I am getting a little tired of talking about how tough my life is, so I’m going to skip most of it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know things have been complicated around here lately. I bring it up at all only to explain why the format is so different from last year’s Year-End List. This year slipped through my fingers, so I have not had the time, energy, or frankly the desire to concoct a nice and neat worst-to-best list like I did last year and in 2020. To be honest, it’s just also felt like a particularly mediocre year for anime. Certainly it’s the weakest since I started this blog.

That said, a brief Top 5 like I did in 2021 also felt inadequate. So, instead of a carefully curated list where I weigh all of my options intelligently, I’ve decided to embrace the chaos. This is less of a curated list and more of a sideways data dump. Some of these things have been written for a while, and are only finding a home here. Others are new. Some are very long, and some are quite brief. Length has no correlation to quality here; there were a few things that I really liked but could only summon up brief takes on (or none at all, in a couple cases, but we’ll touch on that again at the bottom of the article).

Furthermore; the entries here are not in any particular order beyond a favorite being at the top (which is actually the bottom because that’s how listicles work). They’re still mostly anime that came out this year, but some of them, as the title implies, aren’t anime at all, and a few of these things are—gasp—not even from Japan. Instead of worrying so much about format and qualifiers I decided to just write about the things this year that gave me a strong emotional response, made me think, or brought me some comfort in these bizarre times. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the madness.

That said, I wouldn’t quite feel right—

MAGICAL DESTROYERS

—if I didn’t start off talking about one of the few true clunkers I watched end to end this year.

Ah, Magical Destroyers. There’s something tragic about the complete sputtering-out that happened to this series, a reasonably strong first couple of episodes lead into most of the rest of the show being absolutely dismal, and if you wanted the bite-sized review of the show, that’s about all you’d have to say.

Of course, we’re not interested in being bite-sized here. What’s interesting to me about Magical Destroyers, some months on, now that the dust has settled, is the sheer scale of the drop-off. There was a big fall here, and I’m not sure how obvious that was to people looking in from the outside.

In premise, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Magical Destroyers. As I’ve said many times, its core conceit of a world where general, sneering dislike for the nerdy and withdrawn among us turns into outright persecution is a bit indulgent, but it’s not completely crazy. Nor is the idea that they’d then fight back. Other anime (Rumble Garanndoll and Akiba’s Trip, mainly) have done interesting things with this material, so it’s not that the show’s premise is the problem. Instead, what sinks Magical Destroyers is a massive sense of inconsistency, both in tone and just general competence. We’ve been here before, where an anime having bright spots makes the whole thing worse given their proximity to the mediocrity that makes up the rest of the series. Those bright spots aren’t meaningless, but with time, more removed from Magical Destroyers than I was when I first reviewed it, I mostly just remember the whole thing as a letdown.

Worse, there’s a particularly bitter postscript here. Like many anime, Magical Destroyers was created in part to promote a mobile game and hopeful cash cow. All told, Magical Destroyers Kai—the game in question—was active from just April to August of this year, a service life of less than six months. A failure to clear even the incredibly low bar set by such projects of ill repute as Pride of Orange’s mobile game. This is a truly depressing flit and sputter from what started out as such a promising project. Worse, given that I imagine quite a few people are out of a lot of money given Jun Imagawa’s pet project completely tanking, it seems entirely possible that the man will never lead an anime project ever again. Magical Destroyers represents more, then, than just the failure of a single series. It is the failure of one man’s entire creative vision, and the decision making of those who supported him. Worse shows definitely aired this year—the usual slate of iffy sequels, bottom-of-the-barrel narou-kei adaptations, deep pools of mediocrity like Revenger (brilliantly reviewed here by my friend Julian), and whatever the hell was going on with The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses—but I can think of none that so thoroughly embody disappointment as a concept. The rest of this list is going to mostly be positive, but I felt the need to revisit Magical Destroyers. For better or worse, the letdown has stuck with me.

“SHINKIRO”

About half of you are cheering right now, and the other half of you have no idea what this is or why it’s on this list. What is “SHINKIRO”? Aren’t those two of those girls from Hololive? What’s going on?

Well, yes, they are two of those girls from Hololive; that’s Gawr Gura and Houshou Marine (operating here as a very creatively named idol unit; GuraMarine), two of the VTuber Agency Imperial’s most popular talents. This is a music video. Specifically, a really fucking good one that reimagines Marine and Gura’s friendship as a sort of bittersweet romance. It’s inspired, is what it is. The pirate and the mermaid, more or less. A summer that lasts the rest of your life. The key to that vibe—a mix of nostalgia for a time and place that never quite really existed and an implied sadness that it’s forever out of reach—is the music video’s art style, a dreamland pastiche of pre-Millennium anime, reinterpreted through a modern lens by Studio KAI of all groups. I’m guessing the general idea was either Marine or Gura’s (I’m not huge into VTubers these days, but I know Gura is a city pop fiend and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Marine was too), and was followed through by art director Yuusuke Takeda, who has been in the industry for long enough that he’d have been working when this style was current.

The song itself is worth at least touching on, too. I’m not a music critic, so my vocabulary here is even more limited than it’d be otherwise, but to my ear this is almost indistinguishable from “authentic” city pop from the 80s. Things like this can seem transient, and thus not worth discussing in the same breath as “real” anime or similarly longform art like games or manga. But here, when I’m writing this in the second week of a particularly dark December, it reminds me that summer, no matter how far away, is real somewhere.

Oh, and Marine and Gura totally fuck in this video. Like, they don’t literally show it but there are a limited number of ways to interpret “two people wake up naked in a bed together.” Wild.

