This is the yearly rankings post.

Just to make it faster for myself, I’ve left the month that I finished at the end of each entry of these non-simulcast commentary lists.

Top (?) 10 Worst Dropped Anime According to My AniList Rating

Due to the fact an anime needs a rating to be eligible in the first place, this automatically discards Gunjou no Magmell (which I watched a few minutes of when in Japan and decided not to bother anymore).

1. King of Prism – Shiny Seven Stars
2. Joshikausei
3. Shoumetsu Toshi/Afterlost (tie)
4. Arifureta (tie)
5. Yu-no
6. Rinshi! Ekoda-chan
7. Ahiru no Sora (could watch if I could learn to live with the random fanservice non-sequiturs)
8. Assassin’s Pride
9. Didn’t I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! (may come off the list in the future, as it’s marked for re-evaluation) (tie)
10. Maou-sama, Retry! (tie, although I could watch it if I were in the mood for something terrible)

The main reasons I’ll refuse a show, according to this data, are 1) fanservice in a place where it may not have been expected, 2) stuff that doesn’t make a lot of sense or 3) first-person “camera” (which is how King of Prism got the worst ranking). There were some interesting premises/concepts involved, such as the lancanthropes of Assassin’s Pride, but then the execution sucked.

Show-specific notes

• Potential copouts (i.e. an entry is under 5 minutes per ep.) are Joshikausei and Rinshi! Ekoda-chan.
• Ratings range from 25 to 48, meaning I was harsher on 2019 anime than some other years such as 2018.

Top OVAs/Movies Finished in 2019

1. Rurouni Kenshin: Tsuioku-hen (Trust and Betrayal) (June)
2. Kimi no Suizou wo Tabetai (September)
3. Miss Hokusai (June)
4. Rurouni Kenshin: Seisou-hen (Reflection) (June)
5. Blackfox (October)
6. Mob Psycho 2 OVA (October)
7. Oushitsu Kyoushi Heine movie (February)
8. Gakuen Babysitters OVA (June)
9. Mecha-ude (May)
10. Kimi no Na wa/Your Name (February)
11. Cells at Work: Common Cold (January)
12. Double Decker! EX (May)
13. Houkago no Pleiades OVA (December)
14. El-Melloi OVA (August)
15. Namakura Gatana (April)
16. Zenonzard Ep. 0 (October)
17. Sentou Yousei Shoujo Tasukete! Mave-chan (September)
18. Kanojo to Kanojo no Neko: Their Standing Points (September)

Show-specific notes

• Seisou-hen doesn’t continue on from Tsuioku-hen, hence the separate entries. I havem’t watched the entirety of Rurouni Kenshin, so Seisou-hen was bound to have a bad rating anyway.
• Kimi no Suizou wa Tabetai is pretty significant to me because of the day I watched it on and because it emphasises exactly how long I have left in the anime club, but I feel like it’s a bit contrived plot-wise.
• The only potential copout is the last entry.
• The normal requirement for this list is that they shouldn’t have made the simulcast commentary, but I ended up covering the MP100 OVA and the Double Decker OVAs there anyway because Crunchyroll was treating them like an ordinary simulcast.
• June was the best month for this list with 4 entries.
• The Houkago no Pleiades OVA is mostly the same as what is shown in the full series.
• I didn’t really know this going into it, but Sentou Yousei Shoujo Tasukete! Mave-chan is a spinoff of a series called Yukikaze, a sci-fi series.
• I think I may have mentioned this elsewhere on this blog, but I watched Namakura Gatana – the oldest anime on my list by far – as part of a joke that my anime club media manager likes watching “old anime” (series from the ’70s or ’80s).

