2022 in Review:

The biggest slice of this year's pie went to video games.  A tremendous number of games either came out this year, or I started playing this year, which turned out to be some of the best games ever made.  Out of those numerous games Fire Emblem: Three Houses takes the cake.  This is a game I played for almost 1,000 hours straight, winning over and over in different ways, down different routes, at different difficulties, playing all the DLC, and is unquestionably the greatest game ever made.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses has amazing plot, setting, characters and music, but what really stands out is the gameplay.  This is one of those rare games where actually playing the game is more fun than the cutscenes inbetween.  Many games would probably be better as movies, but not this one.  This game thrives when you take the controller into your hand.

Other games of note this year were Bravely Default II, Triangle Strategy and Xenoblade Chronicles 3.  Xeno 3 didn't have the gameplay quality of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but when it came to plot, setting, characters and music it was perfect.  One of the best plots to a video game ever, right up there with Final Fantasy 7.  Xeno 3 also took hundreds of hours to win, providing an absolutely fulfilling, incredibly emotional experience.

Rounding out the video game experience of the year came the middling quality titles -- Tactics Ogre Reborn, Star Ocean the Divine Force, Live A Live HD, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn and Path of Radiance.  I'll be playing Tactics Ogre and Star Ocean in 2023 as well.  These games weren't masterpieces like the above titles but they all had their charms and entertained me for a long time.

Second to video games in importance, 2022 saw a nice rebound in its quality of anime:

2022 Year in Anime Reviewed:

How did 2022's great franchises stack up against each other and what were they?

These six new series finally round out my top 200 anime.  Now I no longer need to rely on short movies to reach a nice round number, there are 200 legitimate series to watch.

1.  Utawarerumono S3

2.  Spy x Family S1

3.  Kimetsu no Yaiba S2 ending

4.  Extreme Hearts S1

5.  Ken Tensei S1

6.  Love Live! Nijigasaki High School S2 + Superstar S2

7.  The Eminence in Shadow (first cour)

8.  DanMachi S4 (first cour)

9.  Macross Delta Zettai Live (finally translated)

10.  Bleach 1,000 Year Blood War Arc (beginning)

11.  Shikkakumon 

12.  BanG Dream Poppin' Dream + 2nd Live movies + Circle Game ova's + Morfonication ova's

13.  Yama no Susume S4

14.  Shadows House S2

15.  Honzuki no Gekokujou s3 

16.  Fate/Kaleid Liner Licht + Fate/Grand Order Temple of Solomon movies (both finally translated)

17.  Shingeki no Kyojin Final part 2 

18.  Bastard!! S1

19.  Boku no Hero Academia S6 (first cour)

20.  Princesss Principal movie 2 (finally translated) + Easy Money ova + Revealing Reviews ova

21.  Kiniro Mosaic Thank You! (finally translated)

22.  Dragon Ball Super Hero

23.  SAO: Progressive movie 1 (finally translated)

24.  Hataraku Maou-sama! S2 

25.  One Piece (Wano continued)

26.  Tropical Rouge Precure (ending) and movie (finally translated)

27.  Magia Record the Final 

28.  Non non Biyori Nonstop oad

29.  Tales of Luminaria oavs.

This year is a great recovery from the previous two, relying on a bunch of movies that came out in Japan in 2021 as well as a lot of sequel works that have been in planning for a long time.  No more delays!  The future of anime is looking bright again.

In addition some good anime came out that isn't ranked but is still watchable this year:

Slow Loop

Akebi-chan no Serafuku

Shenmue the Animation

Shoukei Shoujo

Kakkou no Iinazuke

Healer Girl

Summertime Rendering

Cue!

Prima Doll

Luminous Witches

RWBY: Hyousetsu Teikouku

Shine Post

Isekai Meikyuu de Harem wo

Soredemo Ayumu wa Yosetekuru

Mushikaburi Hime

Delicious Party Pretty Cure

Urusei Yatsura (2022)

I also spent a good portion of the year rewatching all my great anime, including the anime that came out this year and even this season, so that I could proudly proclaim that I've not only watched but rewatched all the anime in my rankings, proving their rankings valid.

Last year I created a mess out of my anime rankings by taking out all movie-length shows and putting them in a separate category.  I spent all year cleaning up that mess and getting my rankings back to 200 strong with the sly inclusions of KonoSuba, DanMachi, Extreme Hearts, Bastard!, Shikkakumon, Ken Tensei, The Eminence in Shadow and Spy x Family.  I also took a lot of care reordering my rankings based on the new reality and providing the most accurate priority ordering of them yet.

