Let’s wrap this up.

For some reason, my “seasonal rankings” tag became a “seasonal wrap-up” somewhere along the way, so that’s the new tag for the final takes on the season. Also, due to the special debut Crunchyroll are doing with Mahou Shoujo Ore, I had to get these posts out about a week or two earlier than I expected, and so I’m only talking about the shows in broad terms here (and missing the verdict on the final episode or two).

Now, to the good stuff – in order of personal preference:

• gd men: This was the only show I had genuine, “Yes! As soon as I get home, I’ll watch this!” feelings for, which…seems kind of silly for an 8 minute improv show, but the chips fall where they may for a show which parodies/references so many anime, I can’t even figure out what some of them are! For those who do decide to watch this in the future, remember to watch episodes right until the end – the next episode previews are hilarious.
• Zoku Touken Ranbu Hanamaru: Having Yasusada written out of most of the season meant the staff could bring the SoL aspect of the show to the fore, but as a tradeoff to that, the overarching plot was even more sluggish than season 1. That’s not to say anything about this season’s bad, per se – like YuruCamp, this show is very consistent and the change in staff between seasons hasn’t really affected anything. In fact, it looked even more visually impressive in regards to the EDs!
• Gakuen Babysitters: The biggest feels-wrencher, but also a somewhat problematic one. Unfortunately, what has disturbing implications can also be very funny and I fell victim to that…I think that’s what the author and the show were trying to (implicitly) exploit, maybe. Aside from that, this show’s a bit of a slow one and a bit repetitive in the morals it tries to bring to the fore, but otherwise it’s quite harmless. It’s definitely a lot more powerful if you have siblings (and even more powerful if you can remember what they were like at Kotaro’s or Midori’s age) or are going to have siblings soon.
• Idolish7: With 17 episodes, this show still has a bit to go, but for consistency’s sake I have to cover it here. While this show is a strong entry into the idol genre with both a firm understanding of character-based humour and drama, it’s a bit like Code:Realise where it can’t exceed the boundaries of its genre to go beyond good and become great. For the first time, I saw some flaws in TROYCA’s anmation (since this is essentially the first series of theirs I’m going to see to the end), but that’s nothing too big.
• YuruCamp: This was the show with the earliest debut date-wise, so I can talk about it pretty fully here. The show was pretty consistent in pretty much everything aside from involving a certain talking pinecone (which is a small quibble in the scheme of things), but at least I’m getting somewhere with those New Year’s resolutions.
• Mahoutsukai no Yome: At times, I felt I was merely watching this just to appease others who were watching the show and enjoying it more. Even though the show’s become more thematically complex, after Silky’s backstory came up the series seemed to fall into a slump by focussing on longer story arcs and trying to wrap things up, possibly too early…that was how I took it up until episode 22, where it clearly got better (although Chise and Joseph’s exchange of curses confused me until I read other people’s thoughts on the episode). Even still, the climax’s not enough to beat out even YuruCamp‘s consistency – in fact, by losing me for a bit, it might have even slipped backwards from its bottom position a tad in regards to enjoyment. Holistically speaking, it’s kept a fairly average position (rating: 70 – 80) though, so not all is lost.

So what did you think about any of these shows, or about the season? If there’s anything specific about any of these shows you want my take on, you can drop by the comments as well.