Roving Thoughts archives

Looking back at the Spring 2018 anime season

Once again it's time for my traditional look back at what I watched in this past Spring season, to follow up on my early impressions and my 'midway' views. Even if I was lazy about it, this is an easy wrap-up because I only finished two shows, each excellent in their own way.

• Sword Art Online Alternative - Gun Gale Online: This had many good aspects that I could rave about, but above all it was pure fun from start to end (they even managed to make the 'episode 5.5' recap great, although it helps to watch it after you've finished the show so you get the undertones). The characters were great and worked well with each other, everyone was enjoying themselves in the game, the twists of the action were great, and the actual comedy was funny. It even managed to pull off being serious every so often.

  Gun Gale Online is my new standard of excellence in popcorn fun action shows.

  (With that said, the show probably was about exactly the right length and I'm not sure you could make more that still was as good as this was.)

• Hisone and Masotan: I don't fully understand what happened at the end there and I'm not sure how I feel about one aspect of the epilogue, but the show as a whole was a great ride and quietly took a point of view that I whole-heartedly agree with. It also had that rare thing, a romance and a romantic pairing that I could actually believe in (partly because the two people in question didn't start out that way at all).

  (This was deeper than GGO but not as purely and easily entertaining; this spring, that put GGO on top as my most anticipated and eagerly watched show.)

I dropped all three of the shows that I expected I'd probably dropped in my 'midway' views. There's nothing deeply wrong with any of them (with the possible exception of DarliFra), I just stopped being interested enough to watch more.

The two shows I finished were both great (in that I deeply enjoyed both of them), and that's enough to make the Spring season a pretty good one. My snap assessment is that it's better overall than the winter season, or at the very least it had more shows that I felt like throwing myself into watching every week when they came out.