Ranking for Full Series Finished in 2019 Off Simulcast Commentary

1. Yuki Yuna (August)
2. Classicaloid 2 (February)
3. Houkago no Pleiades (November)
4. Hozuki no Reitetsu II (pts 1 + 2) (October)
5. Soredemo Sekai wa Utsukushii (May)
6. Haruhi Suzumiya s1 (August)
7. Hellsing (October)
8. Afro Samurai (August)
9. Jitsu wa Watashi wa (June)
10. Konobi (March)
11. Dimension High School (April)

Show-specific notes

• August was the best month for this list, although October is the best overall (TV shorts, movies and OVAs).
• I finished 14 eps of Haruhi, but not necessarily in the order that my streaming service provided them – I went with the order that starts with the Adventure of Mikuru Asahina. This is why it’s “s1”.
• Dimension High School was a victim of Sentai giving the episodes to Crunchyroll far too late and so never became eligible for the simulcast commentary in the first place.

Ranking for TV Short Series Finished in 2019 (Off Simulcast Commentary):

1. Tonari no Seki-kun (January)
2. Tsuredure Children (September)
3. Uchuu Senkan Tiramisu (I + II) (October)
4. Honobono Log (September)
5. Mahou Shoujo Naria Girls (November)

Show-specific notes

• Fun (?) fact: I’ve been just that little bit less sane since October because I managed the nasty feat of staying up until 3 am trying to finish Uchuu Senkan Tiramisu for Chibi Tamago. That’s not something to be proud of, but it shows you how far I can go with some momentum behind me…
• The amount of backlog anime I’ve watched went up drastically, from 12 in 2017 (incl. TV shorts, but no movies/OVAs) to 30 in 2018 (incl. TV shorts, movies and OVAs) to 33 (incl. TV shorts, movies and OVAs).

Top anime of 2019

20. Egao no Daika/Price of Smiles

19. Mahou Shoujo Tokushusen Asuka

18. Cop Craft

17. OPM s2 (down 12 from its previous eligible position)

16. Morose Mononokean Tsuzuki (down 2 from its previous eligible position)

15. Shield Hero

14. Iruma-kun

13. BnHA s4 (down 7 from its last eligible position)

12. Dr Stone

11. No Guns Life

10. Fruits Basket (2019, aka s1)

9. Stars Align/Hoshiai no Sora

8. Given

7. My Roommate is a Cat

6. Kimetsu no Yaiba

5. Shinchou Yuusha

4. Sarazanmai

3. Bungou Stray Dogs s3 (up 4 from its previous eligible position, where both seasons made the chart at the same time)

2. Mob Psycho 100 II (s1 did not chart in 2016)

1. Astra: Lost in Space

Interesting observations

• 20 entries this year, bringing it back up to 2017’s level.
• Due to delays and being away over the Christmas break, I’m missing a few episodes from all the fall shows but this should be correct for everything that I could reasonably assess before this post went out.
• Summer and spring are equal in their top representation in the top 10, because of the way Fruits Basket and Kimetsu no Yaiba represent both.

Show-specific notes

• No Guns Life: “Schlocky, but fun” is better than Shield Hero‘s “I grew dissatisfied with this over time and after thinking about it”. Then again, I seem to give more value to extreme reactions than neutral ones on these lists all the time.
• Astra vs. MP100: This was a pretty tough choice, considering MP100 took out the top non-simulcast commentary spot in 2017. However, I was more consistently giving emotional responses to Astra than I was to MP100, which is how the tiebreaker was won.
• BnHA s4: No matter how good the animation and the plot is, you can tell how used to BnHA I’m getting because of the drop in the ranking. Not to mention I got to read quite a bit of the manga this year between Viz free chapters and getting access to the volumes in my closest library, so I’ve basically lived through a whole bunch of story beats twice at this stage. It’s not that BnHA is bad – quite the contrary – it’s just that other things were better this year. Then again, with s1 at 4, s2 at 5 and s3 at 6, this is BnHA‘s worst position ever…
• Morose Mononokean Tsuzuki: Basically the same thing that happened to BnHA, but without the manga.
• OPM s2: with a drop of 12 positions, this is the most disappointing anime this year.

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So, how was your year in anime?