“Ranking Every Anime” is a yearly column where I rank every single anime I finished from a given year, from the very worst to the absolute best. Expect spoilers for all anime covered.
Way back in the middle of June, I wrote a different and much shorter introduction for this list. However, in early December, I realized it wasn’t going to cut it, and I wanted to properly establish just why it is that I write these things in the first place. (I would apologize to anyone who finds such endless digressing distracting, but I imagine they checked out years ago.) I don’t want to spout a cliché about how every month feels like an eternity these days, but there is some truth to that. And on a more personal level it’s been yet another rough year. I’m a little sick of rough years, so I’ve been trying to make some positive changes for myself. Hopefully, this article will be the first thing of mine that you read where those changes are visible, if only in subtle ways. Here’s the first of those changes, I think I’ve finally come to terms with why I write articles like this at all: I like writing them. More than that, other people seem to like that I’m writing them. Pardon me if this all seems rather obvious, but yes, after a solid 4 years of running this site, I have finally come to terms with the fact that at least some people enjoy what I’m doing here, including myself.
For years, I convinced myself that this was somehow not a good enough reason. That I needed some grandiose motive to rant about anime on the Internet. But honestly, why? There are mountains and mountains of anime criticism out there, some better than what I do, admittedly, but a lot that is much worse. None of those people spend time wracking their brain with an entirely artificial existential crisis over “why” they do what they do. And if I’m being really honest, I have also come to think that I’ve gotten pretty good at this whole writing-about-cartoons thing over the past several years. I have wanted to be a writer for a lot of my adult life, but for whatever reason, criticism—interpretation, really. I am still reluctant to call myself a critic per se—comes easier to me than fiction. So be it, if I am destined to wax poetic about girl bands, demon lords, and the Daicon Spirit forever, there are worse boulders to push up the mountain. Imagine Sisyphus-san happy, and you will see me in your mind’s eye.
I also just think there is still inherently some amount of value in me, a single independent writer beheld to no one, making one of these lists without any kind of interference. In a world where even a lot of the people bringing anime over here in the first place describe what they do as building “a pipeline of content,” it feels meaningful to just be one woman penning one opinion without any corpo shit involved. Maybe that’s silly, I leave it for you to decide.
Lastly, I also wanted to make sure to get out a list this year because I was so frustrated that I didn’t do a proper one last year. Last year was really rough for me, and this year has arguably been even worse, but I didn’t want to just sit here and not do even things I enjoy anymore because my life has been going through a rough patch for several years straight. Technically, I did a messy, deliberately disorganized list of stuff I liked last year, but it was both not up to my usual standards in large chunks and also not really formatted the same way. I do think there’s some merit to the idea of a list (maybe a second list?), unranked, of other media that’s positively impacted my year in some way, even if mashing the two together isn’t the solution. (It feels criminal that I have nowhere to mention Heaven Burns Red in this article, for example.) But this year, I really just wanted to focus on getting back to brass tacks. A list of 20-some anime. Harsh, cold numbers to cruelly sort them. Me, the writer. You, the reader. Let’s get this thing started.
We start, as always, from the bottom.
#27. ISHURA
True story! Months and months ago, I got into a huge argument with a guy on the internet because I said ISHURA was bad. That guy’s argument was essentially, well, ISHURA couldn’t possibly be a bad anime, because it wasn’t really an anime at all. It was based on a series of fantasy novels. His point of view was that ISHURA isn’t an anime series. It was an animated realization of a series of books. (I’m editing out a lot of slurs and name-calling on his end, here. Forgive me for not wanting to reproduce that on my own site.) I don’t agree with this point of view at all, but it is illuminating for me, as someone who has struggled to understand the isekai boom that has dominated mainstream TV anime for the past decade. I think some part of it is truly just that to a certain kind of person, these things really don’t scan as anime per se, in that anime are cartoons and are thus considered to be inherently visual pieces of work, and what this sort of person really wants is more just a direct translation of what’s on the page. (As direct as possible, anyway.)
Does that hold up to scrutiny? I’m not sure. If it does, I still don’t really think it’s an excuse. If we’re taking it as a given that ISHURA is an anime, or an animated version of a novel, or whatever, it is quite clearly the worst of its kind that, at the very least, I’ve seen this year end to end. I’ve rarely felt safer making the call, actually. Compared to everything else I finished this year, ISHURA, which I trudged through out of a sense of—I’m not sure, obligation? Inertia?—is just plain crap. Crap in an uninspiring, uninteresting way.
Because of that, and in spite of how confident I am that it is in fact bad, its placement this far down the list does feel a little wrong. ISHURA didn’t disappoint me in some grand way. It didn’t have some great promise that went unfulfilled. It didn’t make me want to slap its writer, director, etc. upside the head and ask “why would you do this?!” ISHURA just sucks. It is bad, but crucially, it’s a common kind of bad. ISHURA is a scapegoat, the lame isekai that I watched at the top of the year to justify not giving most of the others much of a chance to myself. ISHURA dies in their place despite the fact that ISHURA itself is fairly unremarkable within its genre, and, hell, despite trying a few things to attempt to innovate. So it goes.
Don’t feel bad; ISHURA doesn’t deserve your pity. What we have here is a grab-bag of the least impressive parts of the narou-kei scene; a bloated and mostly flat cast of characters with miscellaneous Cool Powers in place of actual personalities, a molasses-slow narrative that drags like a motherfucker from end to end—the result, I must imagine, of adapting the original novels at an extremely unimaginative 1 to 1 pace—and a fairly boring fantasy setting that only barely rises above being purely stock. But as is often the case, the little things ISHURA does right actually cast the show in an even worse light for their contrast with how dull and dry everything else is. Voice actors die in the booth to try to breathe some semblance of life into ISHURA’s ramshackle attempt at a high fantasy narrative, animators do their damnedest to make their cuts stand out against a background of visual cardboard and janky CGI. None of it is enough, not even Yuuki Aoi, who turns in what might be one of the flattest performances of her otherwise illustrious career. ISHURA is, for sure, not the technically worst thing that aired this year. It’s not the most offensive, and it’s not the biggest letdown. But, in being yet another brick in the wall for its genre, a field that is way, way, way past its expiration date, it might be the least interesting.
I don’t want to seem unfair to the series, though. So just as a final point of record-keeping, here is a short list of the isekai anime that I started this year and didn’t even finish, often kicking them after only an episode or two, dishonorable mentions that were somehow more disappointing, less engaging, or just overall even worse than ISHURA. These include Doctor Elise: The Royal Lady with the Lamp, Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything with Low-Level Spells, Fluffy Paradise, My Instant Death Ability Is So Overpowered, No One in This Other World Stands a Chance Against Me!, Quality Assurance in Another World (annoyingly enough I actually liked that one at first), The Ossan Newbie Adventurer, Trained to Death by the Most Powerful Party, Became Invincible, The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord’s Army was a Human, The Strongest Tank’s Labyrinth Raids -A Tank with a Rare 9999 Resistance Skill Got Kicked from the Hero’s Party-, The Unwanted Undead Adventurer, The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick Up Trash, Unnamed Memory, which is technically not an isekai but absolutely falls under the narou-kei umbrella, and finally Villainess Level 99: I May Be the Hidden Boss but I’m Not the Demon Lord, which commits the additional sin of casting Fairouz Ai in a role where she can’t emote at all. So take some solace, rare ISHURA fans, in that your show was hardly the worst thing to air this year. As if to provide some perspective by illustrating the gap in importance between my opinion and that of the wider anime-watching community, ISHURA was apparently successful enough either on its own terms or in moving volumes of the light novel that it was renewed for a second season, which is just days away by the time you’re reading this. I will not be watching it, god bless.
#26. METALLIC ROUGE
Sigh.
Metallic Rouge should’ve been a slam dunk. It had everything; a futuristic, lightly cyberpunky setting on Mars, a great main couple made up of a kickass female protagonist, Rouge Redstar, who could transform into a killer toku robot and her snarky, sometimes overbearing handler, Naomi Ortmann. It had a bunch of other killer toku robots who acted as obstacles to our main girl. It had a New Jack Swing OP for some fucking reason. (Not the last show on this list whose opening theme is as much a standout to me as the series itself.) It should’ve been great. Metallic Rouge being mediocre is proof that we live in a fundamentally uncaring universe.
Wild exaggerations aside, it really does seem with hindsight that Metallic Rouge just never had any idea what it was doing. Its basic robots = oppressed minority symbology doubles down on all of the obvious problems with that setup and leaves us with a narrative that both stridently manages to avoid saying anything of substance while also arguing that maybe we can boil the origins of bigotry down to the actions of one or two bad people. This pits our ostensible hero against an android liberation army who would be the good guys in a show that wasn’t pathologically obsessed with both-sides’ing what’s essentially slavery. Worse, they’re led by a beautiful silver-haired butch. Again; obviously the good guys in basically any other show that actually had decent writing.
Still, it wasn’t all bad. The fights were pretty good, and that’s worth something. A handful of individual episodes are interesting, especially the space cruise ship murder mystery that launched this scene into minor virality for good reason. It has a great soundtrack, even if it doesn’t really use it properly. And, well, by the end of the series Rouge and Naomi are still in a gay situationship of some description, which does count for something, too. Even so, all these attempts to dig for gems in the refuse must acknowledge what we’re digging through. The show is just badly considered, at the end of the day, and a persistent rumor that it had its episode count cut in half can only explain so much.
#25. PON NO MICHI
The weirdest thing about Pon no Michi is how un-weird it is. It really seems like a hobby comedy focused around mahjong with some light magical realist elements should add up to more than this, but it’s probably not a great sign that the most interesting thing I can think of about Pon no Michi itself, with hindsight, is that its character designs were done by the Quintessential Quintuplets guy. It really feels like even a very dry anime should have more going on than that, doesn’t it?
