== Looking back at the Spring 2018 anime season

[[Once again Winter2018Retrospective]] it's time for my traditional
look back at what I watched in this past Spring season, to follow up
on [[my early impressions Spring2018Brief]] and [[my 'midway' views
Spring2018Midway]]. 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
Winter2018Retrospective]], or at the very least it had more shows that
I felt like throwing myself into watching every week when they came out.