This was not the greatest week in anime, I am afraid to report. All the shows I’m watching that are apparently capable of weaker episodes ended up producing one, with JoJo in particular offering what was almost certainly the worst Golden Wind episode so far. Fortunately, even if all the stragglers faltered this week, both Mob Psycho 100 and Run with the Wind excelled with their usual grace, offering an encouraging counterpoint to their so-so compatriots. Pretty cool that for this season, even a particularly lousy week of anime still offers some of the best spectacles of the year!

This week’s JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure might have been the weakest episode yet of Golden Wind, unfortunately. Though it wasn’t particularly engaging in terms of visual execution either, the episode’s central issue was a familiar JoJo problem – when some Stand conflict centers on “our teammate is behaving strangely and we’re not sure what’s going on,” JoJo characters have a tendency to get really, really stupid. This concept has worked in the past (“BABY STAND”), but this week’s drama pretty much entirely hung on everyone except Narancia acting far less intelligent than they usually do, making the episode’s conflict feel both inherently arbitrary and incredibly drawn out. I’ve come to realize that apparently every Narancia conflict will focus more on horror/emotions than tactics, because Narancia himself is an idiot at the best of times, but I’m not thrilled when Narancia’s idiocy field apparently extends to everyone around him.

Run with the Wind continued its towering run of top-tier race episodes, as Yuki and Nico took their turns on the course. This show’s very premise pretty much implied that the entire last act would be one continuous, thrilling race, but I still wasn’t prepared for quite how well these episodes have brought the show’s many strengths together. The acuity with which Run with the Wind once illustrated the day-to-day experience of dorm life is now being put to work articulating a wildly diverse array of personal running experiences – the solemn, intimate jog of Yuki prepping in the falling snow, the way Nico’s preoccupation with both his immediate surroundings and past experiences make his final race an almost out-of-body experience. And the joy in each handoff strikes like a bolt of lightning, as each character in turn throws their everything into the course, only to pass that spark on to their next friend, collapsing in triumph. Though Mob Psycho is undoubtedly the flashier production, Run with the Wind is still on track to be one of the very best anime of the year.

We received an assortment of dramatic and worldbuilding odds and ends in this week’s Kemurikusa, as the team began their final approach to the red tree. I enjoyed the quiet, earnest conversations between the sisters as much as ever, but the exit of Ritsu and the Rinas felt both sudden and dramatically underwhelming. I assume we’re going to see them again, but that being true meant this scene seemingly just existed to get Rin and Wakaba alone for the final battle, which struck me as a clumsier bit of storycrafting than this show’s usual standard. Rin and Ritsu also just tend to generally offer the best emotional beats of this story, so having Ritsu depart for a good portion of the last act felt like an unfortunate choice.

That aside, the journey across island ten was still rife with the evocative scenery we’ve come to expect from Kemurikusa, and further bolstered by this episode’s  particularly haunting soundtrack. I don’t know if “high resolution Tatsuki” would even be a workable concept, but striking images like that sharp blue light emerging out of fog make me want to see what he could do with a larger studio behind him. Then again, perhaps the fact that this is such a small production is what enables it to be so cohesive in its tone and storytelling. It’d still be interesting to see, though!

The Magnificent Kotobuki leaned heavily on its worldbuilding and political machinations again this week, resulting in a pretty tedious first half-episode. Unless this show was planned with a sequel in mind from the start, choosing to just now hone in on the explanation for their barren world feels like an odd choice – as I said last week, the more this show emphasizes its worldbuilding, the less real it all feels. Kotobuki was essentially designed from the start as a little sandbox meant for airplane battles, and every time I’m reminded this world has exactly two politicians, the edges of that sandbox become clear.

Fortunately, Kobotuki is still good at what it’s always been good at: offering sweet aerial battles. Complaints about this show’s awkward storytelling were basically dashed by the second half, which featured one of the most inventive and thrilling engagements so far. Drawing in basically all the secondary characters for this final bout was a great choice, and even if I’m not entirely sold by the concept, I’m still eager to learn how this whole world portal gimmick plays out. If they’re going to insist on caring this much about their worldbuilding, they better have a neat payoff coming up!

Finally, Mob Psycho 100 casually delivered its fourth or fifth legitimate contender for best episode of the year, illustrating the ongoing battle between Claw and the rest of the world with a stunning, seemingly infinite procession of gorgeous action cuts. The straightforward, largely practical nature of these fights meant this episode couldn’t really match the emotional crescendos of the Mogami or Reigen arcs, but sequences like Mogami’s escape and Mob echoing Reigen’s “your powers don’t make you special” lessons still lent these fights a sense of emotional momentum, as Mob put the lessons he’s learned this season into action. And as for the fights themselves, dear lord.

The last couple episodes have built up Shimazaki’s menacing aura to wonderful effect, and this episode paid off that investment with one of the most stunning battles I’ve seen in anime. “Shimazaki versus Mob’s alliance” is going to be one of those fights people bring up for years, just like the alley battle from season one. The consistent clarity and intensity of that fight seems effortless in motion, but I can’t imagine how maddening it must have been to storyboard and animate. Not only was the animation itself stunningly fluid and perfectly capable of capturing the momentum and weight of everyone’s movements, but the mere concept of “a powerful teleporter toys with a half-dozen uniquely gifted espers” is one of those things that’s nearly impossible to convey in a visceral sense.

“Constant teleporting” is a trick lots of anime characters use, and it’s normally not that exciting, because most shows aren’t able to give that ability much sense of visual drama or menace. Here, the wildly angled storyboards helped consistently hammer in the sense of disorientation at fighting an enemy you can’t really see, while also maintaining visual throughlines from one “jump” to the next, allowing us to feel like we’re whizzing along right on Shimazaki’s shoulder. To maintain a clear sense of physical space and consequences while following this many characters through such delirious feats of movement is an incredible feat, and demanded perfect coordination between Mob’s overall storyboards and moment-to-moment animation – something that anime itself is uniquely capable of, given star animators tend to not just animate characters, but storyboard their own marquee sequences. Thank you Mob for once again showing us the heights these stories can reach.