Pon no Michi is hardly the first mahjong anime to fail to find much of an audience outside of its home country, and I doubt it’ll be the last. It is worth noting though that for most of its run you couldn’t watch it in the US even if you wanted to without resorting to piracy. In what would signal the start of an unfortunate trend throughout the year, Pon no Michi simply wasn’t licensed in North America at all, the situation only changing fairly late in its run. It was also blessed with one of the most astoundingly hooky opening themes of the entire year, a heavily-autotuned, maddeningly catchy little ditty that will get stuck in your head relentlessly. Even now, echoes of “pon pon pon pon pon pon pon” reverberate in my noggin.
If it seems like I’m dancing around the subject of the show itself, well, there just honestly isn’t that much to say. Pon no Michi’s general premise of five girls who hang out in an abandoned mahjong parlor and learn the basics of the game from a talking bird that only one of them can see is, somehow, just not that interesting. The final episode, where the girls’ parlor (and therefore friendship) is threatened via the amusingly mundane event of their shuffle table breaking, managed to get some emotion out of me just because any characters you stick with for twelve weeks are going to be characters you have some attachment to, no matter how minor, but when so much else of note aired this year, it feels difficult to drum up a strong opinion on Pon no Michi. For that reason, more than any other, it’s down here, near the bottom of the list.
#24. MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCES
Mysterious Disappearances is a case of disparity. An adaptation not gone wrong per se, but certainly held back by the transition in medium. Unlike some other manga adaptations this year, Mysterious Disappearances was, to begin with, a series of modest strengths and a whole lot of caveats. A decently fun mystery-adventure-horror thing with a sexy lead and a snarky deuteragonist that she swaps quips with at the best of times, Mysterious Disappearances is also chockablock with cheesecake, and tiresome questions of “censorship” aside, there does seem to have been a concerted effort to tone that down for the anime. Some of this is understandable—protagonist Sumireko’s whole age-shifting bit is weird even in-context and it’s to the manga’s benefit that it stops using it as an excuse to ogle her after a certain point—but some of it is sort of puzzling, and this general inclination to mess with a story that could actually have been adapted chapter by chapter basically fine is the source of a lot of these issues. In this sense, it’s the opposite of ISHURA; too much of the production seems to have focused on haphazardly rearranging events and scenes for little discernible reason, and far too little of it was trained on adapting those scenes to their new medium effectively. What could’ve been a pretty fun mystery-adventure series is thus scuttled by bad pacing and just generally poor visuals.
It’s not all bad. There’s a pretty good run of episodes near the show’s middle where it really hits a stride and manages to summon up some of the same dusky esoterica as its source material as our protagonists deal with poltergeists, vague childhood memories of mysterious bookshops, and VTuber rigs come to haunted un-life. But compared to the original manga it feels sanded-off and less weird, and therefore just plainly less interesting. It’s hardly the worst thing in the world, certainly. But when judged on its own merits, it’s hard to score it higher than “fine”, and if we’re talking about it as an adaptation, you’re better off reading the manga. Or just skipping it entirely if any of the aforementioned seems like it would bother you. This is a case of what you see is what you get.
Like Pon no Michi, Mysterious Disappearances is also notable for its odd theme music—in this case it’s the ending theme— its “Viva La Vida Loca” trumpets absolutely do not match the tone of the show or even really of the rest of the elements of the song. But hey, it’s a pretty good tune! That’s something!
#23. THE WRONG WAY TO USE HEALING MAGIC
Another notch on the list, another isekai anime, one of just a few others that I watched this year. Putting Wrong Way To Use Healing Magic this far down the list feels very unfair in some ways and the only possible route to take in some others. Still, I have to own up to my biases here. At the risk of harping on an already-obvious point, I just don’t like this genre very much. Even a “good” one is only ever going to rank so high. And even within that framework we’re not talking about Princess Connect or something, Healing Magic is not some kind of undeniable visual spectacle. Instead, it is a decidedly fine bog standard isekai series, distinguished from the genre’s dreck mostly by how its author seems to have a basic grasp of storytelling fundamentals that many of his peers in the field don’t. If that sounds like damning with feint praise, that’s because it is. Our heroes have actual personalities, and while the whole shy guy-to-magically-empowered-jock power fantasy that our lead Usato Ken embodies very much still is a power fantasy, it’s at least one with some depth that requires effort on his part.
Still, all of this feels like giving the show credit for having a handle on the absolute basics of storytelling, and it landing a few spots from the bottom rungs of the list can be chalked up to the fact that I was just never invested enough in it to have any kind of strong negative reactions to anything it was doing. A few memorable characters aside, such as Ken’s drill sergeant / magic trainer Rose and the captured demoness the Black Knight, there’s just not a lot to say here.
Speaking of demons, while they’re given a fair shake as-written, the fact that “demon” in the world of Healing Magic seems to just mean “dark-skinned person with horns” is fairly damning. (Not to mention just sort of stupid.) Although, it was still not the worst treatment demons in fantasy anime got this year. We’ll get back to that.
#22. ALYA SOMETIMES HIDES HER FEELINGS IN RUSSIAN
The lower-middle part of the list is always the hardest. What is a trans woman expected to say about Roshidere that’s not incredibly obvious? It’s a romcom aimed at teen boys, this one with “dating the foreign girl in your class” as the requisite gimmick. There’s a tendency among writers like myself to treat this genre as a plague unto the medium, but I have always thought that was kind of silly. In hindsight even my relatively mild criticisms of, say, My Dress-Up Darling seem like a bridge too far, these stories tap into a real emotional framework, even if the specifics are, obviously, blown up for the TV screen.
Roshidere is hardly a highlight of its genre, but it doesn’t especially need to be. The two leads have a distinct enough brand of banter—a kind of distant descendant of that old Haruhi/Kyon dynamic, that’s probably at least one reason that a cover of “Hare Hare Yukai” was used as an ED theme for one episode—that I was engaged through most of the show’s episodes, and I honestly don’t think a series like this needs much more than that. That said; Roshidere also has a pretty poor command of its own strengths, in that it seems to feel like it can pull of domestic drama in the vein of something like Kaguya-sama: Love is War! It can’t, and in trying it loses its way a little bit. Hence its placement relatively low on the list.
There is also a temptation, of course, is to compare this to the other Doga Kobo romcom from recent years that’s roughly along these same lines. Between them, I’d say Roshidere is slightly better overall, but Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie is the better-looking show and has more standout episodes. Neither is exactly going to set the world on fire, though, so it ends up feeling like a moot point.
I didn’t hate Roshidere, and my previous caveats about whether my opinion on it even matters aside, I personally know a few people who liked it much more than I did. I’m happy for those people, but I just can’t get there, personally. It is what it is, I wish the lead couple the best.
#21. BUCCHIGIRI?!
Hey, remember that action anime with the loose “Middle Eastern” theme? No, not that one, that’s Magi which aired years ago. I’m talking about the one from this year that was also a delinquent show. Yeah that one, there you go.
If time has already left Bucchigiri?! behind, that’s a bit of a shame. Never the most high-profile series, it was at least something notably unique in its season and, quite honestly, against the often-repetitive backdrop of contemporary TV anime in general. Its generally out-there nature—the Jojo stands, the colorful character and set design, the intense fujobait—can probably be attributed to the presence of Utsumi Hiroko, also a guiding force in that same role on the more visible and better-liked SK8 The Infinity, not to mention much of Free! So Bucchigiri?! is a minor work for her, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.
The show explores some classic, well-worn themes of coming of age via the framework of an old-school delinquent rumble series. Our main protagonist Arajin (like Aladdin, get it?) is a bit unlikable, admittedly by design, so it’s mostly left to the redheaded and good-natured Matakara to win the audience’s favor. It worked on me at least, enough so that I was genuinely worried for him as the show moved into its surprisingly dark final few episodes. I think in another lifetime, where this show were of a slightly older vintage and at least a bit longer, it might’ve gotten a solid dub and found a home for itself on Toonami. Still, Bucchigiri?! did amass a contemporary Anglophone fanbase, and if you didn’t know that, it’s probably because you don’t lurk around fujo tumblr very much. (I usually don’t either, and I only knew that they were obsessed with it because of my habit of picking through the tumblr tags for most anime I watch.) There are worse things for an anime to be remembered for. By the same token, while there were definitely better anime that aired this year—even better anime in the specific category of “beloved by tumblr fujos”—I remember Bucchigiri?! fondly, and probably always will. Godspeed, boys.
#20. A SALAD BOWL OF ECCENTRICS
There were a few solid ensemble comedies this year. A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics was the least of these, but do not in any sense take that to mean the show is bad or even mediocre. Its silly reverse-isekai-but-not-exactly premise is basically a bit of misdirection, Salad Bowl’s real specialty is an incredibly droll sense of humor. Its protagonist is a detective, but far from being your Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Benoit Blanc, etc., he mostly does what actual detectives do, try to catch people cheating and other mundane and vaguely depressing shit like that. The show’s other protagonist is a little girl, princess of another world, who mostly uses her powers to blow up his spot in humorous ways before the two eventually form a surprisingly sweet surrogate (and then actual!) father/daughter relationship. Elsewhere, an archetypal lady knight is used to lampoon Japan’s homelessness problem, a few episodes tackle the country’s disproportionately large amount of cults, and others take on the kinds of shady gig-work that permeate the capitalist parts of the globe. Somewhere in there, Salad Bowl even finds the time to parody the ongoing girl band anime trend. All of this adds up to a light, but fun show overall. No complaints.
#19. FRIEREN: BEYOND JOURNEY’S END
So, hey, about those demons.
No, before I harp on my pet issue with this show let’s zoom out a little. I genuinely considered just not putting this on the list at all. Shows that start in one year and end in the next are tricky territory to begin with, and I only caught up on Frieren after it was several months in the rearview when I sought to review it. That review is on its own lengthy enough and thorough enough that I could probably have gotten away with resigning the series to a passing mention on this list. Nonetheless, the show ended in 2024, and my opinions have evolved yet further in the few months since I wrote that article, so not marking Frieren down somewhere here felt like neglect of duty.
Even so, what do you want me to say on Frieren that I haven’t already said? I find the show’s incoherence utterly maddening, and, at the risk of coming off like I’m whining, I do sometimes feel like the only person who thinks of the show in those terms. I’m provably not, but when the consensus was and remains so overwhelmingly positive, any other opinion can feel like it lives on an island of one.
