Of course… WP managed to somehow eat the introduction I’d written, and now the page has been published. Ah well, consider it written and posted and pretend I said something intelligent and witty here.
Then hit the jump, and let’s take a look at the songs in this week’s squares!
O1 Encouragement of Climb 2 / Yama no Susume 2
Natsuiro Present (Summer Colored Present) • Yuka Iguchi, Kana Asumi, Yōko Hikasa and Yui Ogura
I think I fell in love with OP the very first time I saw it… The song just sounds so happy and fun! Then I looked up the lyrics… And they were pretty banal. It’s often interesting to look at the lyrics and see how (if) they relate to show, this time it was a mistake.
I2 Orange
Hikari no Hahen • Yu Takahashi
The OP starts with Naho looking lonely and pensive… And from there, the symbolism just builds. As the season progresses, the images of summer, of friendship, gather more meaning. I’ve always loved OP’s that are so tightly intertwined with the anime itself.
B4 Nana
Rose (Broken Rose) • Anna Tsuchiya (BLAST)
Explaining why I like this tune requires digging a bit into my musical history… I am a child more of the 70’s than the 80’s, and I’m still a fan of early 70’s rock. But the late 70’s/early 80’s alternative/New Wave/punk is my favorite period/style of music. In that era, there was a lot of music by German bands on MTV and various radio stations… And Broken Rose somehow reminds me of that era. I can see me, and Charlie, and Dave sitting in Casablanca or The Casbah (our favorite nightclubs) rocking out to this song. It’s solid rock tune (something rare in anime OP music) on it’s own, but it also somehow invokes a strong sense of nostalgia.
Correctly identified by Dawnstorm, anime correctly guessed by Wingking.
B5 Angel Beats!
Your Soul, My Beats • Lia
Sometime all there is to say is “I LOVE this tune”. Not everything is can be explained logically… Nor, I think, should it be. Just let your heart sing!
Correctly identified by Wingking.
O5 Princess Principal
The Other Side of the Wall • Void_Chords feat. MARU
On top of rockin’ out – this song somehow sounds like it could be used as the theme song for a James Bond movie (especially the 60’s Sean Connery version that I grew up on). Appropriate for a spy series, no?
I previously broke down the symbolism in the OP in my post Let’s get ready to start! Some Summer 2017 openings considered and reviewed.
Correctly identified by Wingking.
Apprentice Mages Lounge. 
O1 was YnS??? Dammit, I knew that one was bothering me! I must’ve stared a hole in that corner for ten minutes. Now I know what threw me off, though: in the greyed-out version it looks like Aoi has long hair. So I was trying to think of any cute girl shows with a long-haired girl somewhat resembling the one in that picture, and of course I couldn’t come up with any.
Songs on my own iTunes playlist: 0/5. I would’ve bought Natsuiro Present a long time ago, but naturally they don’t carry it, and I thought I’d already bought My Soul, Your Beats, but I just checked and apparently I haven’t. I have other Lia songs, and other Angel Beats songs, but not that one. I’ll have to remedy that next time I go shopping.
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That’s kinda the point of the blur/grey out… :) It was more effective on some than others, even though I manually applied additional blur to a couple of the more obvious ones. (Designing this turned out to be way harder than I thought it would be… and didn’t entirely work in retrospect.)
I buy as much as I can from iTunes, otherwise I hoist the Jolly Roger and head out.
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Too bad you didn’t get more participation for the amount of work you put into this. I’ve been enjoying it, at least.
I’ve never really been a big music pirate, TBH. Even in the heyday of Napster I wasn’t much of a file sharer. Most of these songs aren’t hard to find streaming when I just want a quick fix anyway, although for some of it I have to surf the backchannels of Vimeo and Dailymotion. King Records especially is way too draconian about keeping their artists off YouTube.
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Posting it during hiatus (and I’ve been on semi-hiatus commenting elsewhere as well) was probably not my best move… But at the time it seemed like a good way to keep the content flowing during my ‘staycation’.
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O1 bothered me the most of the ones no-one guessed, and now I’m predictably miffed that I didn’t guess it.
“Broken Rose” is one of the very few anime opening songs whose title I actually know. It was the easiest to guess on the whole board (and the only one I can say I fully guessed).
3 weeks left now. Currently, O3 is the one that bothers me the most. (I forget if anyone already guessed this.)
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No, O3 has yet to be guessed… Seems a lot of people based their guesses on shows I like, and that’s one I haven’t actually talked about much.
And it never occurred to me how closely “favorite OP/songs” and “favorite shows” correlated.
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O3 seems to show girls running. This rules out around 5 % of all anime, I’d say… But it does look somewhat familiar in style.
I wonder how closely favourite openings correlate with favourite shows for me. Does any of my favourite shows actually have my favourite openings? The Eccentric Family, sure, but other than that? Denpa Onna, maybe. And I wouldn’t call shows like Dantalian no Shouka or Mouretsu Pirates favourite shows of mine. Definitely not Elfen Lied. Interesting topic.
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I’ve never bothered to rank my favorite OPs, I just keep a running list and add to it whenever I find another one that I like – there are about 50 OPs on that list right now. But out of curiosity I just went down the list and marked the ones that I feel like would be top ten candidates if I did try to rank them. I ended up marking 13, and the only two that came from shows in my “Tier 1” favorites group are the OPs for Toradora (“Pre-Parade”) and Yuki Yuna. Although if just having an OP anywhere on the list is good enough, then eight of my eleven Tier 1 shows meet that standard. So I guess it’s fair to say that most of my favorite shows have OPs I like, but most of them aren’t necessarily my absolute favorites.
No idea on O3, I gave up on that one pretty fast. I think I might’ve just now figured out G1, though: I think that’s going to be “Moon Pride” from Sailor Moon Crystal. Which was a good song, even if I have less-than-fond memories of the series itself.
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These are not really a ranking of my “24 absolute/tier 1 favorites”, they’re just the first 24 anime/OP tunes that came to mind as I was compiling a list of candidates over a week or so. (And the list was also limited because I limited myself to one-per-franchise.) If I were to do it again, there’d be overlap I’m sure… but I suspect the lists would not be identical.
Heck, I have a song (Breaking Blue) on my anime playlist from an anime (Girly Air Force) that I dropped.
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I’d be very surprised if you don’t recognize the anime when it’s revealed.
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