Anime of the Season – Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master

I added this to my list of spring shows to check out purely for the key visual they released before the season started. It showed four women in beautifully styled kimonos standing on a large stone staircase, and the vibes just screamed “period drama for grownups”, which happens to be one of my favorite foods.

While my read on the serious tone was on target, rather than a straight period drama, it’s actually a fantasy series set in the royal court of a society of yatagarasu – a mythical three-legged raven from folklore that can take human form – that’s in the midst of a succession struggle, with the four noble houses all sending a prospective bride to the capital for the crown prince to choose from. Joining the would-be consorts is a large cast of characters with a wide variety of interests and loyalties, from factions favoring the crown prince’s older brother, to a scheming empress, and a clever teenage boy who’d just like to do his job and get back to his family outside the capital. The first two thirds of the series craft one of the best executed mystery plots that I’ve seen in an anime, with an incredibly satisfying conclusion at the end of a meticulous setup that made just about every detail count. While the resolution to the mystery in the last seven episodes lacked a bit of the punch the first one had, the setting details it revealed along the way made me wish for a sequel or an English translation of the source novels to get even more of this story.

This would have made its way into the top of the season on the strength of the story alone, but the production quality takes it to the top of the year. The art is nothing short of incredible, with gorgeous painted backgrounds, distinctive character designs, and beautiful Heian era-styled kimonos in vibrant colors. On top of the sparkling visuals, the soundtrack is rich and moody, the opening and ending are unskippable, and the voice cast is full of talented actors. It was the sort of series that comes around once a decade at most, and my pick for the best of the season couldn’t have been easier. 9/10

First Runner-Up – Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!

Before the season began, I saw the premise of nothingburger boy collecting a trio of girls rejected by their crushes, I looked at those goofy bows on the girls’ uniforms, and I took a pretty hard pass on this. Everyone’s praise got to me by the end of the season, though, and I ended up checking it out and getting completely charmed by it. The kids are all pretty lovable, and the production is top notch, with fantastic character animation and excellent voice acting performances. 8/10

Second Runner-Up – The Elusive Samurai

Centered on the lone survivor of the coup that took down the Hojo clan, and set up the Ashikaga shogunate to rule in their place, this shounen action series tells the lightly embellished story of his journey to take back what was taken from him. The balance of slapstick comedy and grisly violence walks the line between purposeful and disorienting, but the art and animation are spectacular, and there isn’t a single boring character in the large cast. 8/10

Senpai is an Otokonoko – You don’t often get stories like this in anime, where a girl confesses to her senpai she thinks is a girl, then still wants to go out after finding out they’re actually a cross-dressing boy, forming a love triangle with another boy who also has a crush on him, and have it treated seriously like a proper coming of age romance instead of a big joke. The jarring chibi animated scenes, and the way it handles a couple of the issues it introduces, keeps this from being as good of a series as it could’ve been. The upcoming movie sequel may resolve some of these problems, though. 8/10

My Hero Academia S7 – The struggle between the heroes and the league of villains runs towards its climax in this penultimate season, and like much of the series leading up to this point, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. At the highest points you get turbo-tsundere Bakugo putting his life on the line for Deku, and the emotional climax for the Todoroki family’s struggles, while the lows include a poorly executed storyline centered on a persecuted minority turning violent, and a frustrating decision to make the one fight between two girls be about feelings and crushing on the same boy. I’m still looking forward to the final season next year. 7/10

Pseudo Harem – A girl joins the theater club at school, where she goofs around with a senpai by acting out the different archetypal characters of harem romance, and it’s somehow one of the sweetest, most genuine romance series I’ve seen. It takes a couple episodes to settle into its groove, and the transitions between sketches could be a little jarring, but the couple’s chemistry is fantastic, and their relationship steadily progresses up through a perfectly charming and satisfying ending. 7/10

Mayonaka Punch – P.A. Works original anime series like to take a group of clumsy but earnest girls with a dream, and put them in a situation. In this original series, the girls are vampires, the dream is to earn a million subscribers on (not)YouTube, and the situation is avoiding homelessness. The characters come in different shades of girl failure, the stunts are amusingly familiar to anyone who watches YouTube, and the comedy comes with a generous helping of heartwarming friendship moments. A fun ride that stops just short of great. 7/10

The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to Be Archenemies – It was a little hard sometimes to watch this knowing that the mangaka passed away while she was writing this. The characters were so charming, the chemistry between the leads was so electric, the art was so beautiful, and the story hook was so catchy, that it hurts to know we’ll never get any more of it, because a talented woman left us far too soon. I’m thankful that we got such a beautifully produced series for her final work. 7/10

The Fable – As consistently entertaining as this dark comedy about a legendary hitman trying to live a normal life was, and as fantastic as the voice actor performances were, any recommendation for this show needs a big asterisk for the visuals, which combined poor animation with characters that frequently went off-model. The large cast of rogues, and the deathly absurd situations they got into, had me interested enough to watch week after week despite the production flaws. 7/10