MAKE THE EXORCIST FALL IN LOVE

Here’s an elevator pitch for you; psychosexual Catholic battle shonen. This is another rule-bendy entry, since Exorcist here technically started back in late 2021. But it’s still ongoing, and yours truly happened to only find out about it this year, so this is where it gets written about (for the first, but maybe not the last? time). Exorcist is a real oddity, a battle series that leans pretty heavily on Catholic myth and morality for its worldbuilding to weave the tale of a teenage exorcist forbidden from the usual affairs of his age because he’s destined to save the world from Satan, a rare appearance by the capital D-L Demon Lord in contemporary manga. The general premise of said exorcist having to protect a seemingly-innocent girl who is actually a demon might sound like the setup for a fairly goofy romcom, but that would belie the fact that Exorcist is actually one of the gnarliest things that runs in Shonen Jump, if only intermittently. There’s something very surreal about the more straightforward romance manga aspects rubbing shoulders with the battle shonen flash, body horror, and unflinching depictions of abuse that otherwise color the manga.

Full disclosure, I was raised Catholic but am contemporaneously a practicing neopagan. So, the manga’s strange mix of subject matter feels like it’s simultaneously meant to cater to and repel people like me, folks who have not set foot in a church in many years and might never do so again. I think this may also be why Exorcist has struggled to really find an audience over here, but at the same time, that singularity of theme and subject matter is what makes it so distinct. Every chapter is a parade of these disparate concepts, and there’s much to be found in seeing how they’ll manage to work together this time, even as the material itself is often grim (see, any number of the manga’s very upfront depictions of sexual assault) or puzzling (the character of Aria and her concatenation of every possible meaning of the word “idol”). Exorcist is a true oddball, I’m hoping against hope that it gets an anime someday, but even if it doesn’t, it’s definitely worth a read if you can stomach what it’s putting down.

CASSETTE BEASTS

The first of several “there is really no way to argue this is even remotely anime” entries on this list, Cassette Beasts is a creature collector game from smallish studio Raw Fury. If you just want the buy/not buy verdict on this charming little indie game, I’ll give it to you in two sentences. Cassette Beasts is Pokémon for depressed burnout Millennials. This is unequivocally a good thing, and if you’re struggling to imagine how, you are not the target demo for Cassette Beasts.

Creature collector games developed in “the west” tend to get slapped with the Poké-clone label regardless of how closely or distantly they adhere to Pokémon’s formula. But while Cassette Beasts is definitely a riff on that formula, it’s far from just rotely copying it; more than can be said of some games in this genre. Aside from a number of flavor differences—for one thing, you don’t command the monsters, you turn into them, here. Feel free to provide your own “henshin!” shouts at the start of each battle—there are some important mechanical ones, too. The vast majority of battles are two-on-two, and you go through the whole game with one of several partners, who you can swap out freely at a café. In addition to Pokémon’s usual types, or close matches thereto, there are also Plastic, Glass, and “Astral” monsters, who lack any real equivalent in that other series. (Astrals are often themed in a broadly similar way to Ghost-type Pokémon, but they work very differently.) Speaking of types; hitting a type-advantageous move doesn’t just do more damage than usual, every single interaction of that sort has some kind of effect. For example; if a Fire-type attack hits an Ice-type beast, it’ll melt, turning into a Water-type. If that same attack hits a Poison-type, the toxins within the monster will ignite, causing a burn status. Metal attacks will shatter Glass-type beast, spreading damage-dealing shards all over the battlefield, but that same monster could strike a Lightning-type beast and cause it to become “Insulated”, reducing its targeting range in the process. There are quite a few of these interactions, and learning the ins and outs of them is recommended for those seeking to truly master the combat system.

The monsters themselves are fun, too. Not every single design is a winner, but of the 120 on offer here, the vast majority are fun in a fresh way that gives them a distinct look in comparison to Cassette Beasts’ genrefellows. One minor point of contention might be the often-punny portmanteau names, which is a naming scheme directly cribbed from Pokémon and used in many other games in this genre besides. Still, it’s hard to get too mad about gems like “Salamagus” and “Crowpocalypse.”

Some might also take issue with that “120”, since that’s relatively small a number for this genre, but if the pool of monsters and moves seems limited, it’s broader than it seems at first glance. For one thing; techniques aren’t picked from a simple level-up list here, and you have far more than four slots per ‘mon, comprised of both active attacks, buffs and debuffs as well as passive skills that are always in play and require no further input from you the user. They’re also not stuck on the monster that learns them; instead, they’re items in the form of stickers (those are what you earn from levelling your monsters), and can be freely swapped out at any time. (Sadly, although understandably since otherwise there’d be no real gameplay reason to use different monsters, there is still only a limited selection of what stickers are compatible with what tapes.) This lets you build different instances of ostensibly similar monsters pretty differently, and if you’re creative with your stickers you can come up with some powerful stuff. My personal right-hand man during my playthrough was an Artillerex—a flak cannon / T. Rex hybrid—who I stuck a variety of “gun” attacks of different elements on, plus the very useful passive Roll Again, which gives monsters a chance to strike a second time at the end of their turn and use a random move they have enough Action Points for. The broad type coverage and multi-striking made it a machine gun of total elemental destruction, and I never got tired of using it. Other monsters have more narrow applications, of course, but the fact that you can fiddle around with your creatures like this provides a huge amount of appeal to even casual experimenters, and I’m sure those who love min-maxing will find even more to tinker with here.

For two; in addition to the basic 120 beasts, every single creature also comes in a variety of “bootleg” types, which tint its sprite a different color, give it a different typing, and change what attack stickers they get as they level up. If you’re not picky about art, you could only a little disingenuously argue that there’s really more like 1,500-odd creatures, and the vast majority of them just happen to be insanely rare, since bootlegs have a Shiny Pokémon-esque rarity to them. Still, they’re often worth seeking out, especially since bootlegs earn rare upgraded attack stickers with bonus effects more often than normal monsters do.

