I Revised My Anime Rating System
The Fall 2023 anime season has come to a close and the Winter 2024 season has basically started. This past season was a partially disappointing season for me, as some anime I thought would be good ended up kind of falling flat towards their ending. Before I go on with the subject of ratings, I do want to give a shout out to two anime I watched this Fall 2023 season that I feel are underrated: 16bit Sensation & Ikenaikyo.
When I wrote my mid-season summary, in the 16bit Sensation: Another Layer part I said "expect the unexpected", and holy shit, it went way beyond my expected level of unexpected in the episodes that were released after my blog post. What I thought was a silly time travel game dev anime actually ended up being a crazy off-the-wall story that gets hella philosophical. I don't know who let the writers cook, but it's great that they got to deliver something amazing and special. Please watch go watch this animu. (btw also, I auto-traced a vector of the MC's autograph.)
Ikenaikyo was not in my summary post, and I picked it up like a day or two after the post for reasons I forget now. Though I do remember seeing memes about how Ikenaikyo's full length LN title makes the average light novel title length seem kind of short. But anyways, this anime (at least in the first half) is just pure sugar. It's so comfy. It's just off-the-charts comfy. In my opinion, the synopsis & title kind of makes it seem like it's worse than it actually is. I guess part of that comes from the word "naughty", which has a double meaning in both English and Japanese: naughty in a suggestive sense, and naughty like "naughty kid". This series intentionally plays with that double meaning, but all the naughty stuff that actually happens is the childish kind. But yeah, I really loved Ikenaikyo.
So... ratings. I changed the rating system I use on my watched anime page from an X/10 system to a letter grade/tier system.
I'm not really sure if this is actually important for people to know. On the one hand I feel like the average person's reaction to considering how things are rated would be like "who cares nerd, now give me your lunch money". On the other hand, this actually isn't super deep and consequential. It's not like I'm some Anton Ego figure giving harsh but legit feedback to anime I watched. I'm not giving out deep analysis or even a quick one-sentence review to most of the anime I've watched, just a one-dimensional summary that almost amounts to "anime good/anime bad". Honestly I'm kind of envious of people who can give harsh but understandable reviews & ratings to anime.
When I started off my watched anime page, it was literally just a list of anime I finished watching, and later on I decided (I think at someone's suggestion?) to add ratings for what I thought of the anime. And I chose the simple something out of ten system that most people seem to use when rating various things. I didn't think much about doing things this way and kept rating things for like a year... until I watched a video that dissed people's rating systems. It wasn't specifically about anime ratings, it was actually about the ratings audiophile reviewers gave to headphones, but it still made me think about my own dumb anime page and its ratings. I think this is an important video (even if you're not an audiophile) so I'm not just going to link it, I'm also going to embed it right here:
So yeah, this video made me think about how my average rating for anime I watched was kind of high. I didn't actually calculate it or anything, but I'm certain it was probably around 8.5/10. And again, I wish I could be someone who gives out harsh ratings, but that's just not who I am. But also I guess my high scores were kind of justified? I kind of rate anime according to a rubric where the quality of the storytelling & characters is just one of many elements that make a show good or bad. For me to give something a rating below 5/10 it would have to have a bad story, bad animation, bad acting, etc. or just have a story so bad it subtracts from even perfect animation and all that.
But I guess this is also kind of a flawed way of looking at things because it's rare to hear a poor performance by a seiyuu these days, and my only recent example of specifically bad animation that subtracts from a story that comes to mind was Helck. And often low-budget shows usually are just sit & walk & talk anime which are usually easy to animate frugally, so no one is going to fault them for their bad animation. Also, it seems that many animators would rather ruin their own health and well-being than make bad animation, which many studios seem to exploit unfortunately. But yeah, my ratings are generally more vibe-based than being rooted in clear explainable logic.
Of course there is also the element that I don't give out ratings to shows which I never finished. If I included those, I guess there would have been a lot more ratings below 5/10 on my watched anime page.
Anyways, so after taking the fact that I kind of treat anime kind of like I'm grading assignments and rarely give out failing grades, and also taking inspiration from the rating system that Crinacle uses, I've decided to switch to a letter grade system to rate my watched anime. Of course, the grades aren't exactly like the A to F grade system used in many academic places around the world. It's actually closer to the tier list system that you see in viral YouTube videos. I even colour-coded my ratings with the same colours used in tier lists. Everything was translated mostly 1-to-1 from my old X/10 system as follows:
- 10/10 - S tier
- 9/10 - A tier
- 8/10 - B tier
- 7/10 - C tier
- 6/10 - D tier
- 5/10 or less - F tier
- Other/10 - Other tier
I also took this opportunity to revise a few ratings I felt were actually too high. And I mostly kept the non-numbered word ratings as they were before (being able to have my rating be literally anything is mostly why I have my ratings on a web page instead of in MAL/AniList/whatever).
Yeah, I don't really have a serious conclusion to all this. I made this mostly so people can understand why my ratings system changed and also so other people can reconsider their own way of rating things, even stuff outside of anime and other weebshit. Hope you like my new anime rating system. Check out this /r/anime thread if you're interested in more thoughts about how people rate anime.