Shoshimin: How to Become Ordinary – I wasn’t sure what to think about this high school set mystery series at first. The cases were extremely mundane, the production was oddly ambitious, and the characters were a little hard to relate to. Over the series run, however, the characters showed their true nature, and the Holmes and Moriarty vibe came through loud and clear. I look forward to the second cour next year. 7/10

Dungeon People – A lone adventurer gets a big surprise when her fight with a monster breaks through the dungeon wall, revealing a woman’s bedroom on the other side, and leading to a new job as that woman’s assistant, managing the day to day minutiae of the dungeon. Setting a cozy slice of life series in a monster packed dungeon shouldn’t work, but the two main characters had a fun dynamic, and the monsters and humans in and around the dungeon had enough variety and personality to pull it off somehow. 7/10

Twilight Out of Focus – Set in a boys high school with a dorm, this anthology BL series follows three separate couples in the school’s film-making club, and like most anthology series, the vibe and enjoyment varies a bit from story to story. The roommate friends-to-lovers first couple was merely ok, the enemies-to-lovers second couple was a step up, and the opposites-attract third couple was straight up great fun. Taken altogether, it’s a solid entry in the genre, and a rare romance series that includes sex scenes. 7/10

Days with My Stepsister – Based on the series’ title, I assumed this would be a trashy romcom full of light novel cliches, but it turned out to be a nicely directed, low-key drama about two teenagers who happen to become step-siblings. It does a remarkable job of capturing the awkwardness of suddenly living with strangers and calling them family, and the changing relationship between the two was just messy enough to be interesting without being melodramatic. It was a little slow at times, and there’s one weird scene between them early on, but it was generally a solid romantic drama on the grounded side. 7/10

The Ossan Newbie Adventurer, Trained to Death by the Most Powerful Party, Became Invincible – For a one-note comedy that’s basically two tournament arcs stapled together, this was a surprisingly fun action-comedy series in the style of the manly action shows of the 80s and 90s, where men talked it out with their fists. There were a few characters whose main job seemed to be having breasts, but the main character was such a great guy, and everything happening around him was so over the top and silly, that I can’t really complain. 7/10

VTuber Legend: How I Went Viral after Forgetting to Turn Off My Stream – Knowing approximately nothing about VTubers myself, I can’t speak to how well this series does or doesn’t capture the streaming scene, but being an outsider did not stop me from laughing at the cast of eccentric streamers and their nonsense. From the main character forgetting to end her stream before cracking a cold one and drunkenly visiting her fellow streamers, to a dramatic game of Among Us, to copious amounts of sexual harassment (affectionate), it had something to make me chuckle every week. 7/10

Quality Assurance in Another World – Without spoiling the premise, which is genuinely surprising when it’s revealed early on, this series takes a couple of popular isekai and isekai-adjacent sub-genres, and makes a fresh and clever story out of them. The production won’t win any awards, and the story cuts off abruptly at the end with no announcement for a second season, but the setting nailed the feel of buggy video games, and the characters were a lot of fun to watch as they navigated a freaky situation. 7/10

Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin – Adapted from a video game, this follows a lazy young goddess who has her peaceful days of lying around in the lofty realm interrupted by a group of humans who wander in and cause an incident that gets them all sent off to a demon-infested island as punishment. I enjoyed watching the characters learn how to cultivate rice over the course of the early episodes, and there were some nice twists and character developments in the second half, but the human characters could be pretty annoying, and the monster fighting action lacked excitement. 7/10

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime S3 – After spending the first half of the season bogged down in meetings, the second half gathered most of the enormous cast together for a low-stakes festival arc. A few episodes of action between the two halves offered some excitement, but the season as a whole felt pretty subdued. It feels a bit like the anime doesn’t know what kind of show it wants to be, and is now bouncing between dialogue-heavy drama, action-adventure, or slice of life, and it’s not equally good at all three genres. 7/10

A Journey Through Another World: Raising Kids While Adventuring – We’re drowning in paint-by-numbers isekai every season, and I’m part of the problem, since I usually pick one of them as a potato chip watch. This season’s selection features a man accidentally isekaied by a clumsy god, who finds a pair of young overpowered kids and takes them with him on his adventure. Vapid, but cozy. 6/10

Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian – I very much was not the target audience for this romantic comedy about a Russian-Japanese girl and a boy who doesn’t tell her he understands what she’s saying when she talks about him in Russian, but it was kinda fun by the halfway point with the full cast of girls, so I stuck around. A decision I regretted once the school election plot fired up and the story got tedious, with too much telling and not enough showing. 6/10

Wistoria: Wand and Sword – Since I enjoy the writer’s other series, I figured I’d enjoy this as well, but week after week, it kept tricking me into thinking it’d turned a corner and become good, then suck just as hard as ever. It has an insufferable protagonist with the idiotic character motivation of chasing after a girl over a promise made as children, a dreadful case of Proper Noun worldbuilding vomit, and a painfully derivative setting, but it was nicely animated I guess. 5/10