Im gonna be doing one of these for each season as of now, where we can all get together and discuss the batch of anime thats been baked up for us :3
For me at least, nothing stands out a lot, just a few series caught my interest. Occultic;Nine is promising, so I have high hopes there, and Sangatsu no Lion looks great too. There's also the second season of Ajin, but thats on hold for me until Ive seen the first season :P
Oh yeah that Magical Girl Raising Project one looked pretty shit xD
Working doesn't look too bad, but not really my kinda show, still it's got a good staff so fingers crossed it's a goodie :P
Gladly, I was able to restrain myself this season and only picked up 14 shows, out of which 5 are shorts. These are way less than in the Summer season, so I hope to have more time for the older shows that are my piling up on my on-hold.
Up till now, Fall is looking good so far, better than Spring at least and will maybe get better than Summer aswell. What I started:
- Bungou Stray Dogs 2nd Season: decent in the same manner as the first season, not outstanding by any means, but entertaining and thus far consistent in comparison to s1. somewhat 5/10
- Drifters: great art style, but lacking animations; only basic story overview in the first episode, but definetely has the Hirano Kouta vibe I wanted. 5-6/10
- Shuumatsu no Izetta: not much is to say about the story yet, because it could still go in many directions, but the animations, the general production values and the way the series presents and establishes itself is pretty good. (i also like them yuri vibes) 6/10
- Keijo!!!!!!!!: genuinely hilarious ass-fights; get ready for the BUTT CANNON 5/10
- Nanbaka: decent comedy with quirky characters, but with a useless trap 5/10
- 3-gatsu no Lion: great animation, pacing and atmosphere; the best-made pilot this season; based shaft at it again 7/10
- Okusama ga Seitokaichou!+!: ecchi, that isn't held by back by a stupid plot s2 5/10
- Gi(a)rlish Number: a cynical catch on the industry with good character presentation, chitose is smug af 6/10
- ClassicaLoid: strange to say the least and weird with trying to pull tension out of nowhere towards the end while force-exposing backstory without prior character establishement; went full obscure at the end, hype for b a c h though 4/10
- To Be Hero: interessant comedy and top-quality meme 5/10
- Gakuen Handsome: dorito chins 4/10
- Bernard-jou Iwaku.: charming and relateable 5/10
- Nobunaga no Shinobu: not much established, meh for most of the part 4/10
- Occultic;Nine: literally the worst piece of shit this season. it has been a long since i've seen such an outright failure, such a pinnacle of not being able to connect or even establish anything and such a thorough mistake and failure in every aspect. easily 2/10 (and without the great op sung by kanako itou's beautiful voice, the good production values and popular seiyuus, I wouldn't be sure why this wouldn't be a 1)
But as to be seen from the few number of bad scores, I was able to avoid most shit shows this season and therefore am truly looking forward to it :)
There are also some OVAs and Movies on my ptw (I'm looking at you, Bikini Warriors OVA), but I'm especially hyped for Zaregoto, not only written by the author who spawned two of my favourite works, but also animated by shaft, who are not only a great studio, but also proved their current qualities with 3-gatsu.
I also thought about picking up Mahou Shoujo Raising Project, but I'm not sure about that yet.
Whaaaa? You really hated Occultic;Nine that much?! I personaly think it's got a lot of potential to shine :P (Well Ryo's blimp-tits are taking it a bit far but it makes for some decent comedy at least)
I agree Sangatsu is a great anime already, hope it doesnt flop later on though.
I dont personally see any appeal whatsoever in Keijo, Gakuen Handsome or Okusama but hey we all have our tastes
Haven't started out on any of the new releases this season except for Keijo.
Nothing really stands out to me that much, well I guess I find a few of them rather interesting.
On another note, Keijo is looking good so far, I mean, who doesn't like butt bombs and boob shields?
Call me an elitist but I cant get into ecchi no matter how hard I try, not unless theres more to it than just boobs ;w;
Eh, there's a lot of people that don't like ecchi
I'm okay with ecchi, at least when it has it's limits and not like "To love-ru" kind of ecchi... These kind are just plain stupid (I like To love-ru though)
- Gakuen Handsome:
Actually, there is no *actual* appeal in Gakuen Handsome anymore. It was questionable back after the first episode, but meanwhile it's become blatantly apparent, that it is just full memes. And while it is enjoyable in some way to watch how incredibly memey it is, it doesn't make for anything worthy on a substantial level. It really is pure idiocy and not necessarily the good kind; my rating dropped to a 1 in the meantime.
- Okusama ga Seitokaichou!+!:
Now as you said, tastes are different and I won't and can't blame you for not liking ecchi; actually I'm not someone who enjoys ecchi or thinks it's good most of the time myself (my average for ecchi is around 3.45), but Okusama is the pinnacle of ecchi anime, albeit many fail to realize that and stupidly cling to titles such as the infamous DxD. What makes it such a competent ecchi title is the fact, that it greatly delivers at what it is suposed to be, namely fanservice. Unlike most other - full-time - ecchi titles it consists of nothing but fanservice scenes and those are executed in a great manner, it is so on-point and not weighed down by incredibly stupid plot and action like most other action titles, doesn't have characters so dumb to make me wanna bash my head (tho they sometimes are), but most of all just sticks to what it should be, so I can't help not minding it and taking it over most other ecchi titles, if not all in regards of pure fanservice.
