Cool Fall 2023 Anime I've Been Watching
Hey hey, so this Spring I started watching a ton of seasonal anime after years of only watching a handful per season (and having the rest of my animu consumption be binge watches). And I wrote a blog post about what I was watching and what I thought about what I saw. For the Spring 2023 season I picked up a total of 8 anime, and I would have actually picked up more if I were actually used to watching so many. There are three other anime from that season I kind of regret not watching while they aired, and now they're in the limbo of my very slow-progressing anime-to-watch list.
The Summer 2023 season was kind of quiet compared to the Spring. I picked up about 7 anime total, dropped 4, finished two, and the last one is a 2-cour series that's still airing. The two serieses that I finished were Reborn as a Vending Machine and Heretical Last Boss Queen.
Honestly, I started watching the vending machine animu kind of ironically, and it actually ended up being not too bad. It's not anything amazing, but it's certainly a novel concept that was executed reasonably well. I never expected a technically immobile protagonist to be so badass at some points. Definitely loved Reborn as a Vending Machine. Oh yeah, and a second season was confirmed right when it finished lmao.
Last Boss Queen I started because I like this recent trend of otome isekai anime. It was quite fun to watch while it was airing, but when the last episode came out it was such an unsatisfying conclusion. Spoilers, but how the heck can one make such a poor "happy last episode" like this anime did? I am pretty disappointed ngl.
So now that I was trained to watch a ton of anime per season, I was ready for a new season with tons of great anime coming out. For this Fall 2023 season I have a total of 12(!) anime that I am watching (plus one that I dropped). As I did with my last blog post, I'll start off talking about the sequel animes, and then go on to the shows that are starting fresh.
Shield Hero S3
I am so danone with this whole series. Season 1 was alright. Season 2 was doggy doo-doo. The producers probably expected a poor reception for S2 which is why season 2 and season 3 were announced simultaneously. Since season 2 was basically just thrown out there for continuity, I expected that we'd be back to the cool action and interesting tension that happened with S1. The production quality and hype of S1 was certainly back, but to me it just felt so... dull. I don't really want to elaborate further, but I dropped this series completely and it's dead to me. Honestly, I feel the people who were saying this series sucked back in the S1 days are smarter than I am.
Dr Stone S3 Part 2
Just the second cour of the split-cour third season of Dr Stone. The protagonists keep battling the antagonists with the magic of sufficiently advanced technology. Nothing much else to say. The outro looks super duper cool though. It's so weird seeing sand art(?) being used for an anime. Where on Earth did the producers manage to get someone who could make an anime-styled outro like that? Seeing that outro was just so mind-bending for me.
Spy Fam S2
A great series continues. It started off with many short episodic episodes showing the chiller slice-of-life chapters from the mango, but now it's moving on to the multi-episode Yor-centered "cruise ship arc". I don't know what will happen, but source material readers certainly seem very waku waku about it.
Uma Musume S3
KITACHAAAAN!!! We're back with a new season of racing horse girls, with a new lead character: Kitasan Black. Of all the characters in Uma Musume, she probably has the coolest character design in my opinion. In case you're unfamiliar with this franchise, it's kind of a weird alt-reality where actual real life Japanese race horses are reimagined as anime horse girls who race around a track in flashy costumes. And the races that happen in the show actually happened in real life. So if you look up the racing history and stories of the real life horses the animu ponies are based on you can basically figure out how the show will progress.
Season 3 is better than season 1, but I don't think it is likely to top season 2, which was so effin good. Who knows though, maybe the writers will manage to completely surprise everyone with something even better. I'd like to point out a scene that happened in S3 with Gold Ship and her Rubik's Cube that was so cool. I can't explain everything because spoilers, but I would really love to know if that was planned right from the beginning, or a writer later realized that it would make such an awesome scene and metaphor after S1 or S2 were already written.
Also, Twin Turbo did a Naruto run in the rain.
Goblin Slayer S2
Goblins bad. Priestess cute. Souka.
Helck
This is the 2-cour series I mentioned earlier that started airing in the Summer season. My feelings are kind of mixed. It's based on a completed manga that a lot of people really love, but it's apparently being made by a low-budget studio without the best animators at that studio working on it. Helck is a fantasy series about a human hero (Helck) trying to become the successor to a killed Demon King, and a high-ranking demon (Vamirio) who doesn't trust him and tries to stop him even though he's the most popular and strongest candidate. But basically these two characters somehow end up going on this huge adventure to save the world and stuff together. I really really love the first OP for this anime, I never skipped it when it played.
However, I do have some issues with this anime. I don't know if the source material is kind of mid, or this low-budget adaptation isn't good (sounds like things are leaning towards the latter), but Helck has kind of puttered out for me over time. The story is more about the drama rather than the fight scenes, and Helck basically has One Punch Man-levels of power that ends fights quickly. But still, I found the slideshow animation of the few fight scenes to be kind of distracting. Even the non-fight animation kind of sucks. It just all feels kind of off the more I watch.