As for visual novels only two came out this year, the short but nice Trinoline Genesis and Hoshizora no Memoria Eternal Heart.  So far I've finished Mare's route in Hoshizora and it was great as expected.  Hoshizora came out at a bad time when I was busy with other things so it will mostly be reserved for next year.  I also enjoyed the expanded version of Summer Pockets, Reflection Blue.  The Umi route was especially good.

I had better luck with regular novels.  Like usual I read a lot this year, from Spice/Parchment & Wolf to Index GT to Railgun SS to Xanth to Ryuou no Oshigoto to Isekai Kenkokuki to SAO to SAOAGGO to Vanity Fair to Bakemonogatari to Grimgar to Imouto Sae Ireba Ii to Haganai to Hataraku Maou-sama! to No Game No Life to 12 Kingdoms to The Last Shadow.  Haganai and Hataraku actually reached their endings.

The best part about reading books is you can also listen to music, and my music hall of fame received a lot of attention this year as well.  Last year I finished constructing my five tiered music hall of fame with 1100 songs per tier, but that doesn't mean all those ratings were correct or I was content with every song listed.  All year I've been fiddling with the ratings, flipping 4-star songs for 5-star songs, adding in new material from anime and video games that came out this year, and now correcting the hasty decisions I made kicking out genuinely good songs from my 1-star tier.  I also added a new genre identifier to every song as either a vocal or an instrumental piece.  Last year was a rough draft and this year is much more polished.  The 5-star, 4-star and 1-star tiers especially have become much more accurate over the course of the year.

I'm still not content with my music hall of fame as things stand.  There are many songs in my 1-star tier that new music needs to come in and replace.  But it's getting close to perfect.  I wouldn't be surprised if I could fix everything left that needs fixing next year.  You can really tell how good this music is by the fact that the end of the year was more fixated on listening to low-tier music than playing my all new visual novels and video games.  Even the low tier music is that enchanting.

Music can also be listened to while reading manga, and I read a lot of nice manga this year.  All new series like Sousou no Frieren (soon to enter my anime hall of fame), Sakura Saku, Ao no Hako and Datenshi Ron joined series that were beautifully finishing up like Sounan Desuka?, SAO Girls Ops, UQ Holder and Chihayafuru.  Older series were fully translated for the first time as well, like Lucky Star, Hanayamata and Kitakubu.  Hinowa ga Yuku came to a tragic early end, but at least it finished the arc it was on and that part of the story was brilliant as expected.

In addition to the more famous manga mainstays like Fairy Tail and One Piece, hundreds of decent series also plodded on with a few chapters or many chapters over the course of the year.  Even Berserk, Nichijou and Hunter x Hunter came back against long odds.  Especially with the beautiful ending of UQ Holder, which is also the ending of Negima, the best value-added manga of all time, 2022 did a great job manga-wise.

I continued editing my own book, 'In Another World With 100 Waifus,' four more times this year.  Each time I improved little things like phrasing, deleting extraneous 'evens,' or spelling, but mostly it was about refining the name gallery of Christopher's children.  The better the quality of the children, the better that reflects on their parents, the better the book becomes.  I changed dozens of names this time around, which is quite a lot, so I think '100 Waifus' is much better at the end of this year than it was at the beginning.  On top of that I also re-read some of my other books, 'Dead Enders,' 'Choice Givers,' 'Followers and Emulators,' 'Changeling' and 'Sellsword,' and corrected any spelling or grammar issues I found there as well.  I don't re-read these books as often so they really struck me how moving they were, they don't fall behind '100 Waifus' in anything but length.

In 2023 '100 Waifus' will continue to get better names as more great artistic works come out, hopefully including the characters from Tales of Arise, so my work on this book still isn't done, but like my music and anime halls of fame it's very close to perfect.

Sports had a lot to brag about this year.  The Winter Olympics which Russia totally dominated, especially in women's figure skating where they performed a bevy of never before seen tricks, the World Cup which featured Argentina's glorious victory and amazing play by soccer legends like Messi we'll never see again, March Madness, college football including two riveting semifinals, the NFL, and a lovely Super Bowl win by the Rams on their home field against a feisty Bengals.  I watched an insane amount of Winter Olympics and World Cup coverage, basically blasting away two months out of the year on these two events.  The Biathlon was addictive.  Men's, women's, this distance, that distance, individual, team, I didn't care.  Just give me more Biathlon.

There was one good movie this year, Top Gun 2, and some okay movies and tv shows like Doctor Strange 2 and Ms. Marvel.  Basically western fiction is dead in the water, though.

