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To Aru No Railgun is centrally a character study of various personalities and their interpersonal dynamics as middle schoolers living in an advanced society. Some of these characters have abilities called Esper powers which allow the majority female cast to be not only appeal to the male audience by being cute girls but also by way of combat sequences. Seeing the absolute intensity of Mikoto's electrical abilities and Shirai's teleportation is very enjoyable. These girls get up to a lot of things not merely related to class at school. The plot while simple is coherent, lore relevant concepts make sense. It's not particularly interesting stuff ... but it's all used effectively to act as a vehicle for character expression. You might find yourself thinking certain things sound dumb, oh that name could have been better, or certain interesting details being underutilized by for example being quickly used to resolve the episode instead of made more substantive and meaningful. I was able to excuse most of this because of the characters, and this is where To Aru gets the majority of its value. The central cast is very loveable all with their own arcs, and even side characters get development treated with the same level of care. This is propped up by excellent art design and writing that has real heart behind it. There are sincere emotional moments here and its mostly delivered convincingly. Railgun gets an 8 because it nails character roundedness and likeability, has real emotional sincerity, is beautiful to stare at, but everything else fails to be nearly as impressive.

Eureka Seven is a coming of age tale where fate thrusts a young boy into what he thinks will be goofing off and hanging out with his air surfer idols, but in reality casts him into a massive military conflict where the winner determines the ultimate fate of the planet. He doesn't know how to solve the problem - nor do his newly found comrades fair better, at least initially - but in order to survive this young boy must grow up and become a man in order to cope with the harrowing and insurmountable realities of the conflict they find themselves facing. Among ... his ilk is a mysterious young girl who he falls head over heels; unfortunately for him without bidirectional reciprocity. Eventually this relationship changes and it turns out that this change is vital to saving the planet.

What's truly astounding is that E7 somehow delivers an absolute masterclass in essentially all aspects from music to character design to animation to script to direction. Easily the best romance and coming of age story I've ever seen, let alone within the anime genre. Expect very pro-leftist themes (anti-racism, environmentalism).
10/10.

Bad boys with hearts of gold, cute girls, and giant swords. Bleach is a Shonen anime featuring a simple yet lovable cast of primary characters, mysterious secondary characters, and dangerously tactical foes set in a world much like our own but with a supernatural twist. At its absolute brightest Bleach shines in its thematics: What does it mean to be a man? To be a warrior? To have honor? How does a proper friend conduct themselves? Unfortunately the arrangement by which it delivers these themes is questionable at times: Important character motivations are delivered abruptly with insufficient set up, power progressions are justified with hard ... to swallow exposition, details about certain characters you'd really like to know are missing, animation is reused frequently (recap segments post intro extensive use of flashbacks), far away shots of characters lack more detail than you're probably used to, the music isn't sufficiently varied (sometimes bordering inappropriate), and the voice acting (as far as the English dub is concerned) can be lacking heart. That being said characters do remain engaging by learning and changing, animation quality and overall art direction/cinematography is impressive - especially fight scenes and other emotionally salient moments - and the music is ear-wormy.

Watch until you get bored, don't let its length or age scare you, and use a filler guide if you want to skip that stuff because there's a decent chunk of it. Solid 8/10.