View previous topic :: View next topic |
Author |
Message |
|
Terrible90sDub
Joined: 14 Jul 2017
Posts: 168
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 2:10 pm
|
|
|
Interestingly, both of my top 2 picks started off on with episodes that, at the beginning of the season, I wouldn't have guessed they'd end up my favorites at all. Land of the Lustrous felt rather slow at first, and I agree with the assessment that Konohana Kitan can come across as a generic fanservicey yuri in the first episode, but both elevated themselves far beyond those first impressions. Land of the Lustrous is refreshingly creative and covers so many different genre elements well, but more than anything, I want it to continue so we can get more answers to the questions they've presented about Sensei and the world, as I found that the most intriguing part. The perceived slowness at the beginning also lead to a great payoff, so it may have only made later scenes better. Konohana Kitan is just heart warming, and even the stories about one shot characters can leave an impact. As it went on, characters that can seem like archetypes at first glance grew beyond that and became endearing in their own right.
Worst of... I watched one episode of Dies Irae and was left wondering if someone on the staff made it nonsensical and with ridiculously chuuni dialog on purpose just to try to make it as bad as possible, lol. Of anime I invested any time in (i.e. not Dies Irae or Kings Game), Ancient Magus Bride was my least favorite. It has a lot going for it on some levels, especially when it comes to side characters, but every episode manages to have something that causes my palm to meet my forehead and, at times, it's more boring than anything else to me. To be fair though, it doesn't have a lot of competition there as I dropped the shows I truly didn't like in the first few episodes...
|
Back to top |
|
|
Joshua Zarate
Joined: 12 Jan 2017
Posts: 2062
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 2:13 pm
|
|
|
GoldCrusader wrote: | Weird to see all this Lustrous love. I'm 5 episodes in and it still fails to get my attention. |
People can have different opinions that may not align with yours and that’s perfectly fine, especially if it’s for shows that may not be your personal cup of tea, anyway.
Anyway, Fall was a very solid season. I’m having a difficult time picking between AMB, GLT, and Land of the Lustrous as my personal best over the other. They are all very good shows for very different reasons that I will just have them all be tied for my favorite to make things easier for me. There were other good shows that I enjoyed from this season as well such as Konohana Kitan and Anime-Gataris. I had a lot of fun with the second half of Magical Circle Guru-Guru as well (I really hope that no one else has forgotten this title). Overall, Fall was a lot of fun.
|
Back to top |
|
|
darkchibi07
Joined: 15 Oct 2003
Posts: 5500
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 2:25 pm
|
|
|
Looks like Ancient Magus Bride and Land of the Lustrous got nearly equal love plus a few gems here and there. I had a feeling those 2 shows will end up being the favorites. And man, I need to check out Girls' Last Tour since that seems like a "true successor" of the first Kino's Journey anime.
GoldCrusader wrote: | Weird to see all this Lustrous love. I'm 5 episodes in and it still fails to get my attention.
|
Was there a particular aspect that was hard to get into?
|
Back to top |
|
|
Merxamers
Joined: 09 Dec 2013
Posts: 720
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 2:39 pm
|
|
|
Quote: | I had a lot of fun with the second half of Magical Circle Guru-Guru as well (I really hope that no one else has forgotten this title). Overall, Fall was a lot of fun. |
I liked what i saw of MC Guru Guru quite a bit, its just a matter of finding time to squeeze it in my schedule
|
Back to top |
|
|
Emdykay
Joined: 14 Nov 2017
Posts: 85
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 2:45 pm
|
|
|
This was a great season in an already good year!
I will exclude AMB and March from my considerations as they are still some way from concluding and I think giving out a rating is unfair at half their runtime, although at this point both would be good enough to be contenders for the prime spots too.
So their exclusion luckily makes the choices fairly easy for me, with Land of the Lustrous as best show and Girls Last Tour for Runner-Up.
I have to say though that I am a little surprised at how much Praise MMO Junkie gets. It is not like I do not understand, after its first three or four episodes I too thought we might get one of the best romcoms of all time here, but around its halfway mark the show started to seriously deteriorate from my point of view.
But from the start:
Like most other people I seriously enjoyed the premise of Morioka as a 30-year old woman who quit her job to somewhat escape to MMO-gaming was both super relatable and neat change of pace to the other hundreds of high school romcom anime. It nailed MMO relationships, portrayed its antics funnily and was an all around pleasant watch.
And then it started changing to Yuta as protagonist more and more.