And for a many continuous episodes there was a long flashback backstory that just kind of dragged on for me with the quality and the wait between episodes. Perhaps it would have felt better if I didn't have to wait a week between every episode. Bingers who pick up things later are kind of privileged when this stuff happens. That's finally ended, and we're back to the main story. Buuut... apparently with this backstory ended, we're only halfway through the source material with only 6 episodes of this season left. Unless they squeeze the remainder of the story into those episodes, Helck will probably need a second season to finish off the story. Ugh...
S-rank Musume
My Daughter Left the Nest and Returned an S-Rank Adventurer is a fun anime, and I think the title should mostly explain everything. The whole cast and their interactions are all really good. Yeah, don't know what else to say other than you'll probably enjoy this show if you like fantasy animu.
I'm in Love with the Villainess
An otome isekai series that isn't afraid of discussing queer stuff? Naisu.
Shut-in Vampire Princess
Going in I expected this anime to be good right away, but unfortunately it did the opposite of hooking me in on the first episode. I strongly considered dropping this anime, but it barely managed to squeeze by the three episode rule, and now I'm invested. The story is about a hikikomari (lol) vampire girl who is super weak and is forced to be a high-ranking vampire general leading a nutty unit of vampires that would quickly get rid of any weak leader.
Interestingly though, in this world, there is some magic that prevents permadeath and heals all wounds, so war and stuff is serious, but not really. It's funny hearing living characters casually be like "I was killed" and have it make sense.
The animation is superb. Clearly the production staff really love this series, and the fight scenes are excellent. If you can make it past the cringy parts and the fan service I think you might enjoy this show. And the outro is so chill and relaxing.
Tearmoon Empire
Story about a princess (Mia) who gets executed after her empire falls apart and undergoes a revolution that strongly alludes to the French Revolution. And she goes back in time to when she was a kid along with the diary she kept while everything collapsed around her. Now she plans to basically change things with the sole goal of not getting executed again in the future.
Going in my expectations were super low, but Tearmoon Empire managed to hook me in hard on the first episode. I don't even remember the last time an anime did that for me (usually at best I'm just like "this anime looks interesting, I'll keep watching" for a while before I actually get hooked). I really love how Mia acts purely selfishly and is constantly scheming to not die, and always fails at her schemes, but somehow still ends up being beloved by everyone because of how her super selfish actions appear super selfless. It's hilarious. If you are amused by ojou-samas who always desuwa, then you will love this anime.
16bit Sensation: Another Layer
Okay, this might not be the "best" anime of this season, but to me it's certainly the "most interesting" anime of the season. You see, the source material (16bit Sensation) is a manga that's kind of a slice-of-life series about indie game development in '90s Japan. It basically shows how game dev was different back in those days, and how there were computer shops who had a side business making computer games (usually eroges). And the main character is a girl who works part-time at one of those computer shops and gets roped into the game-making side of things.
With this anime though creators decided to make an original story and the main character is a girl living in 2023 who wants to make a great game and become a famous illustrator, but ends up working a menial game illustrator job she hates. But shit happens and she ends up getting sent back in time to the '90s where she ends up working for the game dev company with the characters of the source material. Hence the "Another Layer". I think having a modern person forced to do game dev the old-fashioned way is a way better way of showing the audience how game dev was done in the past compared to what the manga did. In there the author spends like half the panels of the first chapter explaining things while for the characters it's normal.
This anime is a feast for visual novel, retro tech, and "Japan nostalgia" nerds. The creators managed to secure the rights to show tons of famous '90s visual novels, and a bunch of modern animanga and visual novel stuff, so there's few silly look-alikes that you've see seen before (WcDonalds kinda stuff), and you actually get a real name you can look up. In the /r/anime discussion threads there were people compiling all the games that were being shown and stuff, some of which are relevant to the plot. There was also much gushing about all the retro historical stuff in these threads.
One little kind of subplot I found interesting was the snapshots of the decline of the PC-98 in the anime. PC-98 was a Japanese-designed computer platform that enjoyed over a decade of dominance in the Japanese personal computer market until American companies overtook that with better computers and software around the mid-90s. This video which I highly recommend watching gets into the whole history of this decline. You might not have heard of PC-98, but you probably heard of a series that originally started on PC-98: Touhou Project.
Anyways, I think 16bit Sensation is cool and worth a try. Expect the unexpected.
Sousou no Frieren
A greatly hyped anime that is crazy popular. The story and writing is great, and the animation makes it even better. I'd call it AOTY, but there's a challenger approaching.
Apothecary Diaries
This anime wasn't really on my radar, and I didn't pick it up until after episode 4 came out because I didn't know that this was a really beloved series that people really wanted an anime adaptation for. Apothecary Diaries is a "historical" drama set in ancient China, and it's pretty damn awesome. This is not a story that really needs great fluid dynamic animation to be enjoyable, but the animators decided to knock it out of the park anyway with simple everyday motion animated with such detail and care. So far this is my most favourite series of this season.
That's all for now. I see some other popular new shows that are airing now that might be interesting to me, but I don't really feel like I'm missing out on anything that might have been interesting like I did with the Spring season. And I still got my anime-to-watch list to get through, plus there are already many cool new shows planned for the Winter season that I'm intending to watch, so all this is enough.
Are you watching any cool new anime this season? What do you think of them?