The crazy thing is, of course, I don’t hate this series or anything. Not even close. The fact that it’s near the middle of the list is in of itself proof of that, and I stand by every positive thing I’ve ever said about the show; its gorgeous naturalistic art, its impressive and expressive magic animation, and the fleeting glimpses of the show it could be if it just had a better head on its shoulders. But that really is the rub, isn’t it? For every compliment I can fish up, there are two more complaints. I have beaten the point that Frieren writes its demons terribly into the ground by now, but it’s still true. It’s the rotten apple that diseases the tree: the telltale sign that this story is not nearly as well put-together as it might appear at first glance. The fact of the matter is that the very art direction I just praised is often turned to ugly ends in the face of the show’s empty heart. Frieren is, for better and worse, a decent battle shonen anime at its core, and trying to engage with it on any other level just makes the thing fall apart. But honestly? Even that much is insulting to battle shonen, a genre that is often capable of immense empathy even in the midst of its violence. Frieren just isn’t interested in that, even though it pretends to be.
So, why is it up even this far on the list? Well, to consider an anime is to consider all parts of it, and that art direction—and the visual work in general—does still exist. Saitou Keiichirou, director of this anime and of Bocchi the Rock! from back in 2022, is a rising star in his field, and he and his team deserve to be recognized for the work they put in to this adaptation in making it look as beautiful as they possibly could. It’s unfortunate that this dazzling fantasy animation is spent on something like Frieren, but the work has been done nonetheless, and I think they do all they can here to make magic out of nothing much. That’s a reality of the anime industry, and just the televisual arts in general: not everything blessed with a sumptuous production necessarily deserves it.
As such, I honestly think with hindsight that I was too nice to this show when I reviewed it. Maybe expecting it to be anything other than an action series is on me, and maybe someday the overwhelming critical consensus will make more sense. They’re making more, and I’m probably going to watch it, if only to appreciate what Saitou and his team bring to the table once again, so who knows. Plus, hey, that Yorushika OP is really nice.
#18. DEMON LORD 2099
I never deliberately court controversy with these rankings, because that’s cheap and I’m a small enough name that no one would care anyway. However, it does occur to me that if any placement on this list makes people mad, Demon Lord 2099 directly in front of Frieren might just be it. Honestly, if someone were to get mad about this placement, I can’t even blame them. I’m cheating a little to get this on the list in time at all (its finale doesn’t air for a few days yet, so if the last episode somehow torches my opinion of the show, Frieren and everything else behind it on the list have my apologies).
But what can I say? I’s true that in terms of production polish, Demon Lord 2099 doesn’t touch Frieren. (Few shows this year do, although there were a couple.) But, if you squint—quite hard, admittedly—the two make interesting foils for each other. Frieren is quite a self-serious show, Demon Lord 2099 is so goofy that its main character is both a traditional demon king figure and a livestreamer. Frieren ties itself in knots trying to figure out a reason, any reason, that it shouldn’t feel bad about having its main character be pathologically obsessed with killing demons. Demon Lord 2099 is not just written with surprising empathy for and consideration of the usually-trampled fantasy races subjected to this kind of thing, it takes place from the point of view of their once-and-future king. Put another way; there are three elves, but only one true demon lord. Veltol, the infernal monarch in question, would be able to carry the entire show on his back even if it had no other strengths at all, the guy is just that damn likable. A confidently narcissistic evil overlord in the vein of archetype’s true greats. The crux of the anime revolves around his attempts to conquer a world that is very different from the one he left. Hence the name, 2099 as in “shorthand for ‘cyberpunk’.” Along the way, he adapts to this new landscape in ways great and small as he deals with a treacherous underling and searches for lost treasures. The series drops off a bit in the back half, and the nature of these things is such that it’s hard to know if we’ll ever get a season two. Even so, Veltol’s adventures across the futurescape are more than compelling enough to put this toward the middle of the list at the very least.
More important than any high-minded analysis (is Veltol really trying to save his people from the gamer light-ridden gauntleted grip of technocapitalism? the jury’s still out) is the simple fact that Demon Lord 2099 feels like it’s carrying the torch for an older school of light novel anime; the genre puree that then became a genre unto itself that freely mixes and matches aesthetics and archetypes from high fantasy, cyberpunk, magic school fantasy, mafia movies, and so on. Even when the tropes of latter-day light novel adaptations show up, they’re usually there to be played with as opposed to just repeated verbatim (note how the deeply tedious cliché of the magic-measuring stone is literally shattered when Veltol breaks his, in the warped school arc that takes up the anime’s back half). In other words, the show is fun, instead of tedious and self-serious, and it’s refreshingly free of the constant snide winking at the fourth wall that defines so much modern narou-kei. It also has one of the best-looking mecha fights of the entire year, which is a very strange thing to say about a show that isn’t even part of that genre at all and is actually fairly visually inconsistent otherwise. (Although its actual action setpieces are consistently great.) Anyhow, if more light novel anime could start being like this I would love that. You can’t keep a good demon lord down.
#17. CODE GEASS: ROZé OF THE RECAPTURE
There is something deeply funny and twice as weird about Code Geass, of all fucking things, getting the millennial nostalgia sequel treatment. Is it that the original series is so 2000s it hurts? That it was the product of a very different anime landscape than the one we have today? Is it that the very notion of making something as, arguably, politically irresponsible as Code Geass feels really weird given Everything Going On Right Now in the world? (Not that 2006 was really any better, perhaps we were just more ignorant then.) Is it just the fact that our protagonist, Sakura, looks like Lelouch, 2 Years HRT? It’s all of the above.
The series picks up like no time has passed at all, despite the literal timeskip, and the difference in landscape between Rozé and the show it’s ostensibly a sequel to. (Or rather, it’s a sequel to the movies, which are a slightly different alternate continuity. God bless anime bullshit.) That’s not to say it’s interchangeable with its predecessor, though. Rozé takes a different, I might argue dimmer view toward its own protagonist than the original Code Geass ever did toward Lelouch. The result is a more compressed and in some ways more neurotic series, one that’s always looking over its shoulder, knowing it’s being judged both against its illustrious progenitor and against the rest of the year’s anime on the whole. It makes a good show of things, but Sakura’s own deep doubts about what she’s doing cast the show itself in a very different light than the original. I have said this before, but it’s almost as though she doesn’t quite have the right temperament to be a Code Geass protagonist. Maybe that’s a consequence of a real world environment where everyone is a bit less sure of themselves than they were even a few years ago.
Still, Rozé of The Recapture makes a good swing of it. As a mecha series, it’s solid and enjoyable, full of the kind of campy bullshit you’d expect (and which I love) from the genre, and managing to make it all more or less work within a tight twelve episodes. Still, as far as 2024 mecha anime go, there is a big red shadow looming over the whole genre, and as good an effort as Rozé puts in, it wasn’t that.
#16. JELLYFISH CAN’T SWIM IN THE NIGHT
Why are we always pitting the girls against each other? In hindsight, the unspoken competition between Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night and that other girl band show that aired in the same season was always going to be lopsided. Fundamentally, they’re just very different anime. But competition is competition: I and everyone else saw these two shows, striving for a very broadly similar thing, and turned them on each other. One of those shows is easily the better one, and it’s not the one you’re reading about right now.
But still, that’s kind of a stupid way to put it at the end of the day, isn’t it? Most “competitions” in the arts are not the Kendrick Lamar / Drake feud. It’s really just not that serious. Sure, maybe in some grand ranking of all the anime ever made Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is well below that other show—as it is on this list—but on its own terms, it’s a solid piece about a specific bubble of contemporary culture, that of the very online pop musician. Jellyfish’s cast of characters meet more or less by chance, and the show’s central narrative, one of overcoming self-doubt to pursue your passions in a world that is either indifferent or actively hostile, is in line with what might be called more or less the standard for this genre.
Main character Yoru is similarly in the traditional protagonist mold for this sort of thing: beset by impostor syndrome and constantly doubting her own abilities, learning to believe in herself and finding that the attention that JELEE—the girls’ collective unit—gets on its own can’t make her happy. JELEE’s singer and Yoru’s kinda-situationship Kano gets an interesting arc too, exploring the underbelly of the entertainment industry and her attempts to escape the shadow of her controlling record executive mother. This makes it all the more notable that the show’s best moment doesn’t directly involve showbiz at all. Instead it comes when Kiui, a supporting character who struggles with denying her own identity in more ways than one, finishes their own arc, loudly, proudly, and bravely asserting their gender identity against a sea of their jeering fellow teenagers. It’s a powerful moment, one of the best of its kind of the year, and a better legacy for Jellyfish than its actual ending, which is somewhat muddled and unsatisfying. Definitely, there is a reason that Jellyfish is the less-fondly-remembered of the two big band anime originals of the year, but I would be unsurprised to see it pick up a surprising long tail in the years to come, and if that happens, I think Jellyfish will have deserved it.
#15. TRAIN TO THE END OF THE WORLD
I know I called it by what’s technically its official English title up there in the heading, but come on, you and I and everyone know this anime as Shuumatsu Train. An anime that, months after it ended, is still, on a broad level, just pretty inexplicable. Take for example its base ingredients: the traveler story genre, something in the very broad vein of Kino’s Journey or Girl’s Last Tour or, to name an example that’s even remotely close to Shuumatsu Train in tone, The Rolling Girls, a core cast of characters ripped right out of your standard schoolgirl slice of life show, and a hellishly surreal post-apocalypse for them to navigate, activated by a mysterious reality-warping electrical signal called 7G. All of this makes for a show that unites the literal and figurative definitions of denpa, and as someone who places a premium on anime that just make me go “what the hell”, Shuumatsu Train was always going to end up decently high on my list, with its mind control mushrooms, hyperspeed anime-within-anime, minature towns, and so on.
