I have seen more than enough anime series in 2024 thus far to be reasonably (not absolutely) confident that the second season of MF Ghost will not be a realistic contender for my annual year-end top-six ranking. With that out of the way, count me as excited to watch the Chad-faced protagonist Kanata engage in some high-octane drifting, disappearing line attacks, and late breaking. As I noted in my 2023 ranking article,while MF Ghost missed by year-end top six by 2-3 spots, I often found myself looking forward to it more than my anime of the year choice, which happened to air on the same day. With luck, maybe MF Ghost season 2 will cut down on everything that doesn’t involve racing (its romance writing is on par with its predecessor, Initial D, and I submit for the record that this is not a complement).
Tag: anime 2023
First Anime I Watched in 2024
Or if you haven’t watched any yet in 2024, I guess what anime will you start with? Surely anyone reading this has watched something though, right?
Yomu at the Umai Yomu Anime Blog asked readers to answer the following question: What anime did you start the new year with? The first anime I watched in 2024 was actually a 2023 series: BanG Dream! It’s MyGo!!!!! Two factors came together to make that 2023 musical melodrama my first anime of the new year.
First, I had started working on my long 2023 anime year-in-review article for The New Leaf Journal in late December. My year-in-review features a list of my top-six series of the previous year. I had considered publishing it in late December, but I had multiple projects in the works so I delayed it until the first week of January. I then became sick in late December and my ill health trickled into the first few days of 2024. Being sick and not having work assignments, I had little to do. I had read some positive reviews of BanG Dream! It’s MyGo!!!!! and, after confirming that familiarity with the BanG Dream! franchise was not a prerequisite to entry (I had no prior familiarity), I decided to spend some of my sick hours watching the series to see what the fuss was about and make sure that I covered all the bases I wanted to cover for my 2023 anime review article. While it is far from perfect, it impressed me enough to earn the fourth spot on my final anime of the year ranking, which made me delete a section that I had written for (former) sixth place The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten (that one still has its full-length review, however).
Solid OP and ED in The Dreaming Boy is a Realist
Sajou Wataru is madly in love with his classmate, Natsukawa Aika, to the point where he daydreams about them being together and constantly pesters her...
I am working on cleaning up a few anime series that I missed throughout the year in preparation for my year in review. As part of the project, I quickly went through The Dreaming Boy is a Realist (light novel titles…) on HiDive (I had neglected HiDive for a bit because there’s no unofficial Kodi app). Was it good? No, not particularly. A series about a high school boy (first year in this case, somewhat unusual for anime) pulling back from his overbearing obsession with a girl he likes but who appears to not like him back would have required a much more deft, focused, and sophisticated hand than what crafted this series. But I will note that notwithstanding the series’ sub-par animation production values, both the OP and ED songs were well done. That may be one of the over-arching themes of my year-in-review. There were no great series that finished in 2023 like the third season of Oregairu in 2020, SSSS.Dynazenon in 2021, or the third season of Takagi-san in 2022 (jury is still out on one continuing into 2024), but it was a banner year for OP and ED productions.