I’m going to cut, for the sake of this post actually going out, Yashahime and Healin’ Good PreCure. I’m going to include, however, Idolish7, even though, in terms of seasonal slots, it’s a spring anime (due to the COVID delay).

I did a seasonal challenge this time, due to Burn the Witch airing in one go early on. I didn’t like Burn the Witch all that much, which isn’t much of a surprise when you know I dropped the manga oneshot before watching the anime (thanks a lot, Viz!). As for the challenge, I would only recommend it if you have access to anime – legal or not – as soon as they’re available and you don’t burn out and/or fall behind as fast as I do. (Why is this talk relevant for this post? I took on 7 anime for that challenge and had Yashahime as a backup, which is why this batch took so long, thereby postponing spring’s and summer’s batches.)

Otherwise, from most to worst hype as it ended up during the season:

Hypnosis Mic

The only anime I ended up keeping up with monthly after headaches started striking me down around the same time each week for several weeks running, and then burnout happened on top of that. (I would assume they were from dehydration and staying up late.)

The plot was worse than paper-thin and without my immense bias, I would’ve probably rated this in the 60-something range (out of 100). The anime is clearly the worst of the parts of the franchise due to how little information the anime staff clearly had in comparison to the other parts, but to please me, all you really need to do is deliver the fun of the series in an animated format and it did that. Twitter was significantly abuzz during the reveal of the Secret Aliens (although I only know this because I have my trending topics set to Japan’s), so once all the releases and events have been rolled out come September 2021, it’s likely a 2nd season could be announced – fingers crossed Rhyme Anima does better with the 2nd DRB if that happens!

Yuukoku no Moriarty

This got much better after I got over my burnout and Sherlock showed up. Aside from the occasional slip-up which you can excuse “because anime”, such as having a typo in the sign for “Duram” (sic) when the subbers clearly can go to the source material and say, “This was ‘Durham’, wasn’t it?”, this had to gain some momentum before it started showing what it was worth. With the reveal of Mycroft and the queen, we’re going into the 2nd season with high hopes.

Akudama Drive

Meanwhile, this anime was probably better while it was still on the rise and (quite literally) aiming for the moon. The final bit about Shikoku came slightly out of left field (…LOL, considering Shikoku is left of Kantou and Kansai). The fight scenes are absolutely spectacular, but otherwise, although the craziness was good at first, it made the anime seem somewhat unfocussed at the end. Although its messages of police brutality and keeping hope even in the direst of times were quite applicable to basically any place in the world in the dumpster fire that was 2020, it seemed Americans saw themselves in this the most.

Taiso Samurai

A quirky anime for sure, but after you get past the initial weirdness (and the fact there’s no time travel…I’m still kinda salty about that), it’s actually a pretty grounded (in some ways, found) family drama that’s also occasionally about gymnastics. I’m still kinda grumpy about how Leo cut his hair short in the end…he was so pretty with long hair…

The series prefers to skip technicalities, so I would recommend anyone wanting to watch this would probably need knowledge of gymnastics to really enjoy the routines. I also think certain characters, such as Tackey (Takizawa) and Leo, weren’t quite explored enough.

Maou-jou

A respectable comedy. It’s probably better in small doses. It works a lot better once it after it diversifies its cast.

Idolish7 Second Beat!

Another anime that required momentum to get good…even though technically it had 17 episodes to get momentum going already, unlike the other anime in this post. I wasn’t quite on board with the comedy at first (especially the switch to chibi art, which was a throwback about a decade too old for a 2020 anime), but it actually works to level out the drama by quite a bit. In the end, I would consider this as having exceeded Maou-jou, but because it was my only Crunchyroll anime (due to the ads, it takes significantly longer to watch CR anime), it was my last priority for the season.

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So how did you like these fall anime? (I know, as I said I still have my spring and summer 2020 anime to get back to, plus now I have winter 2021 debuts…)