ちびキャララミバ / えらんと

Despite stopping Weekly Musings since the end of last term, I still have kept up keeping track of my weekly anime ratings in terms of a spreadsheet, mostly for my APR ballot. Since it is the end of the summer season, it means that I will be doing my final touches on my summer 2012 spreadsheet and starting my fall spreadsheet, let’s just tally up and see what I think was the worst to best show of the summer season.

Last season I ranked the shows based on the total points it accumulated during the whole season (a point is gain from having a better episode compared to every other episode that aired in the same week), and even than I stated how that way of ranking placed Natsuiro Kiseki at a huge disadvantage, as I started that show half way into the spring season, it didn’t collect any points for the episodes that I didn’t watch as it aired (5 episodes). For this season, I first tried to just find the average points gained for each show and ranking it based on it. While that solved the issue that Natsuiro Kiseki had last time, there were still places that some shows might end up having an disadvantage on. For example, on the weeks that Olympics were held, several shows didn’t get to broadcast for those few weeks. The results is that the shows that were able to broadcast would not have gained an extra point if that show were better than the shows that were postponed. So additionally I tried a new different methods to rank this season’s shows. One is to only let each week’s top 5 get points and then calculate the rankings according to the average points, that way, even on a week with less shows, the maximum number of points that a show can get is 5. Lastly I ranked the shows according to each method (original method, or Method A, or the top 5 method, Method B, gave them points according to each rank from 12-0, took the sum and did a final ranking. Here are the results:

I swear that the top 3 being tied is pure coincidence, I didn’t force my result to be like that or anything >_>.

Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita

I liked it the show very much, though I can’t really put my finger on especially why. In general though, I really liked the main characters, all of them have this sarcastic personality that just make the character not like any other generic character seen in other shows, which on top is helped by the wonderful (or lack of) performance of their voice actress. Yes I’m talking about Watashi and Y in particular, which both is a huge reason why I liked the show. Additionally, another big reason why I liked the show was because of the fairies. They love sweets, makes really nasty comments with a smile, does random stuff just because and are just adorable. The the whole series being colorful and wacky also helped me liking this show also. I’m still a bit iffy about the last few episodes, as it stopped being just fun and games, but recalling that the original novel was written by Romeo Tanaka, person behind Cross Channel and Yume Miru Kusuri (both really good visual novels), I guess the last few episodes are where we get to see the serious stuff underneath all the fun and games (similar to Cross Channel, which while was funny and wacky at time, really dives in to some really serious plot).

Smile Precure

What can I say? The show talks of friendship and each episode have the girls just having fun and fighting weekly monsters. After watching for 30+ episodes, I have come to like all 5 of them, so I guess I’m pretty biased toward this show. I guess my biggest issue with them is that the fighting scene is a bit too uninteresting, especially since the amount of them they still use to animate their final move.

Joshiraku

Written by the same guy behind Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, Joshiraku has the same kinds of jokes that made me like SZS so much. Additionally, instead of being illustrated by Kumeta himself (as with SZS), it was illustrated by Yasu and is animated by JC Staff, which seems to making few good shows this year. I loved SZS, and hence why Joshiraku being similar to SZS enough, easily became one of my favorite shows this season. If you love puns and references Joshiraku is something that you should sometime, if not, you can still watch it for the moe girls. My only issue with this? Not enough people are subbing it.

Yuruyuri ♪♪

Despite having a perfect final two episodes, the quality of jokes for each episode differs quite a bit. I guess the main reason is that some cast are just less interesting than others, and when some episodes put more focus on the less interesting characters, I get bored and hence ranked this show lower than, say Joshiraku, which all 5 were almost always present. Despite that, I really enjoyed the show, and came in close in being the best show if it weren’t for those less than satisfactory episodes.

Tari Tari

Heck, the art was beautiful, the few times that the main characters sang were also pretty good, Wakana is cute etc. However, while I can’t really hate this show, there weren’t much there for me to like either. Yes I like Wakana’s arc and her in the last few episodes, but some of the other arcs were so-so (or how Taichi just got shafted). I donno, maybe they are just playing it safe with the show, as it have seemed to have done everything right, but nothing just seem to be that memorable for me other than Wakana (actually, even Wakana’s arc seemed to have ended pretty blend)…

Hyouka

I’m guessing most of you would be putting Hyouka as your favorite this season. No fault of the show, but I only warmed up to this show in the final parts where I finally realized something that everyone realized way before. Yes, the end of the school festival arc was KyoAni’s genius ability at work, and yes the final episode was very pretty and HNNNNGGGG-ing, but I guess I really didn’t ‘get’ the show until or near the end of the school festival arc. Call me slow but that made me rank Hyouka lower than most people had in the earlier episodes

Binbougami ga!

While I do like comedy, I’m less of a fan to slapstick comedy than I’m a fan to puns and references (Joshiraku), and my ranking for this show shows that. The comedy aren’t bad, and I really like it when Momiji dresses up as characters from other franchise, but heck I will never put this above Joshiraku. Also, aside from the comedy, the drama part of the show weren’t all that original and was kinda meh.

As for the other ones: Space Brothers is getting a bit too slow for me to enjoy on a weekly basis, Saki Achiga only happened once so not surprising that it didn’t get that high (only one chance to gain points in Method B), Eureka 7 AO went from anticipation to interesting then right to annoying and a disappointment , Kokoro Connect ended up looking like it was making plot twists for the sake of making them making me stop caring about them, Sword Art Online was never that good for me, and Total Eclipse is just flat out horrible, why am I even still watching that show?