It’s that time of year again… As one season comes to end, another season begins. That whole circle-of-life thing. Or, at least that whole anime calendar cycle thing. Except for a couple of standouts (which I’ll talk about in my upcoming season review post), Spring 2018 wasn’t that great… But a new season brings new hope, and there’s some potential for Summer 2018.
The picture, taken from Mount Omuro on the Izu peninsula, is actually related to my most anticipated anime of the season… Can you guess what it is? Hit the jump to find out and to see more of what I expect from the upcoming season!
I normally don’t get too excited about seasonal shows until I see if they’re going to get a legal stream in the US. But that doesn’t mean I don’t look forward to some shows and hope they get a legal stream…
I’m not going to give formal “tiers” as some folks do (and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that), I usually do but just didn’t feel like it this time.
I’m going to just list off the shows more-or-less by the level of anticipation.
Encouragement of Climb 3 / Yama no Susume 3
Aoi, Hinata, Kaede (Best Girl), and Kokona return for another season of mountain climbing adventure. I’m not going to lie, flat out my most anticipated show this season. When I talked about the “Cute Girls Having an Adventure” genre in my Winter 2018 Preview, this was the show I was thinking about most. If you enjoyed Yuru Camp and/or A Place Further than The Universe… I suspect you might enjoy Encouragement. Not as laid back as Camp, and certainly not as dramatic as Universe, it’s a solid character driven SOL show.
Honoka, a photographer, features in the artwork and the PV… so maybe I need to finish the Photography in Anime feature on her that I’ve been pecking away at for months now.
While the standout second season isn’t streaming anywhere, the first is still solid and worth watching and is streaming on Crunchyroll. It’s a short (3mins/episode), so it won’t take much time, so if you haven’t I encourage you to watch it.
Attack on Titan 3 / Shingeki no Kyojin 3
A show that needs no introduction or explanation from me…
Honestly, I dithered over where to put AOT on the anticipation scale. If you were reading this blog back in Spring 2017, you’ll remember that I didn’t think very highly of the second season. (And I wasn’t alone in that, it was a mess.) However, when Titan is good – it’s very good. (And when it’s bad, it’s very bad.)
So it’s end up near the top of the list, but I’m not sure why.
Grand Blue Dreaming
1st PV
2nd PV
I’ve read the manga, and honestly the first PV is an epic troll. The second PV, if you know what you’re looking at, is a bit more truthful. Grand Blue is about drinking, partying, various shenanigans, oh… and occasionally they go diving. I’m curious to see how they choose to play it.
That brings us to the end of the anime I know much of anything about/am very seriously looking forward to… Everything below is a bit more speculative.
Revue Starlight / Shōjo Kageki Revue Starlight
This falls under the “if you know Derek at all” category… I pretty much always at least check out idol shows. Starlight seems like there may be something more than usual, so we’ll see. I’m hoping it’s the in-universe idol unit that singing the theme song in the PV, because they’re pretty damn good.
Music Girls / Ongaku Shoujo
I can’t find much about this one other than that it’s what sounds like a fairly generic idol show… But I’ll check it out on that basis alone.
Speaking of idol shows, as far as Back Street Girls goes… I’m undecided as of yet. It seems faintly repugnant to me, though I can’t explain why. I’ll wait for the initial reviews and impressions to roll in.
Hanebado!
I’m slowly becoming something of a fan of sports anime, at least those that feature cute girls. :) Seriously though, this does look like a straight up sports anime and thus worth checking out.
Harkuna Receive
Another sports anime? From the PVs, I can’t really tell if this is CGDCT, fan-service oriented, or if there’s anything serious to it all. Still, why not. It’s not as if I object to fan-service so long as there’s decent characters and a competently executed plot. With rare exceptions, there’s gotta be something more than just skin and bounce to grab my attention.
Aguu: Genius Dolls / Aguu: Tensai Ningyou
The description sounds… generic. But the art style looks interesting, and the PV (especially the music) is pretty hot. So, sure… Why not?
Chio’s School Road / Chio-chan no Tsuugakuro
The PV opens with a schoolgirl on a stripper pole – and from there it just gets weird. The description implies that weird just might be the whole point… OK, you’ve got my attention!
Cells at Work
Cells falls into the “looks cute, sure why not?” category…
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OK, once I’m down to one-liners and “sure, why not”… It’s time to wrap this up. As usual, there’s a ton more shows I’m mildly curious about but won’t be heartbroken if they don’t get a legal stream. No point in trying to list them, and it’s hard to come up with something to say about them.
