When the spring anime season began, I was watching a lot of series. Now that it's ending, which survived, and how good were they respective to each other? Let's put a final stamp on this season, get the aftertaste out of our mouths, and look forward to the summer season instead.
These series are not ranked in terms of their overall quality, but only in specifically how excited I am to see the very next episode to come out. In those terms, who won spring 2012?
1. Smile Precure.
2. Saki Achiga.
3. Fate/Zero.
4. Hunter x Hunter.
5. AKB0048.
6. Natsuiro Kiseki.
7. Ginga E Kickoff.
8. One Piece.
9. Hyouka.
10. Naruto.
11. Space Brothers.
12. Kore ha Zombie Desuka?
13. Medaka Box.
14. Sengoku Collection.
15. Shining Hearts.
16. Kuroko no Basuke.
17. Sankarea.
18. Mouretsu Pirates.
19. Kimi to Boku.
I dropped the rest. I would have dropped even more shows, but they were ending soon anyway so there was no harm in just watching through to the end. Kore ha Zombie is pretty much on the edge of watchability. If these series hadn't been ending soon anyway, I would've given up on them, but their brevity was their saving grace. I watched so many episodes of Kishi no Area, and it's still going with no end in sight. The same boring soccer done in slow motion with annoying announcers who explain everything on the side, the same dumb idea of a guy haunted by his brother's left-behind soul, and the same empty flirtation between boys and girls with no deeper meaning. Repeating yourself doesn't contribute to length. A repeating decimal is infinitely long. A story that doesn't cover new ground every episode is a story that needs to end already.
If Kuroko no Basuke keeps dragging on, spending more time trash talking members of the other team than actually playing basketball, I'll drop it too. I can't imagine watching 24 or 48 eps of such chest-thumping nonsense.
One Piece and Naruto are portraying scenes in the manga, but at such an infuriatingly glacial pace that they really aren't fun to watch. Zombie Ninjas is a pretty dumb plot line to begin with, but One Piece was much better in the manga, where things zipped along, than the slow-motion version delivered in the anime. Therefore series which are actually the top of the world from an overall perspective don't score anywhere near the top of my spring season.
Only the top five series really have something to deliver, that leave you begging for the next episode. 6-11 have rare flashes of brilliance that make you want to watch the next episode too, in hopes of seeing another. 12-19 are generally series full of unfulfilled promise and broken dreams, that never went so far as to actively cause me to dislike the characters/story, and thus I couldn't shake off either, like a bad habit. For a newcomer who hasn't seen any of these series, I can only recommend 1-11 at best.
The good news is most of 1-11 is continuing into the summer season. Saki, Hyouka, One Piece, Naruto, Smile Precure, Hunter x Hunter, and Space Brothers are sure to continue. I believe AKB0048 and Ginga E Kickoff are also continuing, which is 9/11 of the good spring season will carry over into summer. If the summer season can just produce 3 decent series of its own, it will improve on the spring 2012 anime experience.
Let's hope that Fate/Zero's success leads to a new season of Fate/Hollow or Fate - Heaven's Feel, or Fate Ataraxia or etc, etc. In that case, even though we mournfully see the passing of one great epic, it's just the chance for the beginning of another. As for Natsuiro Kiseki, the only good anime we need bid goodbye to, its story was so inherently limited that this was a proper place for it to end, so I bear no hard feelings for its passing. Like Ano Hana, even good stories must end, if their narrative structure is built that way from the beginning. If they didn't end, they wouldn't be good anymore.
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