Seems a lot of my regular commenters enjoyed using the Winter 2023 First Impressions post as something of a forum during the season… Thought I’d try a bit of an experiment in doing so for the end-of-season post. I’ll put this up today for people to get a head start on, then update and add to it myself as the shows cross the finish line… Maybe better than One Big Post that never gets finished/written in the holiday rush? We’ll see. Worth trying anyhow.
Keep and eye on FB and Twitter (“X”) I’ll post there when there are significant updates or comments to this post. (With Twitter (“X”) being something a zombie at this point, I really need to get a post up with all the places you can follow me.)
As usual, the comment section is yours! Drop a comment on this season, the weather, whatever you fancy. Let’s chat!
Apprentice Mages Lounge. 
I’ll wait until more shows have finished; next week or so should be fine. But this was/is a great season. Very few disappointments (Jujutsu Kaisen 2, Shy), and none of them downright bad. An elite tier show in Frieren, a great show in Apothecary Diaries (but Maomao has to be the character of the season for me), and some very good shows, too, some of which saw coming and luckily didn’t disappoint, while others came out of left field (love it when that happens).
There are shows I dropped I’d have finished any other seasons, and a trainwreck so bad I couldn’t look away, which is rare in itself (mostly I just drop bad shows). I think I’ll provide a lose ranking of everything I watched with comments, once the season’s wrapped up properly.
I’m totally not ready to wrap this season up. December especially was nuts in real life, so I’ve often been one or two episodes behind (this is probably also due to the sheer number of shows). I’m really happy with this season, that much is certain.
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It’s been an OK season for me mostly… Only two drops, but both because the show suddenly turned to shit. A couple of standouts, but I want to talk about those on their own.
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What a fascinating experiment!
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Thought I’d lean in to how my readers are using the blog, always worth a try, right?
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Can we at least talk about the ballroom scene? (Those in the know, know what series and what episode.) I was flabbergasted to learn the entire scene was hand-animated. As someone who misses actual animation in my anime I really appreciated that. And the director having the confidence to resist the temptation to throw in dialogue or internal monologue, and just let the animators tell the story using body language and facial expressions… wow.
There’s not really even a contest for AotS this fall; it’s not even close.
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I’m not sure why we’re being coy about the name of the series… But I’ll play along.
And yeah, the ballroom scene blew me away for exactly the reasons you say. And if you haven’t, go back and watch closely the evolution of their facial expressions across the scene. I’ve seen a lot of complaints about how “emotionless” the characters are… But they’re not really. It’s just their facial expressions aren’t sensationalized or over amplified – the animators use them much more subtly.
I’m loving watching those two dorks. And their story makes for an interesting contrast to the main, and much more tragic, romance. (The ring scene the other week? I was going “dude, you’re not gonna -“… And then he did.)
Yeah, I’ve been saying “Overtake! is the AOTS that isn’t the other show”. Seriously, old friend, if you can shoehorn the time – you need to watch it.
I’ve seen both Godzilla and The Boy and the Heron. Some minor quibbles with former (mostly over the design and direction of the CGI), and definitely some thoughts on the latter.
And have you seen the Minus One is getting a black and white release? Only Japan so far, but I will definitely go see it if it gets a US release.
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On a non-anime note. Godzilla Minus One. Go see it. That is all.
Haven’t seen The Boy and the Heron yet, but will do so soon.
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So this is everything I watched, roughly in order. Shows can move up or down a few places depending on mood. I’ll separate tiers with “***”; show’s don’t cross these borders.
Frieren: My most anticipated anime, and it’s exactly what I expected after watching the trailer (yes, my expectations were that high). Really, everything about this show is done right, from the righting to the visual framing to the soundtrack. There’s nothing even close this season.
Apothecary Diaries: Maomao is the character of the season, and I do suspect a large part of this is Yuki Aoi. But the writing in the show’s good, too. The show uses chibis really well.
Dead Mount Death Play: To be honest, it feels like Baccano and Durarara were a practice run for this. The author has always been great at handling a huge cast with many factions who also have internal conficts, but here you can tell that he has the experience. Such a fun show.
Ancient Magus Bride: This season gets a bad rap for its school setting, but I really like all the new characters, and the show’s strong as ever with the otherworldly creatures. This season’s actually more consistent in quality than season one, but ultimately season one is still better for its higher highs.