So what holds it back from being even higher? Well, for all the bizarreness thrown about, the show’s underlying thematics are pretty typical. That’s not a huge problem, but more of one is the show’s incredibly crass sense of humor, which is more annoying than anything else. Episodes that culminate with our heroines destroying a zombie army by declaiming old-fashioned erotic poetry get points for audacity and for their light metacommentary on the nature of fanservice, but that doesn’t mean they’re all that interesting to actually watch, and, accordingly, I think these are the weakest parts of the series. What pulls Shuumatsu Train into the station is the central relationship between protagonist Shizuru and her lost friend Youka. In hindsight, I’d call the show an exploration of anxiety; Shizuru hurts Youka before the series even begins. She fucks up, and she obsesses over the fuckup until it’s so big in her mind that it seems insurmountable. It’s not insurmountable though. The finale proves that the two have a bond strong enough that it will eventually restore the broken world of the series itself, and thus, the train keeps on rolling.
#14. ATRI: My Dear Moments
Here’s a random fact about me for you. Every year—or at least, most years—I make an end-of-the-year mix of songs I liked from the preceding twelve months and slap it up on my Mixcloud. I’m not much of a DJ, and my taste in music is, to put it politely, insular and very uncool, so these are mostly for myself rather than anyone else. On this year’s mix, sitting between a sun-blurry ambient piece by punnily-named slushwave artist Imagine Drowning, and the scintillating, raindrop prisms of underrated v-idol group The Virtual Witch Phenomenon’s “Bouquet“, is “Anohikari,” the opening to ATRI: My Dear Moments. That’s not some kind of gimmick or in-joke—these mixes are mostly for myself, there’d be no point—it’s just genuinely one of my favorite songs to come out this year, a rapturously joyful slice of pure sunshine that comes to us from the well-oiled pop machinery of Nogizaka46, the “official rivals”—sister group, basically—of world-conquering institution AKB48. The visual is great too, featuring Atri, the title character engaging in some rhythmic gymnastics, tossing a moon-like ball around beneath an open, shimmering sky.
You might not-unreasonably ask what this has to do with the show itself. After all, if I were ranking these things based solely on their openings, the similarly warm Yorushika song that powers the second half of Frieren and the inexplicable New Jack Swing revivalism present in Metallic Rouge would place them much higher up the list. But here’s the connection: ATRI is a genre study, specifically one for a now largely-bygone era of VN adaptations from the visual novel company KEY. And when you’re trying to invoke memories of those adaptations—especially AIR, which I had the good fortune of watching not long before ATRI premiered—nailing the vibe is crucial. ATRI, for its various ups and downs, nails the vibe.
As for the actual plot, well, if you’re cynical, you could view it as little more than a contrived piece of cry-bait. ATRI‘s bigheartedness could never be mistaken for subtlety; it’s mostly about tugging at your heartstrings and establishing a cozy post-apocalyptic coastal atmosphere. As was the case with many actual KEY VNs, it’s a romance at its heart, and the relationship between the leads works well enough (although how young Atri herself looks might skeeve some viewers out), and the environmental messaging is honestly so hopeful that I’m tempted to call it irresponsible. Its after-the-endmosphere is thus not unimpeachable, and falls short compared to genre greats: vibes can only take you so far. Still, that atmosphere is what ties the whole show together, and that alone is enough to make it one of the year’s more rewarding slow-burns if taken on its own terms.
#13. ‘TIS TIME FOR TORTURE, PRINCESS
One of the year’s more successful Jump adaptations wasn’t an action series or anything really even close. Instead, it was this, an easygoing and charming comedy series that takes place in the kind of endlessly-copied ISO standard fantasy settings that really only work anymore if some kind of joke is being made of them. Thus is of course the case here, but the show is not at this spot on the list for its satirical wit (most of Torture Princess‘ jokes about the fantasy genre are pretty tame).
Instead, its cast, including but not limited to the Princess herself, her talking sword Ex, the “grand inquisitor” Tortura, etc. form a goofy, funny, and surprisingly warm at times relationship. Torture Princess is light on plot, so it’s hard to say it suggests anything in particular by having the Princess’ current life as a “prisoner” of the incredibly nice Demon King be evidently better than her previous existence as a warrior, but it certainly suggests a way forward for this genre that doesn’t rely quite so heavily on the swordfights. In a year that had more than its fair share of that, it’s a nice thought. Also, they’re making more. Will I tune in? You better believe it.
#12. MY DEER FRIEND NOKOTAN
Sing along, you know the words:
shikanoko nokonoko koshitantan
shikanoko nokonoko koshitantan
shikanoko nokonoko koshitantan
and so on, and so forth.
More than anything, I think My Deer Friend Nokotan is an interesting example of a show that’s been tripped up by its own marketing. Months before anyone knew what this show really even was, a looped edit of its maddeningly-catchy opening theme went viral, thus giving a whole lot of people who would otherwise not have given it a second glance a whole lot of opinions on the once-and-forever Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan. That pre-release hype train promptly collided with the reality of nearly-unreadable official subs for the show’s English release on day one, and a lot of puffed-up expectations. I’m not here to say that a show should never be called out on any shortcomings, but in the wake of Nokotan I saw a whole lot of posts all across the internet describing the series as a lot of wasted potential and an unworthy pretender to the throne of Nichijou (admittedly a high water mark of its genre, but often treated by admirers like the only good comedy anime).
Put as simply as possible, I don’t really think any of this is true. What Nokotan is, at its cervine heart, is a solid slice of throwback comedy, essentially more in line with something like SHAFT’s early forays into comedy anime, what with its easygoing pace and the often rather meta bent to its humor. The rest is good old-fashioned absurdism, often staking whole scenes on obtuse wordplay or just randomness-for-randomness’ sake. The hitching post of all this is Nokotan herself, some sort of Bugs Bunnian force of nature / minor eldritch deity that arrives one day and throws the life of ostensible main character Koshi “Koshitan” Torako into chaos, often in ways that would slide up to the eerie or unnerving if played even slightly differently. The result is probably the year’s best pure comedy, and given that 2024 was fairly light on those, that stands as a notable accomplishment.
#11. MAYONAKA PUNCH
I did not watch a single idol anime in 2024, for maybe the first time since I’ve started this blog. The genre seems to be on its way out, and the few offerings we did get this year simply didn’t interest me. They’ve been replaced, in some sense. By girls’ band anime like Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night, sure, but also a second genre, one with no name as of yet, and one that’s overall weirder, goofier, and maybe a little harder to nail down.
Mayonaka Punch is about a group of vampires who run a Youtube channel. Scratch that, it’s about a girl, who used to run a Youtube channel, got very cancelled for punching one of her cohosts, and is now running a different Youtube channel, with the help of a group of vampires, most notably Live, a lemonade pink live wire voiced by Fairouz Ai, who is devastatingly down bad for her. Mayopan is more than just a vehicle for vampire thirst, though, as the series repeatedly touches on the idea that we should do the things we love to do because we love them, rather than it being down to “deserving” to. When the show explores this theme via Masaki attempting to motivate herself back into Youtubing work after being cancelled, it’s well-intentioned but a little clunky. Where the show really sings is its fourth episode, largely atypical for the series. There, Mayonaka Punch briefly transforms into a tragedy of doomed yuri as we learn about the history of Fu, another vampire from the group, and a lost love who taught her to sing. Mayopan never reaches quite that high ever again, but the animus is there, and the rest of the cast is so likable that you’re unlikely to particularly mind that the rest of the show is more lighthearted.
What might catch you off is how seriously this show takes capital-C Content, and I think if it’s a little tough for people to get onboard with Mayopan for that reason, that’s fair. Consider, though, that later in the show’s run they do a song and dance number just like any other idol group, highlighting the similarity between this setup and that one. Of course, the show ends with something entirely different, a high-stakes chase scene finale framed as a prank gone wrong, so perhaps it’s all a bit up in the air. I don’t know if “Youtuber girl” anime will ever be a particularly large genre, but if it’s giving us shows like Mayonaka Punch, I think it has, at minimum, proven its worth.
#10. MECHA-UDE: MECHANICAL ARMS
It might have been the single most straightforward action anime in a year that also contained Bucchigiri?!. Take that earnestness, and a desire to work within its genre’s existing archetypes, as laziness at your peril, though. Mecha-Ude, the debut TV series from studio TriF (that’s “Try F”, folks, not “triff”), is a surprisingly solid thing, even as it retains a lot of that rough web OVA charm from the original short that birthed this project some five years ago. It feels fairly uncontroversial, unless I’m blatantly missing something, to say that this show’s large cast of colorful, eccentric characters, and specific take on battle scenes point to it being a pretty direct pastiche of Studio TRIGGER’s work (particularly that of Hiroyuki Imaishi, their most prominent and most action-focused director). Still, just by being that, it’s a pretty unique thing, and it makes for one of the year’s true hidden gems.
Our main characters are everyman Amatsuga Hikaru and Alma, a hand-shaped mechanoid alien, one of the mecha-ude / mechanical arms of the title, that he symbiotically bonds with. Hikaru’s story is nothing new, a straightforward heroic narrative where most of the focus is placed on the fights as well as his relationship with Aki, the secondary—and honestly much cooler—protagonist. Along the way he makes a rival in the green-haired asthmatic Jun. But, true to its inspirations, a larger threat looms, and by the finale we’re at full-on “battle for the fate of the world” territory. All told, it’s nothing super innovative, but as a solidly-done execution of a well-worn idea, it’s a good time. It does feel particularly bittersweet, though, as some last-minute scenes that play over the credits hint that there were more ideas for Mecha-Ude than could reasonably fit into its single cour. If there’s justice in the world, the show’s creators will get to tell those stories some day in some fashion or another.
#9. THE ELUSIVE SAMURAI
If you boil it down to the numbers, most shonen manga heroes are renowned for winning fights. The Elusive Samurai, a slice of sometimes-zany sometimes-incredibly dark nominal historical fiction originally from the pen of Assassination Classroom mangaka Matsui Yuusei, attempts to flip that on its head. Dirty tricks, leaning on your friends for help, and even outright cowardice are all fine as long as you live to see another sunrise. Life itself, Elusive Samurai argues, is the best vengeance of all, explicitly defining its protagonist as a “hero of life” in contrast to the “heroes of death” that permeate history, and, implicitly, the rest of this genre.
