Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken – This love letter to imagination and creativity is, hands down, the best anime of the season, and probably the best this year. I absolutely loved that we got a story about motivated high school girls creating anime without it being a CGDCT. They’re average looking girls with exceptional abilities creating anime with the help of a diverse cast of side characters. The characters were not moe, their voices weren’t high and squeaky, and they unapologetically pursued their creative passions past the point of cuteness. All of this mixed with a relaxed, cartoonish art style and fluid, lively animation made this the uplifting antidote to all the bullshit this year threw at us. 10/10 Crunchyroll
Chihayafuru S3 – Never in a million years would I have thought I’d get hooked on a series formed around a competitive card game based on classical Japanese poetry, but here I am three seasons later, praying for a season four. It’s got to be some sort of magic that makes the matches super intense and completely engrossing, because I’d be tapping my foot like I’m watching my team in a game seven. I love Chihaya’s singular focus on karuta, and how oblivious she is to the feelings of others, romantic or otherwise, because flawed but driven female characters are such a rarity. The romantic confessions had me absolutely drowning in feelings, and I really hope we get another season. 9/10 Crunchyroll
Haikyuu!!: To The Top – My favorite parts of sports anime are always the training arcs, where our plucky protagonists are made painfully aware of their weaknesses and have to figure out how to overcome them, so watching Hinata and Kageyama struggle through their respective training camps was completely up my alley. I normally can’t bear to watch a sympathetic character get humiliated, but Hinata getting humbled after crashing the camp he wasn’t invited to was a huge moment of growth for his character and I loved it. Other people dislike this season’s animation and character designs, but I haven’t really noticed a huge difference myself. It’s still head and shoulders above other sports anime in quality. 9/10 Crunchyroll
Somali and the Forest Spirit – I am always up for a story about people caring for children, and this fantasy adventure about a forest golem who finds a young human girl and decides to leave the forest with her to find her people gave me pretty much everything I wanted from it. Humans are a hunted commodity in the setting, and golem and Somali face real danger as they travel in search of other humans, but it never feels bleak, or like they’re being ground down. It paints society as a mixed bag with both enemies and allies, all with their own motives that make sense to them. Watching golem and Somali persevere together and develop a strong family bond was really satisfying. 8/10 Crunchyroll
Dorohedoro – I didn’t know much about this before I started it, but I was surprised by how hard it made me laugh considering how gritty and gory it was. It felt really 90s to me, like something that might’ve been on MTV back when I was in high school. The balance of comedy, mystery, and violence was just right, with a fun cast of likable characters, protagonists and villains alike. My only big complaint is how it ended sort of abruptly without much of a conclusion. 8/10 Netflix
Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun – A girl with a crush visits the girls bathroom in an unused school building to see if the urban legend about a ghost named Hanako granting wishes was real. One thing leads to another, and not only does he exist, but she ends up tied to him after he saves her from a murderous mermaid. The animation is choppy, but the art is really pretty for this dark comedy about the supernatural beings inhabiting a private school. The characters and their relationships were a lot of fun. 8/10 Funimation, Hulu
Id: Invaded – This original sci-fi thriller pits murderer against murderer to unravel a mystery about a serial killer using technology that allows investigators to wander around a suspect’s subconscious. I liked the art and animation, which was fairly stylish, and enjoyed how complicated the protagonists were, as the only people who could do those investigations needed to have killed someone themselves. My only complaint would be the final confrontation with the villain, which was kinda anticlimactic. 8/10 Funimation, Hulu
Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It – What happens when two data obsessed nerds fall in love? They build a research project that tries to quantify love and drag the rest of their grad school research lab members into it. The science humor drifts a little close to Big Bang Theory territory sometimes, but the characters are all so charmingly absurd that I couldn’t help but love them. 8/10 Crunchyroll
My Hero Academia S4 – Despite this season featuring the dulcet tones of Kenjiro Tsuda’s voice acting, the lack of Todoroki overuse of flashbacks and info dumping in the first half really hurt the flow of the story and made it a little less enjoyable than the previous three seasons. I’m also 100% not down for trying to redeem domestic abuser Endeavor by having him act heroically at his job. 7/10 Crunchyroll/VRV, Funimation, Hulu
Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun – This looked like a little kids show, so I slept on it until about halfway through its run before deciding to watch it. And, well, it is pretty much a kids show, but it was a lot of fun watching human Iruma accidentally establish himself as an exceptionally talented demon while making friends with all sorts of oddballs along the way. The school festival arc dragged quite a bit, but I’m really looking forward to season two next year. 7/10 Crunchyroll