Now look at this, a half dozen paragraphs about the gameplay and almost none about the story or anything else. That shouldn’t be taken to mean Cassette Beasts‘ only strengths are on the gameplay side. The story itself is a little rough, but the general premise—CB’s world is a mysterious island that our protagonists, and everyone else who lives there, are isekai’d to from our own world without warning—is intriguing, and more than the actual narrative per se Cassette Beasts excels at vibes. The main town’s theme; the melancholic, gauzy “Wherever We Are Now“, is an absolute masterpiece of game music and sets the tone perfectly. My generation is all getting older, and it’s nice to play something that understands that on an empathic, thematic level.

IPPON! AGAIN

The first offering from new-to-the-game studio Bakken Record, Mou Ippon! rang in the new year with a smile. 

Some folks probably argued—amongst themselves or with others—over whether Mou Ippon was a sports anime or a school club anime. The truth of course is that it’s both, combining the former’s invocation of intimacy by way of physical contact with the latter’s easygoing warmth. Lot of blushing in this one. Between that and the constant grappling between girls, it’s hard to argue that this show isn’t at least a LITTLE gay. (There’s a pretty great sequence at the show’s halfway point where a new girl, the self-proclaimed “Wonder Child” Ana Nagumo, joins the club and demands to be thrown. Said girl joined the club in order to get closer to her friend. I leave the conclusions there to you.) It’s not the best-looking show on this list by a long shot (the actual judo is always drawn and choreographed quite nicely, anything else is a crapshoot), but it has heart.

At the end of the day, this is a series about the pure joy of athleticism. Anything else is secondary. Both our central cast and the series’ many supporting characters (mostly other judoka) face a fair number of trials during the show’s run—outside pressure to succeed, the difficulty of overcoming natural differences in ability, etc.—but inevitably, the spirit of the sport wins out.

MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: THE WITCH FROM MERCURY

I’m fudging my own numbers here, since technically Witch From Mercury started last year, but I didn’t cover it in the 2022 end-of-year writeup, and the second season aired this year. So it gets to stay here, keeping the company of 2023’s motley crew.

I’ll be honest, I mostly think of Witch From Mercury as a yuri series. That’s not strictly true; it’s a war drama and a couple other things besides, but given that mousey protagonist Suletta Mercury’s relationship with her rich-girl crush Miorine Rembran defines the entire thrust of the series, it makes sense, at least to me, to put it in that category. Throughout, they struggle together and apart as the political landscape of the Utena-inflected school they both attend whirls around them, eventually engulfing the whole solar system in a conflict orchestrated by the main villain, Suletta’s sinister—and very attractive—mom.

In an intellectual, detached sense, my main criticisms remain the somewhat spotty plotting; the conclusion is just a bit too neat and it avoids asking many really hard questions. In addition—and maybe this is a me problem—the show’s sheer complexity and the amount of overlapping power plays, etc., prevented me from getting emotionally invested in much of the story in a very immediate way. Suletta and Miorine’s relationship ups and downs were really the only exception there.

Yet, it’s hard for me to be mad at something that can muster up this much genuine optimism and empathy even in the face of an overwhelmingly bad situation. (And the things going on in the show’s universe are certainly not great.) Plus, it has a canon gay-married couple. That’s genuinely significant, given how huge Gundam is as a franchise, even if the show’s owners tried and failed to walk it back in one of the most comedically cowardly company moves I’ve ever seen. A move that was eventually undone by the show’s own director. You can’t keep a good power couple down.

HELL’S PARADISE

It just ain’t fair. Back in the day, Hell’s Paradise would’ve gone to a workman studio and aired for a good 2, 3 years straight. It would’ve picked up innumerable filler arcs along the way. There’d be shipping wars. It would’ve been great.

But we are not back in the day. It isn’t 2006, and Hell’s Paradise was brought into a significantly less forgiving anime industry and absolutely choked out by the sheer volume of competition. That in mind, I really don’t know if I could tell you why this show, of all the ones I started but didn’t finish this year, is one that I went back to and eventually completed in the dying days of December, here. Maybe it’s just that despite various deficiencies (janky visuals, rote character arcs, questionable gender politics) it’s still pretty good at delivering good old fashioned brawls, with fights that make up what they might lack in visual polish with a genuine cool factor and a powerful sense of rhythm that lets our protagonists always feel like the underdogs in their quest on the violently hostile island referred to by the show’s title. Maybe it’s because it had the year’s single best opening theme. Maybe it’s because Gabimaru managed to be the ultimate wife guy in a year where we also got another season of Spy x Family (and on that note, I was dead sure his wife and Yor Forger shared a voice actress, but nope! Different people). Maybe it’s the killer aesthetics, with gnarly monsters derived from a deliberately twisted interpretation of Taoism.

Whatever my reasons might’ve been; the themes don’t hurt; by its end, the first season of Hell’s Paradise stresses that we’re all in this together. Perhaps appropriately, this ended up being the last anime of 2023 I finished, and that spirit of solidarity is worth carrying into the New Year.

OSHI NO KO

Lady Gaga summed it up best when she called the rerelease of her first album The Fame Monster. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; the Pop Machine eats its own young, and few in the industry are ever really spared. This is the thematic thrust of Oshi no Ko, and is a huge preoccupation that takes up most of the manga (and of course, this anime adaptation), irrespective of its actual plot points. But we’ve gone over that on this site before. What’s interesting to me about OnK is how as a piece of art, it itself is complicit in this cycle. This is both why it’s on the list at all and why it’s not higher up.

Oshi no Ko‘s main characters are Aquamarine and Ruby, children (/reincarnated fans of. It’s complicated) of the late idol Hoshino Ai. Yet, it’s Ai herself who ends up on posters and in key visuals, in the shockingly large amount of tie-in commercials related to the series, and so on. There’s haunting the narrative and then there’s haunting the broader sphere of Japanese pop culture at large, and that latter stage is where Ai is really at. There’s an apparent contradiction here between Ai as a symbol of promise and life snuffed out too soon and Ai as a commercial titan, but any disagreement between these aspects is illusory. Ai is viable as a commercial idea because she dies in the show’s debut episode; that’s the start of her legend, and is why people care about her at all. One leads to the other, and no matter how convenient it might be to try to separate the two, doing so is impossible.

