Bookend Awards Interlude: Best Anime

To keep you hanging on the game of the year for a little longer, let’s look at some other media other than games I consumed in 2017, and let’s get the weebshit out of the way with the best Anime I watched this year:

Attack on Titan Series 2 – I mean, if you watched the first series, you'll probably want to watch this. I have no idea why they waited so long to make the second series, and I feel they let the hype die on the branch. But if you are still interested there are some big twists and a larger focus on the secondary characters this season. And we're still not even halfway through the available Manga... Pull your finger out and get season 3 done before people really stop caring guys, don't give another 3 year wait!

Bakamonogatari – The first series of the now stupidly long Monogatari series was a bit of a slow start for me, but now I’ve finished it I really want to watch the next one. I don’t usually like Harems, where the main character is just inexplicably surrounded by hot girls, but they’re all such compelling characters in the end I stopped caring. Join half vampire Araragi, Senjougahara the weightless girl with an arsenal of lethal stationary and the rest of the equally fucked up gang in this strikingly directed and pretty damn weird monster story that works well as a standalone series without watching the 100’s of episodes that follow.

Black lagoon: Roberta's blood trial – A follow up six episode OVA to the fantastic Black Lagoon. The former mercenary now Maid Roberta has her mind break when her master is killed in a political assassination and arrives in Roanpur to kill the people responsible, while the black Lagoon crew end up entangled in the mess due to the myriad players trying to make use of the situation. Not the strongest story in Black lagoon, but an entertaining time.

Higurashi no koru ni Kai – After the first series of Higurashi you will have no idea what is really going on. For better or worse, by the end of this one you will. If you watched the first series, you owe it to yourself to watch this one to tie up the loose ends, but the series as a whole is too weird and inconsistent to really recommend, starting with a good idea that it overplays by the end.

Hunter X Hunter – Probably the best shonen series ever made, now finished because Higashi is crippled by his bad back and they caught up with the Manga, but if HxH never gets another anime series, this one ends on a damn strong note. Great characters, villains, stories, interesting power dynamics and every arc feels totally different. If you like anime at all you should at least check it out, even if the episode count seems a little daunting at first, I blasted few it in a few weeks after I started. It’s just that good.

Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress – A really silly anime about fighting weird lava zombies on an armoured train. Good for some mindless action, but not much else.

Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon – Started watching as a joke, loved it by the end. Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid is the gayest thing ever and I love it. After having her life saved by Miss Kobayashi, the Dragon Tohru falls in love with her and decides to become her live in Maid. And they basically end up adopting a young dragon to complete the family, and slowly more kooky dragons end up interfering with their reality. Funny and heart-warming, though may have too much, sometimes a little bizarre, fan service for some people. I didn’t know that tricking people into eating your tail was a fetish until watching this show.

Konosuba – Series 2 to be precise, but the whole series is gold. Transported to a fantasy world after dying of a heart attack when trying to save a girl from a slow moving tractor (she was in no danger), the NEET Kazuma find this fantasy world sucks just as much as the real one when he finds the only people he can get to party up with him is a low IQ goddess, a mage who can only cast one spell that leaves her catatonic for a day after a single cast and a sadomasochistic Knight who’s unable to hit anything with her sword. May not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s the funniest Anime I watched this year.

Little Witch Academia – Harry potter in an all girls school basically. A full series based off of studio Trigger’s OVA’s released a few years back, which live in a different continuity to this full series, and in my opinion Trigger nailed it yet again. Our protagonist is Akko, a dumb but well meaning girl from a normal, not witch, family who wanted to become a witch after watching the performer Shiny Chariot as a child. There’s a colourful cast of supporting characters, which frankly probably don’t get enough screen time when the plot kicks into gear in the second half, and it becomes all about Akko, her sort of rival Diana and their professors Ursula and Croix. While I think it was at its strongest as a magical high school slice of life in the first half, I still had a good time from start to finish.

Lucky Star – Unless you already care about anime, otaku culture and Japanese culture in general, this show will probably be pretty much incomprehensible to you, but I loved this slice of life as Konata, Kagami, Tsukasa and Miyuki make the most banal seeming day to day things interesting due to the personality quirks they each have. Probably most normal people would hate or not get it, but if this is your thing, you’ll love it.

Space patrol Luluco – Absolute madness and a love letter to their past made by Studio Trigger. They had me with the OP and didn’t let me go until the miniseries was finished.

Welcome to the NHK – Equal parts crushingly depressing and hilarious. The hikikomori Tatsuhiro Satou has been stuck in his apartment for four years after having a breakdown on the way to his first day at college has his life turned upside down by the girl Misaki who takes it upon herself to fix him, for not wholly altruistic reasons. On the way Satou gets dragged into making an erotic visual novel (a galge or ‘Gal Game’), a pyramid scheme, a suicide pact and more, all of which he blames on the shadowy Nihon Hikikomori Kyokai (roughly 'Japan Hikkikomori Conspiracy'), the eponymous N.H.K of the title. In my opinion, it takes too long to get going, with Satou refusing to get involved in Misaki’s plans for too long, when it’s clear that’s where the story is going, but by the end I ended up caring about all these characters, despite how awful they all are, all for their own entirely believable reasons. And Satou-kun’s life is just hilariously fucked up.

And the winner is...

                Hunter X Hunter

Man, I watched some other damn good Anime this year, but there’s just no topping HxH, it’s not just one of the best Shonen Anime ever, it’s one of the best Anime of any genre. It took a lot of pushing by friends to actually sit down and watch it, because I hate long series as a rule, but it does live up to the hype.