Friday, December 30, 2016

12 Days of Anime: The 2016 "Almosts"

As I finally make up my top 2016 lists (I mean, it wouldn't be fair to do it before all of the shows finished airing this week!) there are also titles that I immediately know aren't top-of material and yet, I'm still fond of them in some ways.

We had shows that set out with grand plans to tell big stories and yet, just faltered in the end and stumbled over characterization as well. Kiznaiver did a lot of the first and some of the second while Concrete Revolutio did an equal amount of both (I find that I like ConRevo's first cour better than it's second and largely because of how hard it dropped the ball on Kikko and Emi).

Then we have the shows that had some pacing issues. Snow White with the Red Hair/Akagami no Shirayuki-hime suffered from being centered around a weaker arc and My Hero Academia really needed two cours from the start since the pacing moved at a snail's pace some weeks. I suppose Erased/Boku Daki ga Inai Machi also falls under this category, as Bobduh put it "it was two-thirds of a show that would easily make the top ten welded to one-third of a show I’d have dropped in ten minutes."

But I still have a fondness for a lot of these shows, they aren't surefire buys for me but they're likely buys. And, if a show didn't make either this list or tomorrow's list then I'll probably never remember to buy it!