Granblue Fantasy the Animation: From the makers of the classic Final Fantasy games, including music by Nobuo Uematsu, comes Granblue Fantasy. I could feel a lot of FF vibes. The art style is a little weird, but I like it. This is a much better generic fantasy story than Chain Chronicle was, despite having a much lower budget and worse art/animation. But it still pales in comparison to Tales of Zestiria or, say, the unique and interesting world of Atelier Escha & Logy. There's just no 'value added' to this story. It feels like it's been told a million times before. Aside from the blue-haired girl being beautiful, what's the reason to be watching this show in particular? Well, it's inoffensive, so there's no reason not to be watching either. Unfortunately, the winter season only includes episodes 1 and 2. We have to wait until April for episode 3 to arrive. It was nice while it lasted, though. Pass.
BanG Dream: This is the last debuting show of the winter season. And boy did they save the best for last. The art is beautiful, the characters are immediately appealing, funny, and unique. I love how quick the pacing is too. Quick montages suffice for this series where in other shows it would have taken four episodes just to get where they are now at the end of episode one. I'm getting a great K-On! vibe out of this show. Even if all they do is make a pale facsimile of K-On!, that's still an all time great anime. It also reminded me a bit of Love Live!, and if you're doing that you're also very much on the right track. Idol Jihen let me down, but I think BanG Dream is the perfect replacement. Idol Jihen won't make my rankings, but I'm pretty sure BanG Dream will. Best of all, we don't have to wait until April for the next episode of BanG, it will come swinging around again for the next eleven weeks. From here on it's banging time. Pass.
I'm convinced Seiren isn't worthy to be mentioned alongside Amagami SS. It's a good show, but the male lead has no spine. He needs to act more like Yuuji from Grisaia no Kajitsu and stop letting girls push him around. I don't see why a girl would be attracted to anyone who can't even stand up for himself, and we're to believe he can bag six different girls with this type of behavior? Man, girls in Japan must be easy meat. . .
The current arc of Naruto I'm rewatching is just so ridiculously bad. They're trying to save Sasuke 'from himself', but they make bad decisions from beginning to end. Like Sakura trying to talk Naruto out of his berserk demon fox form and just getting hit instead. Or Kabuto and Orochimaru actively trying to heal and help them even as they try to kill Kabuto and Orochimaru. Or the fact that when our heroes did have the chance to kill Kabuto, they instead spared him for no earthly reason imaginable. The amount of insanely stupid decisions that occur during this arc are just impossible to stomach. The series was much better before, and it gets much better afterwards once Pain takes the stage, but God this section is abysmal. I want my #1 anime of all time to be flawless. Naruto is a complete story, which means it doesn't have the same flaw as most of its competition, but that's still not good enough. Bakuman is not only complete, it's also flawless. At no point does anyone in the story make an unbelievably stupid and nonsensical decision. The same for Cross Game. That kind of proper decision making should be the bare minimum for anyone in the top ten, nevermind #1.
I tend to rerate everything at the end of every season, so at that time I'm going to have to seriously consider where Naruto really belongs.
Currently my weekly watch list looks like this:
1. Youjo Senki
2. Tales of Zestiria the X
3. Rewrite
4. BanG Dream
5. Dragon Ball Super
6. Naruto Shippuuden
7. Urara Meirochou
8. Kemono Friends
9. Mahoutsukai Precure
10. Konosuba 2
11. One Piece
12. Demi-chan wa Kataritai
13. Masamune-kun no Revenge
14. Seiren
15. Chaos;Child
16. Eidlive
17. Idol Jihen
18. Koro-sensei Quest
19. Minami Kamakura Koukou Joshi Jitensha-bu
20. Schoolgirl Strikers
21. Hand Shakers
But there's a good chance I'll drop everything from #15 on down sooner or later. It feels halfway between fun and a chore watching everything from Chaos;Child on down. I'm pretty confident in Seiren and everything above it though. They're delivering all the beauty, laughs and action I could ask for. Even if the winter season does end up with just 14 shows, that's still quite a lot. With the addition of BanG Dream into the lineup, I really have no complaints left with this amazing season.
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