If My Favorite Pop Idol Made It to the Budokan, I Would Die – I’m not into idol groups or idol anime, so I figured all the jokes in a comedy about stans of a small time girl idol group would sail over my head, but both the jokes and the idol drama hit just fine for me. I was impressed at how they managed to get across that our stan main characters are giant losers while still making them totally likeable and never humiliating them for cringe style laughs. It was a gentle ribbing of stan culture with a delicate whiff of yuri in the background. 7/10 Funimation
In/Spectre – When I saw the main heroine used prosthetics and a cane, and there was a ghost who reads Harlequin Romance in the first episode, I was hooked instantly. Iwanaga was delightfully bold, shameless, and assertive without being a violent tsundere, and her romance with the reserved, quiet Kurou was kind of adorable. While it started strong with a couple of short arcs, the longer final arc really dragged in the last three or four episodes with a lot of monologue that wasn’t very compelling. 7/10 Crunchyroll
BOFURI: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense – This brought all the warm and fuzzy, low-stakes qualities of CGDCT to a VRMMO adventure, and it was just good clean fun all around. It was amusing to watch our new-to-gaming main character continue to stack points in defense, inadvertently creating an overpowered monster character build because the developers didn’t imagine anyone would put all their points in defense. It’s nothing particularly innovative or deep, but it’s cute and fun in a relaxing way. 7/10 Funimation, Hulu
Seton Academy: Join the Pack! – I didn’t expect to enjoy this high school comedy for furries, but the jokes were surprisingly clever at playing off actual animal behavior that I often found myself chuckling at it. They basically took a bunch of animal trivia and turned it into dirty jokes and somehow made it work. 7/10 Crunchyroll
Room Camp – I don’t have a lot to comment on since the episodes were only three minutes long, but the girls of the Outdoor Activities Club touring around Yamanashi prefecture made a nice little treat while we wait for season two of Laid-Back Camp. 7/10 Crunchyroll
Number 24 – I wish I were a more enlightened person, but I’m just an absolute sucker for sports anime that are just a pretense for handsome guys to get handsy with each other. As a sports show about rugby, this is sub-par at best. There’s very little practice or game action and it explains nothing about the sport. But as a slice of life about guys playing college rugby, it’s… still not really good, but all the guys are handsome and I will tolerate a lot in the name of cute guys giving each other hugs and head pats. I did honestly like how it treated the main character’s adjustment to life after rugby when a motorcycle accident forces him to quit playing, and how he wants to find a way to stay involved. I enjoyed it for what it was – a story about a sadistic shorty and his harem of rugby guys. 7/10 Funimation
Smile Down the Runway – You’d be forgiven for assuming a show about the world of fashion would be shoujo, but this is a shounen sports anime re-skinned so the players are models and designers, and the games are runway shows. It even has the character determined to make it to the top despite being too short. I enjoyed seeing the rivalries and drama of sports anime applied to fashion, but unlike high school sports where your window of opportunity is closing, they’re kids just getting started in an industry they could easily be a part of for decades. Because of this, and because I’m watching this when I’m old enough to be their mother, some of the drama felt a little forced. Like, everyone calm down, you’re 17 and competing with adults. It’s only up from here. 7/10 Funimation, Hulu
The Case Files of Jeweler Richard – This was 100% the most frustrating show of the season in that it half delighted me, and half drove me up a wall. I’m still not sure what sort of story it was trying to be. If the customers’ problems were actual mysteries, or if all that romantic subtext between Richard and Seigi went somewhere and stopped being so wink-wink, it would’ve been a great show. I loved the main characters and their relationship dynamic, emotional and impulsive Seigi ruffling the feathers on the always calm and calculating Richard, while coolheaded Richard saved Seigi from self-immolation, but the story didn’t seem to know what to do with them. 6/10 Crunchyroll
A Destructive God Sits Next to Me – Chuunibyou characters are pretty played out at this point, but this comedy about a “normal” high school kid beset by an an assortment of imaginative weirdos made me chuckle despite myself. Still, despite having surprisingly good voice actors, it was just sort of okay, with a lot of the jokes falling flat for me. 6/10 Crunchyroll
Sorcerous Stabber Orphen – This was a reboot of a 90s anime and between Cleo’s mom jeans and Orphen’s sleeveless denim jacket, it absolutely looked like the 90s. I wanted to like it, but the story jumped back and forth in time so much via flashbacks that I couldn’t remember who was still alive in the present or tell what was happening. It’s getting another season, which I’ll be skipping. 5/10 Funimation, Hulu
The Romantic Goldfish 