On a more serious note, this same self-contradictory nature is why I haven’t really covered OnK here since abruptly dropping my Let’s Watch of it back in June. For some fans, the strength of the narrative overtook its real life influences when the mother of the real person who Akane’s early story arc is based on complained, and that woman was subsequently harassed by fans of the series.

Things like this make it difficult to go to bat for OnK, despite its strengths. The unfortunate truth for me is that, like a problematic pop star who ends up in headlines as much for bad behavior as great singles, I will probably keep following the anime, and it might even show up on this list next year, if I make one. Don’t expect to see it between now and then, though. Sometimes it’s best to keep your fandom to yourself.

THE 100 GIRLFRIENDS WHO REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY LOVE YOU

In a sense, what is there to say here? It’s a comedy show and it’s funny. Mission accomplished. On the other hand, though, there’s a real accomplishment in how affable 100 Girlfriends is despite the fact that it’s an over-the-top horny harem comedy that by its premise requires The One Guy to date many, many girls simultaneously. That sounds like a recipe for disaster in the context of a romantic comedy, but our boy here, Rentaro, just genuinely is that good. If you can remember the general sell on Catarina from In My Next Life as a Villainess!, the general idea is the same. Rentaro manages to feel like he really is the right person for all of the show’s women just by dint of the fact that he’s insanely likeable, with eyebrows the size of banana leaves and an even bigger heart; a total genius of emotional intelligence who knows exactly what to say and when to say it, a supernaturally smooth operator just because he’s so good at connecting with people on an emotional level. No wonder a half dozen girls and counting are falling over themselves to smooch him.

Which would be meaningless if the girls weren’t also great, but they thankfully are. Each is a classic harem series archetype either dialed up to eleven or tweaked in some other way, all of whom work together to create an absolutely pitch-perfect ensemble cast. Tossed in a blender of absurd comedy, overflowing with puns (thanks in part to a delightfully loose official sub track) and slapstick while mostly remaining good natured, a handful of exceptions aside. (I could probably do without the entire character of the old schoolteacher. But she’s a bit character and doesn’t show up much, so we’ll forgive it for now.) It’s also shockingly good at the more tender and serious parts of romance. It really seems like this stuff should suffer given the sheer amount of characters, but somehow all of them feel like they really do work not just with Rentaro but also with each other.

100 GFs is a silly, sometimes outlandishly horny show, but I think its genuinely big heart makes a case for it as perhaps the year’s single best comedy and one of its best shows overall; a perfect polyamorous fairy tale for the modern age. What else could you ask for?

TENGOKU DAIMAKYO

It’s probably for the better that this list isn’t organized like last year’s. If it were; where the hell would I put Tengoku Daimakyo? (Heavenly Delusion unofficially and widely, despite the Disney+ English release using a straight transliteration of its Japanese title.) We’re in murky waters, here. Heavenly Delusion goes some very strange and very dark places over the course of its 12-episode run. A run that feels, frankly, too brief to possibly contain everything the show explores. The series maps out a grim coastline populated by all the horrors, real and imagined, of the human psyche. Abuse, violence, teenage pregnancy, mental illness, human experimentation, the damaged relationships between people in crisis, eugenics, murder, and rape. This is bleak, bleak, bleak territory. Maybe too bleak? It’s hard to say.

The big Discourse Point about Heavenly Delusion was its adjacency to queer issues. “Adjacency to” because the plot point in question—spoiler alert, here—that Kiruko, one of the leads, has the brain of their own younger brother Haruki, forcibly transplanted into their own skull via some horrible procedure. This was criticized for appropriating the transgender experience, a point of view which, as a trans person myself, I sympathize with but don’t really find compelling, if only because Kiruko/Haruki’s experiences are so different from actually “being a guy in a girl’s body” (or any permutation thereof) that any similarity seems coincidental. (I’m open to the idea that I might be wrong, and if it is intentionally supposed to parallel the trans experience then it says some very bad things about original author Masakazu Ishiguro‘s opinion of trans people, but that seems like a big if.)

I’ll admit, though, it took me a while to come to that conclusion, partly just because wow is that a fucking plotline to put into your show, but also because Heavenly Delusion legitimately does dip into some dicey territory. I find it hard to justify the show’s ogling of Kiruko’s body, for example, and I have no idea what to make of a lengthy subplot that, without getting into the details here for the general sake of saving space, I found weirdly ableist. But I’ve also seen the exact opposite interpretation. Was I just reading it uncharitably? It’s hard to say.

But then again, I don’t entirely know what to make of most of Heavenly Delusion in general, and all that in mind you might think I dislike it. That isn’t really the case, though! In addition to its more obvious visual merits, the show has a real warmth and empathy to it in its best moments that does feel, despite the vast differences in just about every other respect, of a piece with the original mangaka’s best-known prior work, And Yet The Town Moves. A core part of a certain strain of post-apocalyptic fiction is that regardless of circumstance, people are fundamentally the same. Heavenly Delusion seems to believe that too, and is undecided on whether or not it’s a good thing. This is without getting into the show’s more bizarre, out-there sci fi elements. Even in brief summary, there’s just so much to this thing that it’s hard to condense into tidy little phrases.

I feel much the same about the show overall. I wouldn’t sort my thoughts into neat categories like calling it good or bad or even saying I have “mixed feelings.” But I have a lot of feelings, and a lot of thoughts. I think to a certain degree, simply being so memorable will count for a lot in the long run. Beyond that, who knows? Maybe I’m just not ready for this one yet.

VOID STRANGER

Inside the box is just another box. Void Stranger, a Sokoban-inspired block puzzle game from Finnish development team System Erasure, is by an order of magnitude the most opaque thing on this list. It’s also, just a fair warning, one of those pieces of art that is impossible to discuss without spoiling the hell out of it. So if you’re just looking for an endorsement, I would recommend buying this game immediately and enjoying being lost in it with the rest of us.