I’m also going to try to not overload myself this season. (As if! Famous last words.) From mid/late-August through the first week of September I have commitments that will eat a ton of time and catching up on watching will be difficult. (Let alone writing!)
Anyhow, what do you think of these shows? What are you looking forward to? Drop a comment and let me know!
Apprentice Mages Lounge. 
I’m still stuck half-way through season 2 of Yama no Susume. I have to finish it soon, but there’s little time…
Aguu looks interesting, but it also looks like a show that might end up unwatchable for someone with my combo of photosensitivity and motion sickness. We’ll see.
Hanebado and Harukana Receive are both on my list, with Hanebado having the edge, but I’m not expecting that much from either of them. Well, I’d have said the same thing about Keijo!!!!!!!!, which I ended up loving.
I’m intrigued by what you say about Grand Blue; it’s risen on my curiosity scale.
Chio makes my curiosity list. Others that do are Satsuriko no Tenshi (girl and serial killer trapped in a strange house; good visuals), Jashin-chan Dropkick, which is almost certainly terrible, but has an off-chance to be great absurdist comedy (if you don’t mind the obvious ecchi).
My top pick for the season is Tsukumogami Kashimasu, a show about a shop that lends out everyday items in old Edo, some of which are Tsukumogami. It could be dull, but it could also be quite good, and if it is, it has the chance to be special.
Slice of life comedy I’ll probably at least enjoy mildly is Asobi Asobase. I like the art style, and it’s a non-game-adaption show by Seiji Kishi (Yuki Yuna, Tsuki ga Kirei, Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita…), so at the very least it’s not going to be terrible (although the preview isn’t terribly promising…).
Then there are a couple of maybe shows I’ll talk about when I get to them.
The big show for me, not my top pic it pains me to say, though is Hi Score Girl. It’s a cute romance anime coating strepped over a huge core of acrade gaming nostalgia, and it hits just my era. I’ve read a little of the manga (an earlier anime, Pupipo, was cute and uses characters from this one in a completely unrelated magical realist setting, so given the topic, I was curious), and loved what I read. I soooo wanted to see the anime, then it got announced and canceled due to copyright issues with SNK Playmore. And now it’s back and I’d be excited, but… 3D-CGI? Why???????? Nooooo!!!! Well, I’ll watch it. I’ll definitely watch it and geek out about the era of aracde gaming. This is so me. It should have been my top pic of season, but… 3D-CGI. Deep Sigh Maybe the decision was made for more seamless integration of game graphics (though they’re likely not even getting to Virtua Fighter, if it’s one-cour, so I’m not convinced). However, the story’s worth it in any medium, and if the nostalgia factor’s there it’s probably still a must watch. But… 3D-CGI!!! (Oh, I’ll shut up now.)
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Yes, yes you should get caught up on Yama no Susume. :) Of course, I’m a huge fan.
Thanks for reminding me about Tsukumogami Kashimasu, I need to remember to point that out to my wife if we get a stream. It is on my “curious about list”, but supernatural is way more her bag than mine.
The PV for High Score Girl doesn’t look that bad, but it’s nowhere on my list. I have no nostalgia for that era… My nostalgia is for the first and second waves. Though I wasn’t fond of ’em at first, at my local arcade my Jr year in high school my favorite pinball game was pulled and replaced with Asteroids.
I hope it ends up working out for you. It looks like Wing is looking forward to it too.
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Yeah, it looks okay, but that’s about it. Goo look for Pupipo; I’d have preferred that aesthetic a lot. But they at least get the mood right, so there’s that.
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In another world where I still had time to watch a full slate of seasonal anime, I’d still find this season pretty underwhelming. As it is, the only shows that I can definitely say I’ll watch if I have time are High Score Girl and (obviously) YnS 3. The latter I will simply make time to watch, as long as someone picks it up for streaming. And High Score Girl is right in my nostalgia zone, with the description talking about a main character who’s a 6th grader in 1991 living down at the arcades and meeting a girl over Street Fighter 2. I was a 7th/8th grader in 1991 living down at the arcades, and there was a period of time where I’d get my weekly allowance and go straight down to the arcade (or more often the neighborhood pizza parlor) to spend it playing SF2. Never met any girls who played it though, unfortunately – that’s where fiction departs from real life.