It is not like Yuta was a terrible protagonist or that what followed after was terrible or anything, the show still got a decent rating from me, but I was disappointed that a lot of those things I initially loved the show for started to dissolve.
So Yuta gets the more prominent role in the second half and with it pretty much all the responsibilty to drive the plot forward, make decisions and well tell Morioka that she really is super effing adorable... I mean god damnit I get it, even portraying a character like Morioka as cute and desirable is actually a step up for anime norms but did it have to be the only thing you did with her towards the end? Never mind anything productive or active coming from her end? I literally had to laugh during episode 10 where she has that monologue telling herself she needs to be more active and take things into her own hands, which apparently means accepting Yutas advances as he takes her hand the next moment. Right, I lold.
Nevermind actually everyone behaving like teens during those last episodes becoming flustered at basically anything and the interactions being flat out dominated by awkwardness at the thought of intimacy, dating etc. You know you did not need to put adult characters in there if you make them behave like your usual anime teen anyway.
So summing up the latter half: Dude has to tell insecure girl she is cute, so she can have confidence, while everyone is super awkward around the issue of a relationship. Sounds a lot like average teenage romcom anime to me and thus kind of disappointed the initial expectations I had of it.
In terms of worst show my pick would be Dies Irae, but it is the only flat out trainwreck show I watched this season (while Jūni Taisen, Inuyashiki or Kino were not good, they were not awful either), managing to stay clear of stuff like Kings Game. I mean I only picked Dies Irae up because of the fuss the 0 episode kicked up, otherwise I would not have watched it either.
Last edited by Emdykay on Fri Dec 22, 2017 2:59 pm; edited 2 times in total
|
Back to top |
|
|
Merida
Joined: 21 Feb 2012
Posts: 1945
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 2:54 pm
|
|
|
Joshua Zarate wrote: | I had a lot of fun with the second half of Magical Circle Guru-Guru as well (I really hope that no one else has forgotten this title). |
I loved that show! And since comedy shows often get overlooked in this best of lists, i'll have to mention Osomatsu-san which i've been looking forward to every week.
Other than that, i agree with everyone who said that this was a fairly high-quality season. I'd probably put Land of the Lustrous at the top of my list because it was such a huge surprise hit for me, but after that comes a string of good shows, i have difficulty to rank properly like BBB, March comes in like a Lion, Gintama, AMB, Children of the Whales, Konohana Kitan...
"Worst" of the shows i've actually finished would probably be Inuyashiki or Kino's Journey.
|
Back to top |
|
|
Calico
Joined: 05 Jan 2013
Posts: 383
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 3:08 pm
|
|
|
Jacob Chapman wrote: | So I decided to make things easier on myself by excluding two otherwise incredibly excellent series that still have a lot of story left to tell: The Ancient Magus' Bride and Land of the Lustrous. They're among the best of the season, and you should definitely watch them, but I figure I'll be talking even more about these stories in 2018, so I wanted to focus on a couple other great shows that may be bowing out from the spotlight this year instead. |
Hey, I don't suppose you know something about a second season of Land of the Lustrous that the rest of us don't? I thought it had only been confirmed for twelve episodes so far.
On another note, I didn't watch anything as it aired this season, but I'll definitely be watching Land of the Lustrous at some point. I love the manga, and clips I've seen seem to suggest that it's a pretty great adaptation. Other than that, maybe Girls' Last Tour? It seems interesting.
|
Back to top |
|
|
TalGreywolf
Joined: 22 Dec 2017
Posts: 1
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 3:26 pm
|
|
|
Well, here I am, and my personal picks for best/worst of 2017. Naturally, we're going to include one series, and that's my personal choice for best of 2017, namely "The Ancient Magus' Bride". If there ever was a series that has held me captive with it's storytelling, animation, characters and plot, it was this one alone of all the anime I've seen this year.
As for the runner-up, I'm going to go out on a limb here and have to say "WorldEnd: What are you doing at the end of the world? Are You Busy? Will you save us?" was a very close second place. Again, here was a series that held you close when speaking, demanding your full attention. And that ending... complete with the same rendition of "Scarborough Faire" that started the series, it broke my heart. Seriously.