For the rest of you; Void Stranger‘s simple-on-the-surface mechanics and deliberately retro presentation belie what I’ve come to loosely term an experiential game. That meaning; figuring out just what kind of game exactly you’re playing is part of the game itself. What sort of story is this? What exactly can you do with these puzzle elements? Are there things the game isn’t telling you? These are some of the broadest questions you’ll be asking yourself as you work through this thing. During which time you’ll learn about Grey, a woman from a fantasy kingdom, and how protecting her charge, a bratty princess, led her to the bizarre labyrinth that is the game’s primary setting.

For a while, it will seem fairly standard, until it becomes clear that it’s very much not. To me, it really clicked when I “finished” the game for the first time. On your first pass through, you’re locked into what’s essentially the “worst” ending. The dungeon dissolves into incoherent chaos around you, a song plays, the road ahead becomes less and less clear. You have succumbed to despair and the world is nothing but a whorl of confusion. But then you start again, and things start to make a little more sense. Rinse, repeat, spend many hours cracking the games ludicrously elaborate codes, and things become a little clearer again. The game is a tug-of-war in this way; between the constant hazy fog that comes from knowing you don’t really know what’s going on and the little gemstone moments of clarity that do shine through. It’s an interesting, rewarding experience, and one I recommend if you’ve got the stomach for the game’s truly staggering difficulty.

Even if you do, it will take you a very, very long time to properly finish Void Stranger. I got quite far myself and still haven’t actually finished the whole thing. I plan to, of course. What’s the other option? Stay trapped in a monochrome labyrinth forever? Don’t be silly; even when you leave the maze, the memory remains.

SOARING SKY PRECURE

Sky fly high. They didn’t have to go this hard, is what I kept thinking to myself. Pretty Cure’s 20th anniversary is essentially an ongoing holiday, in between two adult fan-oriented sequel seasons as we currently are, but it was the main line of the series, Soaring Sky Precure, that best held my interest in 2023.

It’s not fashionable to say this, but at its heart, Precure is a fairly change-averse franchise. The series more or less found its pay dirt formula with Yes 5! and has been riding that train to the bank every year since, but what this means is that even changes that would seem minor to an outsider can be absolutely seismic in context. See, for example; Cure Sky, this year’s lead, being blue. It’s hard to overstate how enthused people were about the simple fact that the lead Precure of this year’s season was identifiably a color other than pink. Similar hype followed for similar reasons; Cure Wing is the first boy to ever join the main cast (he’s not the first male Precure full stop, that’s a different character from a prior season), Cure Butterfly the first adult, and so on.

This spirit of comparative experimentation did not stay throughout the show’s run, as what followed was a fairly typical (if notably episodic) Precure season. The ebb and flow of online discourse has of course led to some concluding that this makes the show bad. I say fuck that; this season ruled. Sure, you could describe Precure as artistically conservative if you wanted to, but the flip side of that coin is that it’s consistent. Every year you get 4-6 girls in colorful outfits punching the themed forces of evil to death, and it kicks ass every single time. This year had a particularly strong cast of villains, with the oafish Kabaton being succeeded by the leering, smug Battamonda, and then the honorable, upright Minoton, before looping back to Battamonda, giving him something of a redemption arc, and then finally revealing the main bad’n for the final few episodes. It was a ride!

Admittedly, I would not personally place Soaring Sky in my absolute upper echelon of Precure seasons; Fresh, Heartcatch, Tropical Rouge, and—sorry, haters—Healin’ Good, but it’s still a delightful and entertaining piece of work. I expect I’ll say much the same about Wonderful Precure next year, and I’m looking forward to doing so.

That said, there’s more than one way a kids’ anime can be great, and while some stuck to the tried-and-true methods, others were much more willing to experiment.

POKéMON HORIZONS

As I discussed when the original anime finally, incredibly, came to a close back in March, I have basically loved Pokémon my entire life, for better or worse. It’s baked into my DNA, and I’m never going to be rid of it. Pokémon Horizons, though, has made the series feel essential—like an actual part of the cultural current, relevant to non-lifelong fans—for the first time in what feels like a million years. There has, in actuality, been lead-up to this of course. Some of that was when Ash Ketchum finally became a Pokémon champion in November of ’22, some of it was in the making long before that, but with the new series it really feels like a page has been definitively turned, and a lot of that has to do with how different it is from the previous Pokémon anime.

Pokémon Horizons has nothing to do with being “a Pokémon master.” Competitive battling in the usual sense is barely a factor, our main protagonist is meek and initially doesn’t actually care about winning at all. And, oh yeah, she’s a girl. Liko, who had the unenviable task of stepping into Ash’s shoes this April, has done amazingly well for herself as the new face of Pokémon. She doesn’t have to do it alone, thankfully, as co-protagonist Roy balances her out and makes up the more fiery, battle-oriented half of their duo. Joining them are the Rising Volt Tacklers, the do-anything crew of the airship Brave Olivine who initially meet Liko when their captain, Friede, is asked to keep her and a mysterious pendant she carries safe. Suffice it to say; we don’t really know for sure where the whole pendant business is headed yet, but we know it involves a legendary hero of a bygone age, the machinations of a villainous group with the deceptively innocuous name of “The Explorers”, and a smorgasbord of cool-as-hell Pokémon battles. Did I mention there’s a Pikachu in a captain’s hat? His name is Captain Pikachu and he is cooler than any of us will ever be.