(On another note, being an elitist correlates to a certain mindset of feeling superiority to others based on certain opinions or standings. Disliking ecchi is not connected to elitism at all, furthermore that is a common thing between many people, so there's no need to label someone as that because of such a reason.)
- Keijo!!!!!!!!:
The thing with Keijo is, that it isn't even an ecchi first and foremost. At its core, Keijo is a shounen anime, that replaces boys with girls and martial arts with ass and boobs. Keijo is incredibly shameful and there's no denying that, but the fact, that it is aware allows it to execute itself in a good manner. Keijo is blatant, yes, but its fights are so over-the-top paired with the ridiculous premise, that it turns out to be highly entertaining just in how funny nonsense it is. Now you can still criticise Keijo in terms of pacing, slight plot devices and overall skipping a lot of adaptable parts from the manga resulting in the loss of backstory, but overall this doesn't discredit how it executes itself in terms of being action-packed and entertaining in a refreshing way.
- Occultic;Nine:
Yes, I do hate Occultic;Nine (or how I like to call it: Occultic;NEIN), I detest it, I loathe it. From the very first episode on it was apparent, that it was a huge disjointed mess defying every sense of pacing, storytelling and execution and general consistency and coherency. The things continued with each episode and it got worse and worse, the show got more pseudo-intellectual, managed to be logically more inconsistent and tried to pull an idiotic mystery plot through without giving a damn about establishing. If I will ever do a kind of write-up on it, I will wait till airing finished, so for now I'll leave it with copypasting a sjhort write-up on the first episode alone, that I did after I watched it.
Out of the shows I have already picked up this season, Occultics;Nine is easily the worst.
As the first episode, this episode should have the job of establishing the characters/setting and introducing us to the world or rather, presenting it to us. This episode however failed in every regard.
After the best 90 seconds of the whole episode, the OP sung by Kanako Itou, the first scene is a roughly 2 minutes long, pandering-driven exposition dump of a dialogue recited in a sped-up manner by the beta-male protagonist. The problem here lies not in a "dialogue-driven" nature, but in the nature of this being nothing but an exposition dump. The appereance of exposition dumps is to be found throughout the whole episode to the point where the anime consists of mostly nothing but incoherent exposition dumps. On top of that this is accompanied by a random collection of scenes trying to form the basis of the show, but failing, because characters are protrayed in action before said characters were even established in the slightest leaving no connection to the story whatsoever.
Back to the characters:
- The MC
Introduced as a quote-on-quote "filthy otaku" the MC is running an online blog called "Kiri Kiri Basara". He has the overly ignorant nature of a natural-born harem lead, he is the perfection of beta male and the most poor excuse for Otaku pandering. In the middle of the episode the series is really open with that, when it lets a female crop-out waifu declare "A filthy NEET is fine too". With all his otaku-pandering characteristics as well as his natural ignorance and traits of a harem lead, he is nothing but the pinnacle of substance-less self-insert.
- The female friend
The MC is accompanied by his female friend. Even though I would doubt it, if someone told me, she managed to be an even worse character. Her vocabular is very vast to the extent, that half of what she says ends up being universe-specific terms, nicknames f.e., that were until two thirds into the episode never even explained, and together with the sped-up nature of the dialogue (a byproduct of the general fast pacing, which also produces the tactless transitions) 90% of what she utters is wasted nonsense. Her general role is completely meaningless thus far and all she did was reenacting meaningless tropes and serving low-key comedy, that was so badly done, that I'd rather laugh at Charlotte's out-of-place comedy. Shoutout to her boobs by the way, that were not only the matter of some pandering dialogue and fanservice, but that were also so big, that they literally blocked the screen and defied every law of physics. The camera always sticking on her boobs whenever she was close did not only not help, but also made for the worst shot-composing seen in some time.
Other than that the character cast was composed of a bunch of adult scientists, whose mental age however did not differ from the under-aged protagonists, that tried to justify a bunch of occult happenings with exquisite science bullshit without establishing any kind of in-universe theories to go by, a cardboard waifu without any substance and a transvestite, who was not one, because this makes up some part of his character, but only because the show deemed it a quirky trait. All the other characters weren't even elaborated on enough to even name them here.
A prime example of the incoherent story, tactless transitions and scenes is a scene midway-through. We're cutting to an unknown place, are faced by two unknown characters and without establishing any of what's happening, one of these characters appears to be under extreme pressure as pointed out by undermined eyes and screams and without clueing us in on anything what happens, the series tries pulling out tension ouf of nowhere only to cut away 1 minute later.
In the end Occultics;Nine failed at having a good character cast, failed at having meaningful scenes in regards of the story and most of all failed at presenting itself in a good way.
Well youre welcome to have an opinion, but I still find O;N to be one of the best anime this season really. It has what most other series dont, a more complex and rewarding story structre. O;N gets the viewer to really think hard about it, and consider all possibilities before being blown away by something no-one expected. That unpredictability, in my opinion, is absolutely glorious, and more anime need to strive to achieve it! But hey, thats just my view really :P