And Hojo Tokiyuki, the titular Elusive Samurai, would know a thing or two about death. At the start of this story his idyllic life as minor nobility is shattered, his family is killed and Kamakura, his home, is burned to cinders by the army of Ashikaga Takauji, founder of the historical Ashikaga shogunate and portrayed here as a barely-human demon that’s some deranged cross between a time-displaced fascist dictator and Satan. Tokiyuki is thus recruited by Suwa Yorishige, a “sham priest but real mystic” who can see the future, to potentially retake his rightful position from Takauji’s grasp. So far, so revenge narrative.
But most stories that start this way do not have nearly as many jokes as Elusive Samurai does. Indeed, this sense of humor is both a defining characteristic and probably the show’s biggest flaw. It’s not that it can’t help itself—it knows when to dial the comedy back to let things get truly dire—but it’s more that it doesn’t want to. The humor is an extension of Elusive Samurai‘s command, almost relentless, to live and live happily even in the presence of oppressive darkness. It’s a tall ask, and Elusive Samurai does not quite live up to its own standards, with the humor being a decidedly mixed bag of caricature jokes and shock value (the mostly very grim episode six ends with the thief Genba literally taking a piss on the camera, for just one example). But there is a purpose to it, and for every gag that doesn’t land there’s a genuinely sweet moment where Tokiyuki bonds with one of his “retainers” (really just other displaced warrior-children like himself), or where the series expresses a genuine and surprising sense of spirituality. Late in the season, Yorishige laments the decline of the age of the gods in the centuries to come—centuries that for us are already the distant past—as science overtakes faith, and as the natural world loses its mystique. All of this doesn’t quite add up to the most coherent show, as Elusive Samurai‘s attempts to tie all this to its ideas of twin heroes of life and death doesn’t entirely gel, but it makes for one that is compelling in its struggles to find its footing. Maybe all of these disparate elements are the real Kamakura Style, or maybe this will all seem more cohesive in hindsight when season two drops. Either way, Elusive Samurai as it stands is certainly a worthy, interesting show, even now.
#8. POKéMON HORIZONS
Shows that run for multiple years are new territory for these year-end lists, because I don’t watch a lot of those, and the few that I do are generally divided into discrete seasons. Such isn’t the case with Pokémon Horizons, which finds its placement on this list on the back of the episodes that aired from, roughly speaking, about the middle of December last year to the middle of December this year. This ’23-’24 run encompasses several distinct arcs, all of which lead up to the still-recent revelations as to what our main villain’s deal is. That in of itself is kind of the interesting thing about Horizons, though. The OG Pokemon anime, in its thousand-odd episodes, was never quite this kind of adventure. Horizons has been, and continues to be, an exploration of something very different both in terms of vibe and in its actual storytelling goals, being more of a proper coming-of-age story as opposed to the sometimes vague direction of the original series.
Still, that only explains why it’s good by comparison. Even if this was your introduction to Pokémon, you’d be able to immediately clock the show’s immense sense of fun and surprisingly ambitious scale. Over the course of this past year of adventures, our heroes Liko, Roy, and Dot have attended a Pokémon academy, they’ve fought gym leaders and—in a series highlight—even Paldea Elite Four member Rika, they’ve fought their recurring foes the Explorers several times over, and they’ve even met one of Liko’s own ancestors from the distant past. Running through the background of all of these arcs is a persistent affirmation that Liko, Dot, and Roy, and thus the children this show is made for, are never really alone. Liko and Dot have learned how to get out of their shells, Roy has learned how to listen to his partner Pokemon, and all three have learned the real value of friendship. In a world that’s still firmly post-pandemic, something like this being so much about the bonding experience that makes Pokemon great in the first place feels reaffirming.
What you get overall is the show this year that feels the most like watching Sunday morning cartoons as a kid, the kind of anime you could enjoy equally well at ages 5, 25, and 50. Don’t be surprised if it’s even higher on the list next year. We’ll see what 2025 brings.
#7. WONDERFUL PRECURE!
Hey kids, who loves learning about animals?
Good, okay, I’m seeing a lot of hands.
Now then, who loves learning about how humans drive animals to extinction, and how the disappearance of the Japanese Wolf is an interesting case study on this subject?
Hmm, fewer hands. Surprising!
Wonderful Precure has been a weird one for the long-running magical girl franchise. It might be the best Precure season since I started mentioning them in my year-end writeups, and if it doesn’t surpass Tropical Rouge, it’s at least on roughly the same level. I’ll confess that I often feel like I end up saying roughly the same thing about Precure every year, and, I mean, you know the drill, right? Solid action fundamentals plus warm and personable character relationships plus a classic tough-cute aesthetic equals excellent magical girl anime. Since I started keeping up with the show yearly back when 2019’s Star Twinkle was the season of the hour, I’ve walked away from basically every Precure series thinking more or less the same thing. I love the series to pieces but it’s definitely mostly variations on a theme. That’s not a problem, and if I don’t say some variation of all this for You & I-dol next year when it’s wrapping up its run, it shouldn’t be taken as a slight against that show, but Wonderful does feel a little different in this regard.
It might just be a logical consequence of trying to do a season about animals. Our lead character, Cure Wonderful, is a dog in human form. It would be a little wild to have that be the case, have her best friend Iroha / Cure Friendy be on the same team, and not at least touch on the idea of that relationship eventually ending, thus making Wonderful the only Precure season that, to my knowledge, has an episode about an old woman’s dog dying. Wonderful Precure really only Goes There for a handful of episodes, and most of the time, it’s more traditionally Precure-related stuff, but when it does go there, it does a damn good job of it. The obvious point of comparison here aside from other Precure seasons is Tokyo Mew Mew New, but while TMMN was a nostalgia exercise, a deliberate throwback created for Tokyo Mew Mew’s original fanbase, Wonderful Precure exists in the here and now, speaking to the young children of today. I think that matters, and if I’ve placed the series higher than you might expect, that’s a good chunk of why.
The rest of why is that Cure Nyammy is in it, and she’s quickly become one of my favorite Cures ever, having both a killer design, an amusingly bitchy attitude, and a very compelling character arc that just wrapped up a few days ago as of the time of this publication. Faves matter, too.
#6. BRAVE BANG BRAVERN
Brave Bang Bravern, perhaps the single piece of giant robot animation most willing to embrace the notion of “dare to be stupid” since the original Transformers cartoon, embarked on a quest back in January to be the greatest Dudes Rock anime of all time. I’m not sure if it succeeded, but it made a strong showing, and I respect the hell out of that. On its face, the series is a baldly silly pastiche of super robot anime. Slightly below the surface is the fact that it also just is a super robot anime—like any good pastiche, it stays on the loving side of “loving parody”—as the biggest super robot otaku related to the show is Bravern himself, a hammy intergalactic powerhouse here to save the Earth from an alien invasion that is much more serious than seems apropos for his goofy demeanor. Indeed, in the first episode when he appears out of the sky like a bolt of lightning, that seems like it should be the “trick.” Instead, it’s the first of many, and Bravern is one of the year’s best anime for this very reason.
Bravern’s entrance in that first episode alone is fantastic, probably the best single capital A capital M Anime Moment of the whole year. He appears in a flash of green from the heavens, he annhiliates the invaders coldly exterminating humanity, he demands that Isami, our protagonist and his initially unwilling pilot, yell out attack names alongside him, he has his own theme song. His own diegetic theme song. During all this, in the first crack in a suit of emotional armor that takes the entire show to fully break, Isami admits that he never wanted to be in particular a soldier or a fighter pilot, he wanted to be a hero. Lucky for him, this is a show about heroism.
It’s an odd show about heroism, though. Bravern the show goes through pains to stress that heroism is a group thing. Bravern the robot seems to at least nominally think that too, going through the effort that he does to win over the displaced military folks who make up the bulk of the show’s cast, including both Isami and his buddy / rival Lewis, as important a character in this story as Isami himself. This is perhaps the one aspect of the show I have some trouble with, given the military setting, but more than that’s the only area of the series that betrays any insecurity at all about the premise. This is the one bit of bet-hedging, and the main reason it’s not in the top five. Everything else belongs to the titular giant space robot from the future, to the power of love, and to us the audience.
Yes, from the future. There are twists, because why wouldn’t there be? Lewis eventually finds one of the aliens, a suspiciously human-looking girl named Lulu, who becomes another part of the regular cast. With Lulu’s help, Superbia, one of the giant death machines spearheading the alien invasion turns face and becomes a valued ally. The biggest twist—and I’m about to spoil the end of the show here, just a heads’ up for you—is saved for Bravern himself. It turns out that Bravern is Lewis, transformed by cosmic forces and from another timeline, but Lewis nonetheless. I don’t make a secret of being a pretty big yuri fan on this blog, and it takes a lot to get me on a yaoi train. Nonetheless, I have to acknowledge this one, Bravern made me care about these two macho military guys and how they save the world with the power of love and also very homoerotic ending themes. That’s some real dedication. You won’t see that in a half-assed romcom.
And the final thing is this, for as great as Bravern is, hindsight has already made it feel like a herald of things to come. Not long ago, a new, suspiciously Daicon-y Gundam series was announced. Pedantic questions of where that falls on the largely imaginary super robot / real robot scale aside, it really does seem like the future continues to belong to the mecha ‘heads. So move forward, and make sure you bang brave bang bravern all over the place the entire way.