“The PV opens with a schoolgirl on a stripper pole….” Wait, what? Of course I had to watch that PV just because you said that, and wtf? Went and did some more research, looks like I’m seeing a lot of comparisons of Chio to Nichijou from people who read the manga. Hm. Shows like that can be very hit or miss for me, and I’d probably have to watch it seasonally if I watched it at all, because with that kind of comedy I usually can’t sit through more than one or two episodes at a time.
Grand Blue sounds like K-On with alcohol.
Harukana Receive – I’m kind of surprised no one’s made a beach volleyball anime before, given the obvious sex appeal of the sport. I might check it out if I find the time, but being a fan of volleyball in real life (and someone who played for my middle school team), it would have to treat the sport seriously for me to stick with it. Still, it is a Manga Time Kirara series, which I usually like, and Seven Seas apparently thought enough of the manga to license it for North America, so I have to think (hope) it has more going for it than just bikini bodies. What doesn’t inspire confidence is the animation studio, who’s history is mostly just doing outsourced animation for other studios and a few co-productions with Satelight. I’ve never even heard of the two previous shows that they were fully in charge of animating.
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Crunchy announced YnS yesterday, so (crossing fingers) we should get a NA stream. Pretty much everything they pick up does. Hope we get a chance to chat about it.
1991… I don’t even think we had an arcade here then. I know there wasn’t one in my end of the county. The one down south may have been open then, but I rarely had reason to go down there. Either way, I was working killer hours that year. (Wouldn’t have worked so hard had I any clue the boss was going to screw me like he did.) As I said to Dawn, my nostalgia era is for the first and second waves of video games.
Re:Grand Blue… It’s a frat dramedy, so you may be right.
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Oh good! I hadn’t seen that announcement, but glad to hear it. Now they just need to get season 2 back.
Yeah, the pure standalone arcades were mostly gone by the early 90s, but there were still a lot of businesses that also had game rooms. The two biggest “arcades” in my area that I frequented belonged to the miniature golf place and one of the local movie theaters (which had a huge space for games because it had been built in the late 70s, not like these modern multiplexes where the alleged game room has space for maybe two uprights and a pinball machine). The pizza parlor around the corner where I did most of my SFII playing normally had about 6 uprights and a pinball machine in stock at any given time, plus a few more in tabletop mini-cabinets at the bar. My earliest memory of that place was actually one of my brothers bringing me in and paying for me to play a game of Star Wars while we were there. You know, the one with the wire frame graphics. That would’ve been around 1983/84, so I was probably about 5 or 6. Although my very earliest arcade memory is actually playing Berzerk at my grandmother’s grocery store while Mom and Grandma were in the checkout line. Four year old me loved that game just because it talked (“Intruder alert! Intruder alert!”), which was such a novelty back then.
You’re actually around the same age as my brothers, who were all born from 1957-1965 (I was a late-life child), and one of my brothers was really into arcade gaming during that early golden era. Asteroids, Defender, Star Castle, Super Cobra, Robotron, and a few pinballs like Black Knight and Eight Ball Deluxe…those were “his” games, the ones he still talked about for years after the fact (he was justifiably proud of his Defender skills in particular). 1987 was about the time I started hopping on my bike and going out to play games on my own, so I missed most of those, but there was a few places around that held on to some of their classics, so I was able to git gud on a few of them like Moon Patrol. Most I never had a chance to play until emulation came along in the late 90s, though. Nowadays they have the California Extreme classic arcade convention in the Bay Area every year, where they truck in 500+ vintage arcade and pinball machines and everything’s free to play with the entry fee. Me and my arcade-nut brother and some of our friends always go to that together, so I can get my fix that way.
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I was a child in the early eighties and playing lots of games: Pac Man, Scramble, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Dig Dug, Pengo, Crazy Climber… Most of those were standing in cinemas, but a rather seedy hotel also had a backroom. Street Fighter II was my teenage years. It was the first game I remember you could “play through” (I was too bad to manage that). I always wanted to play Vega, and then there was suddenly a version where I could. Good times.
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Looks like you’ve got a great list sorted! 😊
I agree with you when it comes to AoT. I don’t know how excited to feel about it because the last season was a mess. The pv looks good so hopefully it’ll be a good watch but who knows really.
I can’t wait to watch Grand Blue! It looks like a great comedy about the reality of college life!
With Hanebado, when I heard about it, I knew I’d watch it because it’s about badminton :’) I’m usually a sucker for sports anime but an anime about one that I enjoy playing? Definitely going to have to watch that!
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Re:Grand Blue, the manga was pretty good, so I’m hoping for good things from the anime!
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Yeah, I’ve heard that manga is pretty good. Hopefully the anime will up to it!
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