As for worst of 2017, well... there's a massive list I could give, everything from Heybot to Black Clover. There was a lot of really bad anime out there, but if I have to say one series in particular, it'd be "King's Game".
|
Back to top |
|
|
invalidname
![](/bbs/phpBB2/images/subscriber-gold.png) Contributor
Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 2476
Location: Grand Rapids, MI
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 3:29 pm
|
|
|
TalGreywolf wrote: | Well, here I am, and my personal picks for best/worst of 2017. |
Just FYI, this article is only for Fall. Maybe save your picks for the year for next week. From the article:
Quote: | If you're already itching to start recapping the whole year, our Best Anime of 2017 feature will launch on December 26th! |
|
Back to top |
|
|
HolsteinCrab
Joined: 07 Dec 2017
Posts: 42
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 3:33 pm
|
|
|
My choice for Best of the Season would be Classicaloid as I have a soft spot for socially anxious NEET composers striking up friendships with pygmy hippos. (Though I'll readily admit I've found the show so hit and miss this season that it's sort of a barrel scrape answer from me but as it still makes me laugh every week and I genuinely look forward to it every Saturday it is not undeserved.) Kind of disappointed in evil shota Wagner just sulking in the sidelines in later eps after being such a manipulative little button-pushing snot in the first 3 episodes or so but hopefully the upcoming episode will fix that.
Worst of the season... I never touched King's Game but I did decide to see how bad Dies Irae could get after the experience that was Episode 0. As it turns out it never got quite as randomly thrown together and outright incomprehensible as that but it did get laughably chuunibyou to compensate. Its clunky production values weren't an issue for me (if anything I got a snigger out of Heydrich and Marie's back and forth stomp stomp dance) but the writing is haphazard regarding motivations and developments and some of the characters are beyond repulsive. And that's even without mentioning Reinhard Heydrich (who got far too glamorous a portrayal) - characters we're presumably meant to like such as Ren's friend Shirou and the rich girl whose parents run the hospital end up being insensitive jackasses who willfully leave dozens of innocent people to be brutally slaughtered as a nazi sacrifice and then just sneer and pose over it. And when the characters are not being awful people, they're being stale old stereotypes. It often plays like a 13 year old's idea of THE MOST EPIC SHOW EVAAAAAR so all the orchestrated shock value and haremesque romance angles and narrative trainwrecks feel as though they fit right at home in a first time fanfiction.
I originally was planning of giving LoTL a miss but after hearing how it really picked up after the first couple of eps, am tempted to give it a whirl. At the very least the shiny hair does look so very pretty.
|
Back to top |
|
|
GoldCrusader
Joined: 25 Apr 2017
Posts: 1023
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 4:00 pm
|
|
|
darkchibi07 wrote: |
Was there a particular aspect that was hard to get into? |
While I think the show is fine. It's just kinda slow and un-interesting at times. I don't have this one more episode feeling. Also the characters aren't clicking that much with me. So that's probably the main hick for me.
|
Back to top |
|
|
NonsenseUser
Joined: 22 Sep 2008
Posts: 51
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 4:20 pm
|
|
|
Best: Easy choice, as it will likely top my yearly list as well, but Land of the Lustrous has been fantastic from start to finish with no lulls at all. The way it can be charming and funny at times, while sad and tragic at others, and be masterful at both, just blows me away. Can't wait for the finale tomorrow and I'll be hoping for another season next year.
Runner-up: I'm going to go with Gintama. The serious stuff is great, but this season has really made me miss these absurd one-off episodes that made it one of my most beloved series. I'm actually going to be sad to see it go back to that serious stuff. Also want to give a shout out to Just Because! as well as I'm really enjoying that one
Worst: I don't like picking shows I've only seen one or two episodes of, so while King's Game had easily the worst premiere, I did not continue with it. So for my worst, I'm going to go with A Sister's All You Need, but not for the reasons I'm sure some suspect. I actually loved all the gross out humor it employed and I've actually enjoyed most of the show in general. But it can get a bit dull at some points and the ending of the last episode left a sour taste in my mouth.
|
Back to top |
|
|
scowler
Joined: 30 May 2009
Posts: 93
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 5:02 pm
|
|
|
Best: Land of the Lustrous
Runner-up: Girl's Last Tour
Worst: Evil or Live
|
Back to top |
|
|
ultimatehaki
Joined: 27 Oct 2012
Posts: 1090
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 5:08 pm
|
|
|
Best: Girl's Last Tour
Runner-up: MMO Junkie
Worst: Blend S
|
Back to top |
|
|
Zin5ki
Joined: 06 Jan 2008
Posts: 6680
Location: London, UK
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 5:36 pm
|
|
|
Key wrote: | King's Game was the only repeat on the Worst, with 4 appearances. |
Surely a show that is so unequivocally awful deserves some fashion of special accolade. In a way, its creation is a greater rarity than that of an equivalent success.
|
Back to top |
|
|
|