The main thing is that the series excels at a sense of adventure. The first Pokémon anime had been airing for so long that it tended to fall into tropes of its own making, and that continued to some extent right up until its very end (not to say that it was bad or anything, it could certainly be great, too), Horizons manages to feel as fresh as it does partly by simple virtue of not being its predecessor, but there really is a genuine sense of the new and unexpected with each and every episode. The airship gives the show license to set its adventures basically wherever, and it often takes advantage of that, helping even inconsequential-in-the-long-run “filler” episodes feel fun and purposeful. There’s also a lovely paralleling between the makeup of the Brave Olivine’s crew and the actual people who’re watching this show, with both adults and children represented, with Friede and company helping to mentor Liko, Roy, and tertiary protagonist Dot. In a real sense, the series feels like it’s bridging the gaps between generations, and that’s a lovely thing to see as a long-time fan of Pokémon. Here’s to 900 more episodes, god willing.

CHAINSAW MAN: PART 2

Wherefore The Chainsaw Man? Part 2 of the manga—which we’ll be discussing here, so the spoiler averse should skip down the next entry—began last summer to a fair amount of anticipation. Some of that has cooled in the intervening months, but for the most part, the manga remains very popular and widely-read.

This is a little surprising, all things considered. Chainsaw Man‘s second half is a very different beast from its first. Most of the original cast have either died or otherwise departed the narrative. Denji has a costar now; Asa, human host of the War Devil, and a sort of adoptive little sister in the form of Nayuta. In the process, Denji has lost one family and gained another.

But the biggest change has actually been in terms of pacing, of all things. Chainsaw Man Part 2 is a noticeably slower affair than Chainsaw Man Part 1. Indeed, the manga has adapted a deliberately tease-y tempo as Part 2 has gone on, even as the tension has mounted and literal prophecies of armageddon have begun to fill the air. But it has kept its core emotional roughness; a kind of pain that resonates very broadly and is the main reason that this thing is still so popular. Denji’s old life keeps haunting him, as disparate forces conspire him to pull the ripcord once more. He is still searching for answers to life’s big questions, he’s still not happy, and the world’s still going to hell. So of course, they’ve succeeded. As of its most recent chapter—its final, before a hiatus into the new year—Denji has once again cast aside any pretense of ordinary life to become Chainsaw Man, laughing like a maniac in the manga’s final image of 2023. The poor kid can’t catch a break.

ELPHELT VALENTINE

Look, this is basically a filler spot, but what are you going to do, stop me? This is my article, and if I say a DLC character from a fighting game I like (Guilty Gear -Strive-) gets on the list, she gets on the list, logic be damned. I barely knew who Elphelt was two months ago, and now she’s my absolute favorite pink and white marriage-obsessed heavy metal singer of a blorbo. It helps that she’s fun to play (and fairly simple, which as someone who is still very much a neophyte to fighting games as a genre, is welcome). I paid another human being $30 USD (plus tax and tip) to make a chibi drawing of her eating a large pretzel because I wanted my own unique Elphelt icon that badly. She’s great, and you will pry her from my cold, dead hands.

I don’t have the space to earnestly get into Guilty Gear’s genuinely weird-as-hell lore here, but her backstory is genuinely pretty compelling, as is the silliness of her arcade mode story in Strive‘s story. Bottom line; she brought a damn sight more joy to my life than most things this year. For that, she gets a place at the table.

SLAY THE PRINCESS

The other video game with an expanding, changing narrative on this list, Slay The Princess is a good deal more accessible than Void Stranger by virtue of being a visual novel and thus posing no difficulty beyond reading and clicking. But that shouldn’t be taken to mean that it’s somehow the lesser of the two (I wouldn’t say I cleanly prefer either to the other), or even that it’s harder to spoil (this is another section you’ll want to skip if you care about that kind of thing). The story is simple; you are on a path in the woods, at the end of the path is a cabin, and in the cabin is a princess. Your charge? Kill her. Failing to do so will, at least so you’re told, end the world and doom everyone in it.

Of course, things are more complicated than they first appear. The stern narrator who tells you all this seems untrustworthy at best, and there are voices in your head beside your own. The Princess herself is no ordinary human, either. But eventually, you’ll make your choice, to either free or kill her, which seems like it should be the end of this story.

Except, it is obviously not. You are on a path in the woods. You find her and save or kill her again. You’re on a path in the woods.

Time loops are one thing, but Slay The Princess’ entire narrative structure is based on iterative rings like this. What you do changes the woods, the cabin, yourself, and the Princess. No matter what you do, you’ll discover that the two of you are deeply connected. This is, after all, a love story. You kill, you die, you try again. Slay The Princess reveals itself as a love song from one myth to another. You are on a path in the woods. You are a path in the woods.

LEVEL 1 DEMON LORD AND ONE-ROOM HERO

Ecchi slapstick political satire fantasy!! It’s a genre jambalaya. And of the various fantasy anime that tried to tackle serious issues this year, One-Room Hero might honestly have done it the best. I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth reiterating how utterly weird it is that this series, with its burned-out loser JRPG hero protagonist and his 404 gender-not-found shapeshifting demon lord frenemy, is probably the best satire of imperialism I’ve seen in a mainstream TV anime in years.

That’s not to say the show is an intellectual powerhouse or anything; there’s a difference between being witty and being smart, but it should probably say something that all of these cultural currents are so dumb that even a show with a character who dresses like this can poke fun at them. Other anime swung more for the fences this year, but I don’t think anyone hit higher above their weight class.

OTAKU ELF

In my head, Otaku Elf is this year’s version of My Master Has No Tail. Absolutely rock solid comedy / slice of life shows with a fantasy bent that seemingly rather few people actually watched. (I think Otaku Elf did a little better in that regard than My Master Has No Tail, but not much better.)

In premise, Otaku Elf is pretty simple. The title character, Elda, is a classic high fantasy-style elf who has inexplicably been enshrined as a kami in a Japanese shrine. Here, she uses her position to while away the centuries by indulging in her nerdy, nerdy interests, all while basically never leaving her house, often using her put-upon shrine maiden Koito as a go-between. Think Himouto! Umaru-chan if Umaru herself was taller, a bit less abrasive, and had magic powers, and you’re in the right ballpark.