Undead Unluck: I expected a trashy action anime that’s fun, but I misjudged the type. It’s not Killing Bites; it’s Crime Edge – which, for me, is even better. And there worldbuilding’s interesting, too. For example, I never noticed that the night sky was devoid of stars until a certain event. Charming dorks in a show that’s completely nuts. Love it.
Disgraced Noble Lady/Naughtiness: This is the rom-com of the season for me. The usual harem set-up has a clueless lead; this isn’t a harem, but you have two clueless leads. It’d dorky and charming. The leading lady is very much the anime equivalent to a Disney princess, and the “naughtiness” is rather family friendly. If I went back in time and described the show to myself, I probably wouldn’t expect to like it, but here I am.
S-Rank Daughter: Good fun. Has an actual plot I couldn’t predict. I was taken with the early episodes, but I was also worried that they’d drag out the joke of the daughter being too busy to get to see her Dad. I needn’t have worried. Some of the character designs actually remind me of updated and streamlined 70ies/80ies anime – not usually, but it’s there in some shots.
Shangri La Frontier: The show actually knows what it’s doing with its concept: a guy who’s usually playing bad games to defeat bugs and bad design plays a really good game and is really good at it, but also really inexperienced with basic stuff like tutorials. The best thing about this show, though, are the fight scenes. They really do feel like in-game fights. There’s a training arc where he has to defeat a gauntlet of monsters; he fails over a hundred times against a comparatively weak bird, because his build’s a really bad match.
Helck: A decently told story, with characters I like.
Spy X Family: I actually liked Yor’s arc, but it’s not enough; it’s the set-up. I hope we get more. Other than that it’s the same old fun show.
Yuzuki-san chi no yon Kyoudai: Well-executed feel-good show about four siblings. Good side-characters.
Saint’s Power is Omnipotent 2: I really liked the first season; this season wasn’t quite as good. But they did everything right with the core romance, and the confession I just watched was very well executed. For some reason, this is the one isekai where I can never forget that she’s from Japan, even the show mostly does (the usual I-miss-the-food token gestures are there.)
My New Boss Is Goofy: A feel-good show about recovering from an abusive boss that’s not going too deep into the gruesome stuff, but also doesn’t make light of it? A difficult balance, but well executed. Love this show.
Tearmoon Empire: Fun comedy with a gremlin princess stumbling into doing things right. Never going to be special, but it’s also not bad at anything it’s doing.
Dark Gathering: Among the best horror anime has to offer, but then I don’t think that horror is a strong suit of anime. One thing this anime understands is that horror isn’t just what might happen to you; it’s also what you have to do so it doesn’t happen to you.
Faraway Paladin 2: Liked season one, like this one a little less, but it’s still fine. I hope there’ll be another season.
Ragna Crimson: It’s a shounen fighter, but I’m having fun. A rather unusual main villain, with a rather unusual arc for a main villain. She needs to destroy humanity for her dragon god (who is maybe her own split personality), but she wants them to suffer as little as possible. She gets the typical crazy eyes, so you think she’s the typical type, but the character development shows it’s actually a deep-seated emotional need not to cause suffering… I haven’t seen a villain quite like that.
I’m in Love with the Villainess: One of the better entries in the oversaturated genres. Gets points for the protagonist explicitly confirming being a lesbian. Also, good cast: given that we’re in an otome game, the princes and putative love interests are pretty well used as background characters.
Shy: Yeah, this could have been better, but I am mostly having fun.
Kamonohashi Ron: Mystery shows shouldn’t work if you have to switch off your brain to enjoy them, but this one does. The plot keeps undermining itself, characters are inconsistent… But it’s just fun to watch.
Girlfriend X Girlfriend: What can I say, I sort of like the characters. They’re all dorks, and have a consistent personally. That said, it’s still not really a good show.
16Bit Sensation: Ah, this show. It has ideas that need to be executed well to work, and mostly they aren’t. I roll my eyes a lot at this show. However, there’s so much it gets right about the gaming eras and geekdom, that I actually sort of like the show. The OP/ED combo contains some really great pixel art, though. There’s a huge nostalgia bonus for this show. It’d probably be a tier lower if not for that.
Irregular Witch: The characters actually grow on me, and as hard as it may be to believe, the show can actually be surprisingly genuine at times. Better than episode one would have had me believe. The core joke, though, never goes away and doesn’t ever start being funny…
Returners Magic Should Be Special: Utterly avarage in every way, so it should be lower than this. I sort of like it, though, and I have no idea why.
