Seems to me that I’m watching more anime series this season than I have been recently. Though I’m keeping up with some of the long-running series I have been, there has been the return of second seasons of a couple of shows I liked before, plus the addition of a number of slice of life stories which have a bit unexpectedly captured my interest.
One show I definitely didn’t expect to like as much as I do is Gundam Build Fighters. As a big-time Gundam fan, I was very skeptical of a show that isn’t in-universe, and though I kind of liked the shorts that were done in a similar vein earlier this year about the Gunpla side of things, I didn’t know how this would work as a real series. Well, the premise and some of the execution are still cheezy, but it’s a not-so-bad kind of cheezy. and it’s a fun little show for what it is. I still don’t consider it a real Gundam show, but it’s not really meant to be, and since I also used to build Gundam models, I find it a kind of cute parody of the whole model-building culture.
There are a bunch of comedies this year of varying quality. I’m liking YuuShibu, an interesting comedic take on what happens to heroes and demon lords once there’s no more war. NouKome, on the other hand, is taking a while for me to warm up to; a student is forced to choose between two embarrassing things several times a day. This leads to funny situations and awkward school relationships. One day, a girl falls on him from the sky, and she’s sent to help him get rid of this curse. A favorite of mine this year is the romantic comedy Golden Time, which is based on a manga of the same name. A law student attends college in Tokyo a year after losing his memories in an accident. He meets some interesting people in his college, including a beautiful girl that’s given to self-delusions, her childhood friend who is desperately trying to extricate himself from her delusions, and a second-year student who seems to be drawn to the amnesiac for reasons that become clear later in the story. It’s a good time.
As for dramas, there’s Nagi no Asakura, an interesting story of culture clash among different groups of school kids. There are a group of humans who can also breathe underwater, and they live next to a group of regular humans; fear and distrust of each other permeate the two communities, and it’s at this time that the high school for the diminishing population of water-breathers closes, which forces those kids to go to school on land. Gingitsune is a story of a girl who can see the heralds of the gods at her family’s shrine, and the interesting fox herald that resides there.
We get some favorites back for new seasons — Kuroko’s Basketball, Valvrave the Liberator, Freezing and Infinite Stratos. As usual, Valvrave is a little weird and quite violent, but it’s pretty interesting, and Kuroko’s Basketball picks back up with the Winter Cup tournament as it continues on the path that the manga is leading. Freezing Vibration picks up the manga storyline after the original anime series ends, but it rearranges a couple events first. Kingdom gets a new season as well, though I haven’t been following that one as closely as before.
There are probably a couple other series that I’m leaving off — the lineup’s that extensive this time around. I’ll edit this if I can think of anything else.