Much of the comedy here is referential or (very) lightly satirical, but throughout, the show commands an impressive and easy charm that mixes well with its occasional moments of real pathos, like when Elda remarks that the way Koito eats her ramen reminds her of her late mother, the previous shrine maiden. Heart like that can’t be faked.

Undead Murder Farce

Another oddball that defies easy genre categorization. Undead Murder Farce seemed from a distance like it might belong to that millieu of Bakemonogatari-ish (and consequently, Boogiepop-ish) shows like In/Spectre and Rascal Doesn’t Dream of the Bunnygirl Sempai. In practice, it ends up watching like a strange cross between a detective novel, Bakemonogatari itself, and the Fate series if it were set in the Victorian era.

The detective part is the main hook, though, with the titular Undead girl being an immortal named Aya, a literal talking head who serves as a detective for supernatural cases that more traditional sleuths can’t really crack. Throughout the series, she, her assistant Shinuchi, and her maid Shizuku traipse across Europe solving supernatural mysteries and hunting for her missing body. Whether their cases are actually Fair Play ™ or not I can’t definitively say, but they at least seem solvable, giving the show an element of involving the viewer, as well as more traditional mystery series thrills. (And it does do those pretty well; it’s worth noting that this series is from Kaguya-sama director Shinichi Omata, and some of that style shines through.) Later, things get a bit more action-y as a plethora of period-appropriate public domain characters turn up—Sherlock Holmes, Carmilla, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Phantom of the Opera, you get it—which is where that dash of Fate spice comes from. These disparate parts work together pretty well, with elements like Carmilla’s queer-tinged rivalry with Shizuku adding additional intrigue.

Really, the only bad thing about this series is that it ends without resolving its main plot, being adapted as it is from a series of novels far too long to condense into a single anime cour. If there’s justice in the world, we’ll get more Undead Murder Farce. But if not, at least it made a strong showing while it was here.

SCOTT PILGRIM TAKES OFF

“At its finest, Scott Pilgrim is much, much more than it appears to be. It’s an ambitious meditation on what growing up means to a generation for whom comics and video games are not just cultural touchstones, but the dominant iconography.” That was The Globe & Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record, on the original Scott Pilgrim graphic novel and the then-upcoming live action film, way back in 2010.

I’m writing this, myself, on the last day of November, 2023 (and editing it nearly a month later). Two weeks ago, I had no working relationship with this series whatsoever. I wasn’t really planning to watch Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Science SARU’s still-inexplicable anime take on the series. I had no reason to, having never seen the movie nor read the comics. But, circumstance is a funny thing, and what initially started as me wanting to spite a group of deeply annoying people (it’s a long story) has led to me flipping this thing over in my head several times. The nature of this list makes me deeply hesitant to crown an overall single “best anime” of 2023, even in the narrow category of ones I actually finished, but if this isn’t my single favorite, it’s at least one of several.

First, if you don’t know the story of Scott Pilgrim in general, of how an uncomfortably relatable loser-everyman manages to forge maybe the first real connection of his entire life with an uncomfortably relatable loser-everywoman after being forced to (among other things) fight her exes in combat, this whole entry might scan as a little incomprehensible to you. Sorry about that!

Scott Pilgrim is one of those things that started out fairly niche, and then became a touchstone, and then (probably unfairly) a shorthand for a Certain Type of Guy. So Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is then much less about Scott Pilgrim (the guy) and much more about Scott Pilgrim (the story). In general concept and execution, it’s not entirely dissimilar to something like Rebuild of Evangelion, in that it’s not a reboot exactly or a straight sequel exactly but more of a front-to-back rewiring that keeps the main players intact but does pretty different things to and with them. It is also a sequel, though. So to understand it we should at least touch on the original comic, which I read essentially in preparation for watching this anime.

To be honest, I would’ve loved nothing more than to completely bounce off Scott Pilgrim. The entire franchise—from the original comic, to the live action film by Edgar Wright to, I assume it’s only a matter of time, this anime—has been simplified into a punchline these days. You’ve all seen the tweet; “you are not Scott Pilgrim and that girl on the bus is not Ramona Flowers.” This is wrong on several counts of course; the girl Scott meets on the bus in the original comic isn’t Ramona, it’s Knives Chau, a high schooler who becomes his ill-advised mostly pretend-girlfriend. Also, I absolutely am Scott Pilgrim. So are you. So is probably everyone who’s ever lived, or at least everyone who’s ever grown up in this strange, strange era of history we live in. Millennials, who are ostensibly “the generation” meant to identify with Mr. Pilgrim, are defined by anxiety. We don’t hurt people because we mean to—who does?—but because the alternative to hurting people is doing something scary, and lots of us don’t know how to handle scary things. We’re all Ramona Flowers, too—I’m aware I’m contributing to a stereotype by being transgender and identifying with the character in any respect—in that for many of us, at least sure as hell for me, the default way to disengage with people is to just silently drift away without a word. Reader, I would so love to tell you that this is all me being dramatic, but if there’s any projection here, it’s solely on my part; Scott Pilgrim vs. The World read me to fucking pieces. I was embarrassed. It was bad, but I can only respect a piece of art that prompts me to do some genuine reflecting.

Of course, this entry is, actually, technically, about Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. The brand-new anime from Science Goddamn SARU, that has, actually, not a ton in common, at least plot-wise, with its forbearer. But it’s important to understand what vs. The World actually was. Because, just to hammer this home one more time, while Scott Pilgrim (the comic) was largely about Scott Pilgrim (the guy), Scott Pilgrim (the cartoon) is largely about Scott Pilgrim (the story). It is also kind of about Scott Pilgrim (the guy), to be fair, but only in the sense that everyone is “Scott Pilgrim” (the archetype).