Eminence in Shadow 2: Not the best show out there, but nothing if not consistent. Anyone who liked season one’s going to like season 2, and the reverse is true, too.
Dating Story: Not my kind of romance, really. I don’t see any chemistry between the leads; they’re ideal expies and little else to me. Nicole is the only character I actually like.
Jujutsu Kaisen 2: I haven’t been feeling this season, to be honest. It’s okay, but not more than that.
Playthrough/VMROO Life: Yeah, it’s exactly what’s on the tin. But it feels genuine, which pushes it up a tier.
I’ll Survive Using Potions: Look at the concept art, and know it’s a budget isekai; you’re pretty much getting what you expect. It gets bonus points for character designs I happen to like, and for a scene in episode one where the main character actually gets to say goodbye to friends and family in a dream. You don’t see that often.
100 Girlfriends: I’d probably have dropped this if people hadn’t given this good reviews, including people I wouldn’t have expected this from. I was curious; but I just can’t see it. One-note characters, annoying humour, occasionally actually clever (I didn’t expect that; but it’s not often enough to matter), sort of cute at times, sort of cringy at others. It’s marginally better than the first episode suggests, but – still – if you watch the OP, you know what to expect.
Protocol Rain: Feels like a competent imitation of a b-list PA Works show; too much drama, though. It does things individually right, but the accumulated effect is one of fatique. Pity, this could have been good, had it been more subdued. The potential’s there.
Goblin Slayer 2: Didn’t like season 1, but I’m more on board with season 2. It’s probably that my initial expectations were so low that the actual show could only go up. Why did I even click play on the show to begin with. I don’t know.
Shield Hero [I forget the number, but too many]: God knows why I still watch this. I didn’t even like season one too much. The show got worse as it went on, but it also got less annoying. Does that even out?
Seiken Gakuen…: Generic and forgettable.
Berserk of Gluttony: Oh dear. And that’s all I have to say.
Heat the Pig Liver: Saved by worldbuilding that’s actually got me guessing and interested. The show itself would be a tier lower if not for that. I just don’t click with all that annoying otaku perving. It’s not frequent enough to get used to, sadly.
Kingdom of Ruin: Dear god, that show. It’s bad. It’s not so bad it’s good, it’s so bad it’s bad. It’s the trainwreck you can’t look away from. It’s sometimes so edgy that ends up funny, but usually you just stare at the screen in disbelief that the show found a way to be even sillier.
I… I watched 37 anime…. No wonder I sometimes skipped a week this season…
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And… the software deleted the tier separators. Oh well, not that important.
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Show we have in common…
Frieren = Agreed, absolutely top notch. Even the weaker episodes are exceedingly well done.
Ancient Magus Bride = The ANN reviewer pointed out that we’re seeing a different side of Chise, one focused on other rather than herself. It’s been a fantastic development. I kind of agree with you on the seasons, but with the caveat that the 2nd cour of S1 has been the weakest so far. The 1st cour is still the absolute best of the series.
Spy X Family = The series would have to work hard to not be fun… I mean, it’s got Anya! But I don’t think the much ballyhooed Yor arc lived up to how it was sold by the fans.
Shy = I was always kind of on the fence about, but I think it was E6 that brought my interest in it to a screeching halt. The show and characters was NOT strong enough for the lengthy exposition. And then, we got the leaden drop of the League of Villains. I noped out.
Our Dating Story = I’m enjoying it despite the rough edges and heavy reliance on well worn rom-com tropes. It took a while though.
No Overtake!?
You shouldn’t have used asterisks for tier separators, because that’s the markdown for italicizing… That’s why I always use the “=” sign.
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CGI cars that go around in circles really fast struck me as not very motion-sickness friendly; that’s why I didn’t even try out the first episode. I might in the future, but… I’m still a little wary. In the end, it depends more on what they do with the camera, than what they do with the CGI itself, but my experience is that calculated and rendered movement encourages the sort of camera that makes me anywhere from queasy to ill.
I thought that was the case. Not sure I’ll remember next time; I think I made the very same mistake before. But then I have trouble focusing lately, so who knows.
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Ah, right. I always forgot about your motion sensitivity. My apologies.
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I largely agree with both of you on Frieren, Ancient Magus’ Bride, and SPY×FAMILY, so I’ll skip those and go to the ones we share but Derek doesn’t.
Tearmoon Empire: I think it may be at least partly because I had such very low expectations going in, but this is pure delight for me. Exactly my type of humor, it seems. Any opening that can make a guillotine seem alternately whimsical and menacing has my attention, and the stories are fairly smartly told, if sometimes perhaps a little implausible.