#5. DELICIOUS IN DUNGEON
This one’s a little tricky. Not because I feel any need to hedge my bets about how good Dungeon Meshi is. The top five is when we tend to get in to “unrestrained gushing” territory for me, and even if it weren’t, we’re talking about TRIGGER‘s first TV anime in a good while, and the debut turn for director Miyajima Yoshihiro who handily proves himself here. But! This is the rare case where I’ve read the manga. Dungeon Meshi, being what it is, is the sort of story where spoiling it doesn’t ruin it, but I’d still hate to do such a thing, even by implication. What I can say is that even here, in the two-cour adaptation of the first chunk of the manga, Dungeon Meshi weaves a complex, rich world. A magical ecosystem that puts many dedicated worldbuilding projects to shame. The story it threads through this world is one of conflicting principles and loyalties, and how those principles and loyalties fall away to the most basic underlying motivator of all; hunger. Hunger both literal and metaphorical, mind you—there is so much material on the theme of consumption in this story that you could cut it like a layer cake all on its own—but hunger nonetheless.
In this early section of the story, that hunger is mostly on the literal end, and you could indeed enjoy most of what’s here as a relatively lighthearted romp through a traditional fantasy dungeon where our heroes are forced to munch on monsters to survive. The characterization here, of Laios, our kindhearted and eccentric lead, the somewhat aloof and self-interested Chilchuck, the powerfully neurotic Marcille, and the survivalist, wisdom-dispensing Senshi, is fantastic across the board, and you could do a lot with a cast this strong. But if all Dungeon Meshi were was a decent comedy, it wouldn’t be this high on the list, and I don’t think it’d be anywhere near as well regarded in general. The adaptation really excels at playing up these darker, more serious elements, cracking them wide open, animating them less like an artist and more like a necromancer.
Indeed, fundamentally what TRIGGER is bringing to the table are all the usual benefits of an adaptation, the addition of sound and color and the transformation of texture that this brings with it. They’re just executed here with uncommon deftness. This may be a somewhat contentious statement, given all the discourse about what the anime cuts (I am sad about the lack of the Marcille-running-her-hands-through-her-hair panel in that one scene too, believe me), but overall, the anime presents a worthy alternate take on the same foundational story, remixing and reemphasizing different elements to highlight or dim different elements. Senshi’s backstory, late in the season, is an excellent example of this. In the manga, it’s tightly-wound and claustrophobic. A lengthy aside, but an aside nonetheless. Here, it’s much more akin to how it probably feels for Senshi; a traumatic memory that resurfaces again and again, rendered in full, earthy color, with all the violence and fear a party of dwarves losing their composure as a monster picks them off one by one requires. Similar examples rebound throughout the season, especially on the topic of Falin, Laios’ lost sister whose rescue the entire story revolves around, and whose eventual resurrection sets up the second half of the manga, yet to be animated. I’ll say no more on that front, other than that Falin, in all her forms, is perhaps my single favorite character to feature in any anime this year period. If it’s not her, the list of competition is very, very short.
Like the next anime on the list, and like Chainsaw Man in 2022 (I stand by what I said there), Dungeon Meshi is primarily not higher up because I have full faith that what’s to come will be even better, and I want to save giving it the gold or silver for a year when it’s at its absolute best. Staying hungry makes the meal all the tastier, I’m told.
#4. DAN DA DAN
Do you believe in Pikmins? Dandadan does. That and a whole menagerie of ghosts, goblins, ghouls, monsters, giants, and little green men from Mars. Lurid, even questionable at first blush, Dandadan deploys these gonzo Weekly World News escapees to weave a portrait of a world that is vastly, overwhelmingly, totally unknowable and hostile. I am tempted to here again compare two very different anime. Both Dandadan and Elusive Samurai, several spots back on the list, are intensely—surprisingly, even—spiritual works. But if that similarity is real, it’s to opposite ends in each given show. Elusive Samurai sees the wonders of the world as something fading, something beautiful to treasure while they still exist. Dandadan sees them as something unknown and frightening, every bit as potent today as they were centuries ago. If all this seems heady for a show that has an astoundingly straightforward (and frightening) “probed by aliens” scene in its first episode, well, that’s just the sort of leap of faith you have to make with Dandadan, a show that rewards a cursory watch just fine but a thoughtful one even more so. This is an anime for the kids who held Charles Fort as a personal hero, or at least, whoever his Japanese equivalent is. I like to try to nail down a show’s central theme in these high-spot writeups, but with Dandadan that’s difficult because it’s about so many different things.
But, if I have to boil it down to just one idea, it’s perseverance. Momo and Okarun, our heroes, are thrust into a world they don’t understand by hostile forces beyond their control. For Momo, this takes the sadly very realistic form of having her bodily autonomy constantly assaulted, in some of the show’s darkest and most upsetting moments—this is a big enough fixation for the series that this first season actually ends in the middle of such a scene—for Okarun, the violation is less intense but no less real. The fact that he spends most of the first season looking for his missing family jewels is more than just a dirty joke, it’s an indication that this disruption has left him incomplete and shaken up as a person. And yet, Dandadan never argues that the world should be shut out or burned down because of its dangers, our heroes push on as they do regardless because they have each other.
Throughout, Okarun and Momo fall for each other, giving the series a playful streak of young love that helps take the edge off and also giving them a ton of reason to banter, some of the best of the year, in fact. They also help a variety of both human and non-human allies come to terms with their own problems; a ghost hounding their classmate Aira is eventually laid to rest in the show’s untouchable seventh episode with the help of Aira herself, the unimaginable pain of the phantom’s waking life is given meaning and pathos, and she is able to move on feeling that it wasn’t all for nothing. But Dandadan is unwilling to focus solely on the obvious plays to pull at your heartstrings, just a few episodes later, our heroes are helping a displaced alien gig worker, and that somehow hits almost as hard. The romance angle doesn’t slack either, as both Momo and Okarun make the very teenagery mistake of thinking of a budding relationship as a zero-sum game in different ways over the course of the season: they clearly like each other a lot, but they’re both still learning.
This is what really separates Dandadan from the pack, not just a belief but an unshakable conviction in the human spirit, no matter what may go bump in the night and how many flailing miscommunications may happen. That would be all well and good in of itself, but combine that with the fact that this is easily one of the best looking shows of the year, maybe the best full stop, depending on your aesthetic preferences (I might give it that crown myself), make for an absolute fucking treat. That it’s taken me this long to even mention its action in passing feels like a crime, given how well the show delivers on that front, being not only visually pleasing but also inventive (episode nine, where they’re underwater in the school while fighting a bunch of aliens? That shit goes hard). It’s also, when it wants to be, the rare horror anime that’s actually scary, and its most disquieting episodes had me as rattled as anything I read on UnexplainedMysteries.org as a kid.
All told, this is a very welcome example of the zeitgeist turning its attention to something that clearly deserves it. A second season announced for summer of 2025 feels not only just right but also inevitable. The main reason Dandadan isn’t even further up on the list? I have no doubt that it has even higher peaks to climb. We’re just getting started with this one.
#3. MAKEINE: TOO MANY LOSING HEROINES!
Alongside the more obvious narou-kei boom of the past decade and a half, there has also been a surge in romance light novels. Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian, from farther up the page, is one of these. Makeine is too. It’s just that unlike most anime based on romance light novels, it just happened to be one of the absolute best things to air this year. Funny how that goes.
What sets Makeine apart from its peers is not something as simple or ineffable as quality, but rather both its metatextual nature and its commentary on—and celebration of—romance LNs as a medium. I am a sucker for this kind of thing, but it would be meaningless if Makeine wasn’t any good. Not only is it in fact very good, a best-in-genre for its year and an elevation of that genre overall, but it’s also full of a genuine love for romance LNs as a scene. For every sly observation about their clichés, there is a stock situation lovingly played to an exaggerated tee or turned on its head. For every brilliant little gemstone of genuine sentimentality, there is an equal and opposite locked shed with two characters stuck inside. Some would consider this embrace of the shamelessly goofy a flaw, but I can’t put myself in those shoes. There’s a huge difference between doing something because it’s the default and doing it with intent, and Makeine has intent in spades. Intent allows it to get away with the audacious trick of pretending to not be a “real” romcom while at the same time doing shit like having a character freestyle a children’s story off the top of her head out of pure heartbreak.
That love of the romantic in the broad, older sense of that term informs Makeine‘s whole style. The series has a real knack for rearranging the traditional tropes and setpieces of a romcom to be about just about anything but romantic love. Despite some early signs, and some teasing in its final episode, the main arc of Makeine is not about our lead boy, Nukumizu, getting together with anyone in particular. He and ostensible lead girl Anna even make a whole thing out of how they’re not going out. Will that change? Who knows! Makeine is such an obvious virtuoso with this material that bending it into almost any shape imaginable doesn’t seem out of the question. (Of course, we’re really talking about some combination of the talents of Amamori Takibi, the original novelist, director Kitamura Shoutarou, and overall scriptwriter / series comp guy Yokotani Masahiro, but the reality of any given anime as a group effort has never stopped me from anthropomorphizing them before.) All told, I’ve rarely been so happy to have so little idea of how a story is going to end.
What is apparent this early on is that Makeine’s focus on human connection doesn’t privilege romance over anything else, which is a very rare thing not just for this genre or even this medium but for fiction in general, and without getting too into it, as someone who engages with romance in a bit of a different way than a lot of people, that really spoke to me. Throughout the series, characters get their hearts broken, or romance never blooms at all, but they’re there for each other. This is the common element throughout the three main arcs here, each focusing on one of the show’s main girls; Anna, Lemon, and Komari. You can’t control what happens in life, but you can control how you respond to it. Cherish your friends, take your losses on the chin with dignity, stay determined to forge your own path. No regrets.
#2. OSHI NO KO – SEASON 2
Look, what do you want from me? Last year I raked myself over the coals for the crime of talking about Oshi no Ko at all in a period where its fanbase was being very awful to a real person involved with a real tragedy. I think, in hindsight, assuming I have the platform where choosing to write about this show or not would make any kind of tangible difference was an act of arrogance. If you disagree, I can only ask for your forgiveness here. This is one of the year’s best anime, I want to talk about it, and I am going to do so.