The midterms weren't as good as they should have been.  Republicans retook the House but lost a Senate seat overall.  I'm looking forward to 2024 when Trump is replaced with DeSantis and the Trump albatross is tossed overboard, at which point Republicans will win back everything.  If Trump hadn't thrown a hissyfit about phantom rigged elections we never would have lost those two Senate seats in Georgia and now we're stuck with Democrats owning the state for the next six years.

Of course the biggest event of the year was the war in Ukraine.  The good news is Russia invaded and conquered four new provinces.  The bad news is all four provinces haven't been fully secured, Donetsk's civilians are still being shelled daily, and Russia's military looks completely incompetent.  Eventually, in a long war of attrition, I expect Ukraine to run out of men, money and weapons, which will result in total sweeping victory for Russia.  Before then Russia has to drain dry all the weapons and ammunition of Europe and the USA, which it's well on its way to accomplishing.  Afterwards, when Ukraine can no longer fire a shot in its defense, it will be very interesting to see what peace terms Russia will accept.  At the very least I expect the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.  I'd also like to see the annexation of Mykolaiv, Odessa and Kharkov.  Whatever's left of Ukraine, if anything, will of course no longer be allowed to host NATO troops or missiles.  But that's something to look forward to next year or however many years it takes.  What is clear is that Russia can outlast Ukraine so the longer the war goes the more assured Russia's victory every day, even if they should have had a much faster easier time of it.

Russia's victory in Ukraine will pierce the bubble of invincibility and infallibility the West has been living in for the last thirty years.  Once it's clear that the West is not the preeminent power in the world, but a blustering fool with feet of clay, many things that have gone unquestioned since World War II will be open for questioning again.  Including the advisability of democracy, women's liberation, LGBT+, debt financing, open borders immigration, diversity, equity, inclusion, and anything else the West adopted but Russia/China did not.  There will be a worked example of a better way, proven better in that the two went up against each other directly and the other side won.  If Russia wins liberalism loses, which gets liberals off our necks and lets us breathe again all across the world.

As usual virtually everyone has come around to the conclusion that I was right all along and the Covid vaccines are worse than the disease, as shown by the lack of uptake on the latest booster shot.  However, I won't receive any credit on getting this right, as people will wave their hands and somehow explain that even though they aren't getting their vaccinations they're still pro-vax, unlike the kooky anti-vaxers.  A recent poll by Rasmussen showed that 7% of Americans reported severe side effects from their Covid vaccines.  Needless to say, 7% of Americans have not had a severe case of Covid, and the people who died of the vaccine weren't around to answer polls on how bad their reactions to the vaccines were.  The excess mortality rate around the world is around 20% higher this year, with no Covid but lots of vaccines, than it was in previous years with lots of Covid and no vaccines.  This is definitive proof that the world has been bamboozled.

It would be a dream come true if everyone who got vaccinated 'died suddenly,' but due to their hypocritical refusal to keep getting boosted I expect the massive die off to slow to a trickle in the years to come and the whole episode to be forgotten.  Sadly karma does not actually rule the world.  It only rules Ukraine, where they're getting lots and lots of karma for their decision to shell Donetsk and not uphold the Minsk accords.

The economy is in shambles, which is frustrating, but ignoring that 2022 was a much better year than the previous two.  It had endings to great series, marvelous new video games, 50% more great anime, and two major sporting events.  Perfecting my top 200 anime rankings, my music hall of fame and '100 Waifus' are all worthwhile productive endeavors.  I'm also proud of my two new permapost promoted blog entries written this year, 'All Signs Point to God,' and 'I know the arguments used to defend Jews, they just aren't convincing.'  As repetitive thoughts aren't useful, the range of new useful philosophical contributions I can make on this blog is continuously shrinking, but I still managed to come out with two new good ideas nonetheless.

Looking forward I expect 2023 to be as good or better.  Russia will win the war, FF7 Rebirth and FF16 will come out, Fire Emblem: Engage and Octopath Traveler II will come out, lots of great anime will be released, more manga will conclude, Aiyoku no Eustia, Kud Wafter and Majikoi A-5 should be released, and I'll get to play Tales of Arise.  Like 2022, 2023 will be dominated by video games, which is fine by me, but there will be plenty of other sweeteners to the pot.

January 2023 is going to be spectacular, with bowl games, NFL playoffs and Fire Emblem: Engage right out the gate.  I'm looking forward to the New Year.  (Or the new era as Uta would sing.)