Fall 2016 – Virtually Every First Episode Retrospective

Holy shit I’m alive. Having dragged myself through one more gauntlet of endless, senseless, pitiless animation, I can finally say I’ve survived another one. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say this was the least psychologically damaging crop of debuts I’ve had to weather since joining the preview guide. Sure, there were bad shows – there are always plenty of bad shows – but the number of true spirit-breakers was mercifully low, and a surprising number of shows were competently executed even if they didn’t appeal to me. Anime’s current production model may be an unsustainable trainwreck of manic overproduction, but the bastards didn’t get me this time!

And so, having sat through all those many, many hours of animation, it’s time to send my battle report back to the folks back home. As usual, I’ll be running down every single show I watched in general order of how impressed I was, grouping things into categories based on how much they hurt me. Also as usual, you can check out the whole list of reviews over at ANN, or click on any of the titles below to go to that show’s specific reviews (I’m Nick Creamer over there). There’s a ton of very reasonable anime this season, so let’s get right to it!

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Fall 2016 – First Impressions, Part One

Anime monsoon season has arrived again, beginning with the usual torrential downpour of mediocre cartoons. The season is starting a little slow so far, but that’s really just an issue of scheduling – most of the shows I’m looking forward to have yet to premiere, and those that already have either matched or exceeded my expectations. First episodes aren’t always trustworthy, of course, particularly when it comes to animation quality, but I certainly haven’t been suffering too much!

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