That bitter aftertaste isn’t irrelevant to discussing Oshi no Ko itself, though, we should admit. The second season of the series breaks protagonist Aquamarine’s search for vengeance against the man who killed his mother and the rise of his profile as an actor down to its base elements and interlaces them. The result is bitter, prickly, and insular, despite its lavish, often extremely colorful production. Indeed, some parts of this season can feel like petty score settling, take the character of Tokyo Blade mangaka Abiko, whose manga is the source material for the 2.5D stage play that much of the season revolves around. Abiko is depicted as a complete weirdo, someone with poor personal hygiene and even poorer social skills. She clashes with the play’s staff, admittedly also depicted with a fair amount of sympathy, at one point threatening to pull her endorsement of the play itself, not because she’s power tripping or anything like that, but because this coiled hedgehog of a woman is, Oshi no Ko argues, a would-be auteur, someone who cares deeply about her work even as everyone else around her tries to snip pieces off of it to make it fit into a more acceptable, commercial box. Oshi no Ko isn’t so simple as to suggest she’s entirely in the right, but Abiko is a telling cipher for the anime itself, and not just because she might be loosely based on OnK’s own mangaka Akasaka Aka. It is tough to escape an uncomfortable knot in my gut about this show, and this plotline in particular, like I’m listening to 2015 Drake and can see the eventual crashing-down-and-out coming a decade in advance.
Elsewhere, there’s much more light. Akane and Kana return in full fucking force in this second season, bristling with ambition and talent and locked in a rivalry throughout to upstage the other and win the affections of Aqua. In practice, this is basically a battle shonen rivalry, with all the “unintentional” homoerotic subtext that entails, and I will admit that no small amount of Oshi no Ko‘s placement this high up on the list is due to the absolute blast I had shipping these two. It will never happen, and it’d be pure hell for the both of them if it did, but seriously, I’ve read actual yuri manga where I was less invested in making two girls kiss about their weird, complicated feelings for each other. That’s not to say either of them aren’t a good pair with Aqua, though. (For my money, Akane wins that competition when she casually reveals she’d be down to help him murder a dude.) This is ultimately all part of the same spiderweb of entangled neuroses as Aqua’s whole deal, but it feels less serious since it’s not literal life-or-death.
In fact, the focus on acting as an art is pretty astounding through. It’s such that even very minor characters get a star turn. Melt, the prettyboy actor who unintentionally sabotaged the Sweet Today production in season one, returns here, committed to working on his acting after a few cutting remarks from one of the other Tokyo Blade actors, and his spotlight episode is one of the best single anime episodes of the whole year. He works hard at it, at some points with Aqua’s help, and the time he gets to truly be a star—mere minutes, both in-universe and out—is enrapturing. There’s a very telling bit of this episode in particular, actually, where Aqua explains to Melt that if he puts his all into one singular moment, people will remember his performance. This, of course, is reflective of the show’s own construction; Melt really does have only those few minutes, and outside of them, he barely exists. Oshi no Ko‘s greatest feat is its ability to explain these tricks to you as it’s pulling them off, a truly breathtaking piece of showmanship that had no real peers this year and is short on them even outside of it.
All of this praise heaped on it, you might wonder why I didn’t put ONK at the number one spot as opposed to down here in second place. Honestly? It all comes back to that unease I mentioned earlier. Oshi no Ko has genuine, well-articulated themes about how fame works and how it can ultimately destroy people, but I think that in the end, what Oshi no Ko is actually about is the spectacle of it all, prisms that trap stage-burning spotlight beams and refract them into cartoon paint. Sometimes that spectacle is hellish. People bleed and die on stage, sometimes almost literally. The crux of this story, remember, is the psychosis of someone who’s died and lived again times two, with the promise that the one whose head we haven’t spent time in yet is somehow the more poisonous flower. The message is not the point of Oshi no Ko. I don’t know if Aka knows that, but the people at Doga Kobo making the anime definitely do (a quick shout out to director Hiramaki Daisuke, who has been absolutely killing it with this adaptation for two years in a row now). Like I said, this is a spectacle. An incredibly good spectacle, but a spectacle nonetheless.
If we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s entirely possible that with its final arc this season, it’s writing checks it can’t cash. The radiating, vantablack stars that the series knocks into Ruby’s eyes in the last few episodes threaten to spill out and swallow the rest of the story whole. Plot, characters, themes, ideas, subsumed under a tide of black and red bile as the trauma and obsession overtake Ruby and stain her with a palpable dark charisma. But that’s the thing about metaphors; there isn’t really a jewel, there’s no marble to play this game with. At the end of the day, no matter the shape of the pupils, eyes are just eyes. I find it hard to believe that Oshi no Ko really has the guts to go out in a blaze of glory as the last few episodes of this season seem to set up, but I’d be happy to be wrong. Given how polarized the reception to the manga’s ending has been, I just might be, I don’t know the details. Either way, just enough put me off-kilter about this show to put it here, the second to last spot from the top. Very much unlike some other shows on this list, I don’t think Oshi no Ko has any higher to climb, and I think this cursed, jewel-encrusted artifact of a season might be the best we ever get out of it, not that I could complain if that were the case. Who knows, though? Showbiz is full of surprises.
Now, before we get to the very top of the list, there are two other pieces of business to take care of. Let’s get the brand new one out of the way.
#?. HONORABLE MENTIONS
Also known as: Things I watched at least some of from this year but didn’t finish, or didn’t fit the format, but which I still had some stray comment or another on that I wanted to note down here before the year ended. This was a super last minute addition—I’m literally writing this the night before this article goes live, having already filled out the other entries—but it felt like a fun little bonus to add, and I have a handful of thoughts on these shows, so why not?
- NINJA KAMUI: One day, Toonami will bankroll a good anime again. Basically every thing they’ve done since the first pair of FLCL “sequels” has been a complete miss and unfortunately this is no different. Yes, the JJK director is involved. No, that doesn’t automatically make it good. Seriously one of the most boring things to air this year. This might’ve gone below ISHURA.
- NEGATIVE POSITIVE ANGLER: I really, really wanted to like this, but I could just not get invested enough in the main character’s struggles. There’s a problem when your main guy is such a jerk in such an uninteresting way that I don’t care that he’s literally terminally ill.
- QUALITY ASSURANCE IN ANOTHER WORLD: Another isekai that broke my heart this year. Oh QA-sekai, I thought you were different! But no, it eventually devolved into being just as boring as most of them.
- NARENARE -CHEER FOR YOU!-: Serious question, what the hell was this show? Ostensibly a simple anime about cheerleading, in the four episodes I saw it managed to meander through some five or six different main ideas, switching up its tone each time. Weird show. I’m told it gets even weirder later on.
- THE GRIMM VARIATIONS: Netflix horror / fairy tale anthology anime with CLAMP character designs. I only watched two episodes of the six, or else I might have put it on the list proper, where it probably would’ve sat comfortably near the upper middle. The two shorts I saw were interesting breaths of fresh air against the contemporary landscape. Cool shit, and I do plan to eventually finish this. (Although being an anthology means it doesn’t have that same “just one more episode” hook, doesn’t it? Oh well.)
- GO! GO! LOSER RANGER: Another one that would probably have scored pretty well if I’d actually finished it. Life got in the way and I happened to fall off of this right as it was getting to what is, to my recollection, the weakest arc from the manga. Nonetheless, I want to catch up when season 2 drops, since the material after that arc is a lot better. Don’t be too shocked if Footsoldier D shows up on the list proper next year, should I do one.
- BYE, BYE, EARTH: Bit of a heartbreaker, this one. It started out very promisingly, being a very peculiar original-setting fantasy thing with a really fun protagonist (voiced by Fairouz Ai, who feels like she’s truly achieved Star Voice Actress status at this point) but eventually the pacing got so fast that watching episodes started feeling like a chore. I may read the source material at some point if I can get my hands on it, since the fantasy worldbuilding here is incredibly interesting, probably the only real competitor Dungeon Meshi had in that department this year.
- SENGOKU YOUKO: This was the big cut from the list proper. I’ve actually finished the first season of this, and I quite enjoyed it. (I’m honestly mostly just over the fucking moon that we have another Mizukami Satoshi adaptation that’s actually good.) However, I fell off of the second, ongoing season for boring life reasons—noticing a pattern?—and it felt weird to put only half the show on the list. Maybe that’s silly considering I’ve got Precure on here, but oh well.
- SHOSHIMIN: HOW TO BECOME ORDINARY: This one I am really kicking myself for not finishing. Yet another where life just kind of got in the way and I had to put something on hold and it ended up being this. I really like what I’ve seen of this show! It’s an intriguing ‘mystery’ series where the mysteries themselves are quite mundane, but serve as a vehicle for the show’s interesting examination of how the world treats people who are different (and thus implicitly, how it treats the neurodivergent). Also has a really interesting, photography-aided art style. I really want to get back to this one. My one close friend, who is almost certainly reading this, you know who you are, I promise we’ll watch this together soon!
- THE TRANSFORMERS 40TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL MOVIE: Essentially a music video for a Bump of Chicken song, this TRIGGER-animated short, directed by major Transfan and SSSS.GRIDMAN brain Amemiya Akira, was one of my favorite anime things period to air this year. If this had a spot on the proper list it would be very high, because this is just pure fanservice in the old sense of the word, endless cuts of giant robots from every corner of the Transformers franchise duking it out, no rhyme or reason, just pure metal-on-metal action. Fantastic stuff.
- CHOCOLAT CADABRA: The other fantastic shortform thing directed by a TRIGGER director—Yoshinari You in this case—this year. This music video for an absolute slap of an Ado song / very involved chocolate commercial is maybe the best thing Yoshinari has ever been responsible for, and I say that as a huge Little Witch Academia fan. Maybe the chocolate company involved here will like….sponsor a TV-length version of this? Please?
Alright, that was probably way too many, but hey! I still have to pen my customary shout out here before we move on to the top spot (you are reading this in order, right?). Each year, I ask people to guess what my favorite anime of a given year was, and I mention them in this little lead-in paragraph if they get it right. Normally, only a couple people get it right, since I tend to pick things that speak to me and not really give a damn as to whether many other people have seen them at all, much less whether anyone likes them, hence previous list-toppers Wonder Egg Priority and Healer Girl.
