Tag: Annual

I tell myself that I never intended for my “favorites” lists to get this out of hand, but I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m 4 posts in and only now winding down. There’s a lot of good anime every year, as I always say, but the past year has been exceedingly fruitful in terms of great, unique, or just entertaining anime series. It’s difficult to stop talking about them all!

Aside from a couple in this group which were listed here due to space restrictions on the previous post, these are series that I didn’t have a chance to finish, either due to timing or other factors, but which I wanted to talk about anyway. In some cases I will likely get back to them later and close the loop; in at least one case that’s questionable, for reasons that I hope are clear. In all cases, though, there was something about these series that caught my eye and excited my imagination, so I felt it would be a failure on my part to ignore them.

While I had a lot of top favorites last year (see Part 1 and Part 2), I also watched a lot of anime that I’d classify as good or even great, but which didn’t break through and affect me the way some of the others did. This doesn’t mean that these series weren’t worth talking about, so I’d like to give a little bit of the spotlight to some of the “also-rans,” the series that I think are worth watching from the past year.

I limited this list to series that I’ve either completed, or in the case of multi-cour series, ones where I’d watched at least half. This isn’t an exhaustive list of every series I completed last year, just ones I wanted to talk about and signal boost. As a reminder, my “year” runs from Autumn 2017 through Summer 2018.

Welcome back! I wasn’t originally planning to split my favorites up between multiple posts, but I realized while writing that there was just too much great anime that I wanted to talk about and it would have been unjust to cram them all into such a tiny space. It may also be that I can get a little long-winded talking about the things that I love… but that’s not necessarily a bad thing (at least if you enjoy my writing).

Just for consistency’s sake, I’ll reiterate that the anime series I’m writing about for my favorites were broadcast from Autumn 2017 through Summer 2018, rather than from the entirety of 2018, not only because I tend to watch things in fits and starts, but because I like to let my opinions crystallize a bit before naming something a favorite. There was obviously a lot of great stuff airing this Autumn… so some of it will probably end up as a favorite next year!

Read part 1 of this series here!

Now is the time when many of my favorite anime bloggers are posting their picks for their favorite (and sometimes least favorite) anime of the year. While this is something I’ve always wanted to do, what’s prevented me from posting lists like this in the past is the fact that I tend not to finish watching the Autumn season shows in a timely manner, and so feel ill-equipped to participate. I also like to let the series I have finished watching settle for a while so that I can ensure that my opinions hold up over time; sometimes I may feel one way about an anime immediately after completing it, but after some further thought my opinion becomes more nuanced and even completely different.

My solution, then, is to operate on a slightly different time-table. For this list of favorites, I’ll be drawing from the anime I viewed from Autumn season 2017 through Summer season 2018 (basically October 2017 through the end of September 2018). While that will offset my picks a bit from others’, I feel like this is the best way to confidently represent how I feel about the anime I’ve completed.

This list is in no particular order, other than chronological based on time of broadcast. I’m terrible at assigning rankings to things, and would rather feature these different anime for their specific good traits rather than attempt to figure out which ones I liked more or less. I also hope that through this list I’m able to feature a few underrated gems that readers might want to give a second look.

This was getting lengthy, so I split it up into two parts. Stay tuned for the second half!

ETA: Check out Part 2 here!