Dark Gathering: I still say that the show took a bit to find its feet, but by episode 10 or 12 it found that footing and turned into something even better than I’d hoped. I dunno, maybe Ai’s story just didn’t hit me right or something – at least until it did, because I’m actually kinda missing it at the moment (I still have the last two episodes to go). Whatever, certainly by the Castle spirit it had taken off, and the Househunting story was both superb and unsettling.
Kingdoms of Ruin: Okay, technically I dropped out in the middle of the fourth episode, but you’re right. It’s just awful.
I do want to interject that I don’t see a lot of people talking about Power of Hope, the “grown-up PreCure” series, and I can’t figure out why. It’s good stuff, especially so if you’re a magical girl fan, but also just as a series in itself. Putting former magical girls into a situation where they can’t just beat up the antagonist, and then throwing in a dark magical girl curveball, reminiscent of Yūki Yūna though not derivative of it*, into a PreCure story on top of it? Excellent. Also, bringing all three of the original PreCure “generations” into the story is pretty fun, even if juggling 11 main characters (Cure Black, Cure White, and Shiny Luminous; Cure Bloom/Cure Bright and Cure Egret/Cure Windy; and Cure Dream, Cure Rouge, Cure Lemonade, Cure Mint, Cure Aqua, and Milky Rose) makes the series a little cramped.
*Basically, there’s a reason that they stopped being PreCures as they grew older, it turns out. Not sure what impact, if any, that will have on Cure Butterfly, but then continuity between “generations” of PreCures isn’t a real concern of that franchise.
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My guess would be that PreCure is mostly not a big thing in English language fandom. It has has passionate fans in it’s niche, but it’s only recently gotten legal streams in the US. And it’s seen largely as a “kid’s show”, which further handicaps it.
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I mean, PreCure really is mostly a kids’ show. Liking it, at its best, is similar to liking SpongeBob or, more to the point perhaps, shows like She-Ra or Star vs. the Forces of Evil. At its worst, it’s purely forgettable glurge (or a typically poor Saban translation/rewrite). But PreCure Full Bloom seems to have higher aspirations. It’s no Madoka, but it is interrogating the premise of magical girls and finding a deeper level to them that seems more satisfying than just “beat up the problem”*. And it does it without being quite as grim as most dark magical girl shows, which seems like quite an accomplishment to me. As it happened, they did tie everything up in a mostly happy-ending bow in the final episode, but not without making it clear that the victory achieved was only partial and short-term, and that the work had to continue. Pretty heady stuff for a genre that is frequently not much different than the typical shōnen action series, with its escalating power-ups and endless battles except with frills and lace instead of gis and giant swords.
But yeah, I get it, there’s no real history to PreCure in the West quite yet, and I suppose that PreCure Full Bloom does rest at least a little on nostalgia. I’m still looking forward to the similar Witchy PreCure sequel, hopefully later this year, not least because Witchy PreCure was perhaps the weirdest PreCure generation to date.
*To a certain extent, Power of Hope seems almost like a direct response to Tokyo Mew Mew New, which proposed a similar issue but then set the conditions so that the solution really could be “beat up the problem”, which Power of Hope didn’t allow itself to do. Mew Mew limited itself to climate change, too, which is thematically appropriate, but not nearly as encompassing as Power of Hope’s seemingly insurmountable collection of issues.
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Reposting my reply to Dawn as top level comment (easier to find and reply to).
Frieren = Agreed, absolutely top notch. Even the weaker episodes are exceedingly well done.
Ancient Magus Bride = The ANN reviewer pointed out that we’re seeing a different side of Chise, one focused on other rather than herself. It’s been a fantastic development. I kind of agree with you on the seasons, but with the caveat that the 2nd cour of S1 has been the weakest so far. The 1st cour is still the absolute best of the series.
Spy X Family = The series would have to work hard to not be fun… I mean, it’s got Anya! But I don’t think the much ballyhooed Yor arc lived up to how it was sold by the fans.
Shy = I was always kind of on the fence about, but I think it was E6 that brought my interest in it to a screeching halt. The show and characters was NOT strong enough for the lengthy exposition. And then, we got the leaden drop of the League of Villains. I noped out.
Our Dating Story = I’m enjoying it despite the rough edges and heavy reliance on well worn rom-com tropes. It took a while though.
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Ah well, that didn’t work as well as I thought it would.
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