That was not the case this year! This year, lots of people had my number. And how could they not? This show really was that good, and I’m not even remotely alone in thinking that. So a big shout out to Josh, Sredni, Wolfie, Ox, and Shrike (I’ve got a veritable menagerie going on here).
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#1. Girls Band Cry
Nina, cue me up.
If I can be very honest, I’m pretty sick of talking about how my life sucks on this blog. It was the main thrust of my write up for Healer Girl when I put it at number 1 on 2022’s year-end list, and things have, as I noted at the start of this article, not really improved since then. (They’ve arguably gotten worse!) It was the reason I didn’t make a proper list at all last year. It’s the reason I only barely made one this year and why the Weekly Orbit has stalled out, and so on, and so forth. You get it. I’m tired. You’re tired. We’re all tired. The world is such a nightmarish mess that even mentioning it in passing on something as ephemeral and trivial as an anime blog feels disrespectful.
Girls Band Cry is not an antidote to that. The best anime, cartoon, film, work of art ever conceived and created is not an antidote to that. Girls Band Cry is also not a call to action, it’s not a profound statement about the state of the world, it’s not something that cuts to the heart of why life is how it is, or anything of that sort. Here’s what Girls Band Cry is, though: a testament to the salve that is kickass music, and kickass art more generally. Its ability to help us hold on, for one more day. Through anything. Through everything. This is not subtext, it’s what the show is about, and pardon yours truly for being corny, but I think that really does fucking matter. Things are bad, but we can make the best of it by belting from the top of our lungs. Art isn’t a solution, but it can help, sometimes a lot.
Case in point: Our lead Nina’s suicidal urges, revealed in or strongly implied by a single line of dialogue depending on whose sub track you were watching. The music of her favorite band, Diamond Dust, served as an escape, more than that, as a balm, something to ease the pain, something to staunch the bleeding for just another minute longer. When Diamond Dust’s vocalist, Momoka, left and was replaced, it felt like an acute betrayal. Naturally, she meets Momoka in the first episode, and before too long we see that initial attachment to Diamond Dust grow into a need to be her own cure, to make music of the kind that saved her. It takes a while for even Nina herself to realize that that’s what she’s doing (and she technically never expresses such outright at all), but that journey of growth is the year’s single most rewarding character arc.
For Nina, we get to watch her overcome that pain and see her find her voice both figuratively and, as she becomes the vocalist for the band eventually known as Togenashi Togeari, literally. Art is not an indulgence for Nina, it is a necessity. The same is true, of course, for us, and thus, as is the case for most truly great anime, the work reflects itself, a mirrored ball of hollered songs of rage.
That, of course, is only part of the story. The nuts and bolts of how a show like this becomes good is beyond the scope of this list, even if this is the top spot. (And god knows I’ve already written a fair amount about Girls Band Cry this year, so forgive me for not wanting to repeat myself.) But a number of things, both about the actual content of the show and the context around it, are worth at least touching on. Nina and Momoka’s relationship is the biggest of these, evolving from a one-side admiration to a mutual one, then to friendship, loyalty, and young love. It’s fascinating, and all too rare, how Nina and Momoka actually inspire each other, the kind of genuine partnership that makes real bands work. Of course, they don’t get to that point without a lot of bickering, and overlapping emotional outbursts and misunderstanding power a lot of Girls Band Cry. (Those with good memories may recall that it actually took the show a while to click with me, mostly for precisely this reason.) Moreso when the series comes to involve the group’s drummer Subaru, an actress-in-training who secretly resents the grandmother making her study that trade, and keyboardist Tomo and bassist Rupa, who form a sort of two-part unit unto themselves. A common point among all of them is the breaking down of facade, as they all use the music they make together as a tool for processing their trauma. As the show goes on, these girls come to trust each other, because they feel they can truly be themselves around each other, blemishes and all. Thus, TogeToge is not just a band but also a place to belong, a place to pursue their dreams, not anyone else’s.
Visually, Girls Band Cry is the rare TV anime that really looks like nothing else. All-CGI anime are still a little polarizing, but this show looking this good proves it’s completely possible for 3D anime to look every bit as fluid and expressive as the flat stuff. Girls Band Cry more or less tosses out all conventional wisdom as to how to make a 3D anime look good, too, eschewing old tricks like halving model framerates or emulating traditional anime cuts. Instead, it basically builds a new visual language as it goes, innovations that are sure to have trickledown effects in the years to come. The show is mostly pretty grounded, but when it wants to, it can absolutely soar with the stylization, whether this is as simple as giving Nina red and black “rage needles” to show her brimming with anger or as complex as the full-on music video the show explodes into at the climax of the eleventh episode, its best. There, every part of Girls Band Cry—writing, music, visuals—work in perfect concert to stage a perfect concert. Togenashi Togeari premiere their song “Void & Catharsis”, and it is, quite simply, the best moment in this medium this year. Little else even came close.
All this about an anime you had to pirate when it was new! I wonder if people will forget that over time, that GBC’s anglophone fanbase was a completely organic phenomenon. I wonder if the competing translations for that one line in that one episode will go down in history or be forgotten to the mists of time. I wonder if people will remember the jokes, the stupid memes, the conversations, the collection of translated tweets from Japanese fans calling Momoka a lesbian. I hope they do, Girls Band Cry was, in addition to everything else I’ve said here and in my original review, probably just the most fun I’ve had watching an anime in ages, and the community was no small part of that. Perhaps a reflection of the fact that this is the show in the top five that feels most like a single, complete thought? Maybe! Who knows. I could talk for forever about things big and small I loved to pieces about GBC, but I think you get the point by now.
There is some expectation to begrudgingly acknowledge flaws with things you think are basically perfect when you’re writing as a critic, so sure, I’ll do that. It’s not literally flawless. (Of course it’s not, nothing is.) Its structure is a bit lopsided, such that Rupa and Tomo don’t get much focus. Everything after episode eleven is basically postscript, not bad in any sense of the word, but not strictly “necessary” either. And, of course, the big one, after its immense success, the series is being subsumed into the sort of forever-franchise moneyball dreams that compose most of the current multimedia landscape. A mobile, likely gacha, game is on the way, which will probably unnecessarily complicate the shit out of Girls Band Cry‘s universe. This is the way of things, unfortunately. While it’s ridiculous to think of a band that was at best half-real (and certainly purely corporate) in the first place as “selling out,” that is nonetheless kind of what this feels like. It’s unfortunate, but not unexpected.
And yet, none of that will ever ding the show itself, a screaming knot of anger, drama, teenage angst, tears, fights. Joy and rage, drunk off youthful indiscretion and pure fucking spite. Flipped fingers, middle and pinky. Guitar solos, drum checks, broken facades, t-shirts with “LIAR”, “COWARD”, and “DROPOUT” hastily scrawled on them. Suicidal ideation and the incomparable peace when it leaves you for however long it does. Ceiling lamps spun around like ceiling fans, pet snakes, Undertale shirts, Rupa’s groupies and “nice beer!” Screaming into the void to feel the catharsis. No matter what else might bear the logo, all of that shit is the real Girls Band Cry. Everything else is commentary.
That’s not to say the actual series will have no impact beyond its own episodes, though. Over the past few years, the girl bands have steadily replaced the once-prolific idol-anime-with-a-gimmick genre, and while it’s impossible to say if that’ll continue, or if they’ll keep delivering the same level of quality seen in Bocchi the Rock, BanG Dream: It’s MyGO!!!, and of course Girls Band Cry itself, the future—or at least this incredibly narrow slice of the future—is bright. 2025 promises the goth-metal melodrama of Ave Mujica, at this point just days away, and Rock Is A Lady’s Modesty, an outside contender based on a manga, looks insane enough that it shouldn’t be written off either.
All this to say, what I’d really like to sign this entry, and thus the whole list, off with, is some pithy one-liner about how the girl bands will save us. That of course isn’t really true, and sometimes you have to sacrifice wit for honesty. But what is true is that they provide just a few more little bright spots for us going forward. I honestly, truly think that the show’s real legacy will be exactly that. Be it out of spite, out of pride, out of hope, or whatever else, hang in there, we’re in this together. If you’re angry, sing it to the heavens.
Play me out, girls.
And that’s the list, or it will be, at least. Since I’m writing this before I have the full thing actually finished. (Tempting fate? Maybe!) I had to make sure I took the time to properly thank each and every person who read this article, though. I know it’s a fair bit to get through and I’m not sure how leaving it as a single article as opposed to breaking it up into several as I’ve done in years past will affect things. Hopefully though, whether you largely agreed with my rankings or not, you found some pearl of insight in here somewhere, or at least an entertaining read. If you did, I’d be really thankful if you could drop me a donation on my Ko-Fi page. I don’t have a traditional job, and Ko-Fi donations are my only source of income, so it really helps.
With that out of the way, I’d like to end the year here on Magic Planet Anime by thanking all of you, since y’all, my readers, give me motivation to keep doing this and y’all mean the world to me. I say that a lot, but I do really mean it. I also want to specifically thank my friend and sometimes podcast cohost Julian M. of THEM Anime Reviews, without whom this list would not exist at all, since several months ago I mentioned to them that I was on the fence about making one, and they strongly encouraged me to try my damnedest.
In addition to Julian, I want to take the time to individually thank some friend groups of mine, mostly in the form of Discord servers with funny names. Shout out to: Magic Planet Anime’s very own server, which you can still join in the link below, the similarly named but unrelated Magic Planet server, Mugcord, the Secret Scrunkly Server, The Donut Zone, and the LOVE BULLET fan server. I’ll just also go ahead and shout out every single person who follows me on Bluesky, Tumblr, and Anilist. You guys rock, and you make my life better. I mean that.
As for what 2025 will hold for Magic Planet Anime? I don’t know! I’ve learned to not try to make any big predictions, but I want to keep writing. Because I love doing it, because you guys like reading it. I hit the big 3-0 this year, no more need for rounding up, but I don’t think MPA is going anywhere. I’m going to do this until they put me in the ground.
Now then, I’m going to be taking the rest of the year off. See you in January for seasonal premieres!
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“Goodbye, sekai!”
The Magic Planet 