Because Takes Off is also a sequel, thematically if not entirely textually, it can get away with snipping out character arcs in some places. Knives, for example, is reduced to a bit player here, and, as others have pointed out, the actual damage of Scott’s insensitivity—in the original, he hastily breaks up with her in a rush after meeting Ramona that leaves her heartbroken and defines her character for the rest of the comic—is by consequence pretty much entirely erased. Is this harmful to the character? Is it harmful to the show? I don’t know! On the one hand; Knives gets to be happy for most of the anime because she had her character development back in the comic and came out the other side a much more mature person. The fact that the show doesn’t literally chronologically follow on from the comic, so this is not technically “the same Knives”, is true, but pointing it out feels like nitpicking. The emotional logic of this sort of thing is a lot more important than the actual logic. On the other hand; Knives being reduced to basically a series of fanservice (in the old sense of the term) cameos guts her character and thus most of the reason people liked her in the first place. Changes like this one are divisive, and they are so for a reason.

The people who do get arcs are the exes—they’re the real stars of the show here, and in particular Roxie is elevated from basically a living joke about “girls having a gay phase in college” to a character with some actual pathos—and Ramona herself. It’s interesting that Ramona gets so much spotlight actually, because while the original comic was definitely mostly Scott’s story, she still got a fair amount of play. Perhaps it’s because the comic was definitely also guilty of sometimes treating Ramona as the unattainable, mysterious maiden she attempts to present herself as. Attempts that are, as the comic points out, covers for her own emotional flaws. Again; the main reason that Ramona and Scott get on so well is that they’re very similar people. The actual plot is a whole haphazard patchwork of goofy shit involving time travel and a whole very meta thing where the events of the series are made into a movie in-universe while they’re actively happening. Explaining all this in more detail would I think get in the way of an important fact; Scott’s biggest enemy is himself. No, literally, as in, him from the future, where he’s broken up with Ramona and is torn up about it and tries to sabotage his own past because of it.

Since, of course, a huge part of Scott Pilgrim is that trying to fix your mistakes is way more important than just feeling bad about them, they eventually reconcile to try again. They will probably try again forever. The amusingly huge Divorced Guy Energy of Future-Scott aside, it’s hard to imagine the two of them ever having a smooth relationship. But a smooth relationship and a fulfilling one are different things, and no matter what form it takes, Scott Pilgrim does understand that much.

On a more lighthearted note the whole thing just looks great. And it left a lot of questions in my mind, too. Questions like “if Scott Pilgrim met Shinji Ikari would they be friends or enemies?” and “how does Ramona dye her hair so often without it getting all dried out?” Anime that make you think are good, I’d say.

All of this then said, the question of whether or not this reimagining is actually “good” seems kind of quaint. I’m still not terribly keen on a future ruled by reboots, reimaginings, and redos, and I still think that this whole phenomenon of western companies hoisting sacks full of money on anime studios and telling them to make a Whatever Anime kind of sucks—although I should take a second here to concede that Brian O’Malley at least seems to have been much more involved in this than is the norm for these things—but if we’re going to keep getting more of these, more of them should probably be like this.

And that’s the list. More or less.

Is Scott Pilgrim Takes Off actually my anime of the year? I don’t know. I didn’t do the whole cutesy “guess my top anime this year, everybody!” contest on social media this time around. Partly because I don’t have a Twitter account that I use in any major capacity anymore, partly because it just seemed like a trick question. I’ve quite liked a few anime this year. Oshi no Ko was much farther back on the list, but despite what I said I probably like it more than this. Or do I? I go back and forth. The same is true with Pokémon Horizons, 100 Girlfriends, and Trigun: Stampede, which I couldn’t manage to finish a writeup on. Some of the older anime that I watched this year, like Earth Maiden Arjuna and The Devil Lady will definitely stick with me more than the vast majority of 2023’s own anime will. And even some anime from this year I genuinely thought were really good, obvious standouts like Skip & Loafer and BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!, I didn’t actually finish. Because! You know! Life is weird and difficult and sometimes even something as simple as making yourself watch a cartoon can be tough! This is without factoring in shows that actively disappointed me, like, again, Magical Destroyers. Or hell, Frieren, a letdown that I don’t really want to talk about in detail. With no better place to put it, here is a short list of honorable mentions that I liked—really liked in a few cases!—but couldn’t come up with even brief writeups for, didn’t finish, or otherwise did not get a full writeup despite every one of them having definitely deserved it.

• Anime
  • High Card
  • Buddy Daddies
  • Dead Mount Death Play
  • Trigun: Stampede
  • The Ice Guy & His “Cool” Female Colleague
  • Skip & Loafer
  • Helck
  • BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!
  • SHY
  • YOHANE THE PARHELION -SUNSHINE in the MIRROR-
• Manga
  • Touge Oni: Ancient Gods in Primeval Times
  • Sakamoto Days
  • Witch Watch
  • Magical Girl Tsubame: I Will (Not) Save The World!
  • Go! Go! Loser Ranger!
  • Kindergarten Wars
  • Destroy It All and Love Me in Hell!
  • Touhou Suichouka: The Lotus Eaters, Drunk & Sober
  • Cipher Academy
  • Otherside Picnic
• Games
  • Ultrakill
  • Yume Nikki Online Project
  • Pokémon Violet’s Teal Mask and Indigo Disk expansions.

Art really has helped me get through an immensely difficult year, and more than just being a source of comfort, it’s given me things to discuss with others, things to look forward to, and moments of genuine sublimity that make the time I put into this medium feel worth it. I’ve rambled a lot in this article, but at the end of the day, I really just want to help people appreciate art, in my own, very specific way. Hopefully, this article helped you do that in some fashion or another. That’s really all I can ask for.

So where does all that leave me, other than with another year down? I honestly don’t know! I have no idea what the future looks like. I was going to type “for this blog” after that, but honestly, it’s just true in general. The future is an open void of unknowability. These days, I’m just thankful for every day I make it through.

And on that note; who knows what 2024 holds? I’m reluctant to make any specific predictions.

But hey, Metallic Rouge looks pretty promising, right?

See you next year.

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