promote realism if the show had successfully established a solid baseline personality, which it hasn't. HaXXspetten: 5  Individual Ranks Schizoidmouse Hibbington Selinea HaXXspetten |
Akuma-chiApr 5, 2019 1:24 AM
Schizoidmouse said: 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! This needs to be a thing :D |
| A tie between the sequels and the new shows for the number one spot. It will be interesting to see which will beat each other out in the next one =o. The bottom is pretty predictable but I guess i'm not the only one having issues with ONE PUNCH right now. |
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Winter 2016 please contact Schzoidmouse/Sean or Hibbington before part 2 is put up after week 6. Realised something: is it supposed to be "Winter 2016" or "Winter 2015"? |
Forgotten_Memo said: Winter 2016 please contact Schzoidmouse/Sean or Hibbington before part 2 is put up after week 6. Realised something: is it supposed to be "Winter 2016" or "Winter 2015"? Yeah it's Winter 2016. http://myanimelist.net/anime/season/2016/winter |
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| Ahhhh I see. |
| Comments are done, phew, I rewrote more than I thought I would. Also, for kicks, points away from the aggregate ranking points away from PRC list: Sean/Mouse: 28 Hibs: 50 Sel: 36 Haxx: 48 Points away from each other: Mouse-Hibs: 60 Mouse-Sel: 42 Mouse-Haxx: 52 Hibs-Sel: 64 Hibs-Haxx: 80 Sel-Haxx: 62 What I learned from this exercise was basically what I already knew by eyeballing. We're all pretty different and Hibs and Haxx had the most opposite ratings with each other. |
SelineaOct 28, 2015 8:00 PM
| What do you mean by Aggregate Ranking? |
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FriedNut said: Hibbington said: What do you mean by Aggregate Ranking? I'm pretty sure Selinea's talking about the distance from the overall ranking from the combined ranks. Ahh okay, I thought it was going off our week one testing lists. |
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Hibbington said: FriedNut said: I'm pretty sure Selinea's talking about the distance from the overall ranking from the combined ranks. Ahh okay, I thought it was going off our week one testing lists. Mouse never even confirmed where Taimadou was on our week one testing list, just an afterthought at the end that it wasn't cut, so the assumption would be last, but we don't really know, haha. Plus, it had shows that weren't on this one and shows that are on this one that didn't need to be tested, so it would be even more impossible to compare. But yeah, distance from the real PRC list, with the ties left as is, because otherwise it would be even harder to set up in Excel, and the ties affect everybody's distance scores the same way anyway. |
| Not trying to be picky but do you think it is more suiting to call it Deviation Rankings? As that is kind of more what it is. You are trying to show the deviations of ourselves in regards to us as a collective. When I think of aggregate, it is more about combinations. Finally to respond to you advanced statistics. I think it is pretty surprising that HaXX and myself are the one's furthest apart. If we go by this new affinity nonsense that MAL put in, my lowest is actually with you so on average according to MAL at least it should be us who is the furthest apart. |
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Hibbington said: Not trying to be picky but do you think it is more suiting to call it Deviation Rankings? As that is kind of more what it is. You are trying to show the deviations of ourselves in regards to us as a collective. When I think of aggregate, it is more about combinations. Finally to respond to you advanced statistics. I think it is pretty surprising that HaXX and myself are the one's furthest apart. If we go by this new affinity nonsense that MAL put in, my lowest is actually with you so on average according to MAL at least it should be us who is the furthest apart. Well, it's points away from the aggregate ranking, with emphasis on the first two words, I just didn't know what to call our collective PRC rankings (the "aggregate ranking" is supposed to be taken as one idea to indicate the PRC numbers, not that the numbers I came up with WAS a ranking in and of itself, if that makes sense). I'm sure there's a better term for it that doesn't lead to this discussion, haha, I'll keep thinking about it. I didn't use the word deviation though because this is a complete mockery of actual standard deviation calculations. I thought about doing actual standard deviation numbers, but then I was like, nah, too much work. XD First, I don't really get the new affinity thing that MAL put in. Maybe it's explained in some forum post I haven't read yet, but if it works like the old one, and it runs off of score spread, these PRC rankings don't measure the distance in between each of our shows. Maybe we love 1/2 and it's a steep drop off to 3. Maybe there's not much of a difference between how much you dislike number 4 and how much you dislike number 10. MAL would account for that, this doesn't. Shows that are actually a 1/2 punch are still separate by a whole number in PRC. An almost indifference between number 4 and number 10 is marked by a whopping six points of difference here. So PRC is a pretty rough estimate of how much we actually like or dislike a show. It's only comparative of shows with each other. I have a lot of different theories about our different viewing preferences, but just in raw numbers, your biggest outlier, Gakusen, clashes the most with Haxx. Haxx's rating for Sakurako-san clashes the most with you. So it's really just winding up on opposite ends or near opposite ends for certain shows more so than it happens with Mouse and I. Edit: Actually, I decided to do standard deviations after all just for kicks. Standard deviations were done from raw average scores (adding up everybody's ranks and dividing by 4) and not the PRC placement. Mouse: 2.20 Hibbs: 3.91 Sel: 2.95 Hax: 3.55 Also, biggest outliers for each person (as defined as +/- 5 or more ranks from other three people): Mouse: none Hibbs: Subete ga F ni Naru, Gakusen Toshi Asterisk, Taimadou Gakuen Sel: Concrete Revolutio Haxx: One Punch Man, Comet Lucifer, Young Black Jack |
SelineaOct 28, 2015 9:04 PM
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