Also a lot of my anime exposure is a bit old school so I enjoy titles like
Trigun
GunXSword
Cowboy Bebop
Sargent Frog
Ouran High School Host Club
Mobile Suit Gundam Wing
I was also in to Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z when I was younger (no laughing)
I am generally too disturbed by super gory anime to really get in to any series like that, but there are a few I have seen with exploding daemons and whatnot which were good enough to see past the gore and enjoy the story line.
Also, admittedly I prefer the dubs to subs, but if I can’t find a good dub I still enjoy watching a sub version, I just hate having to read my show instead if just watching it.
So what are your favorite series, genres, characters, guilty pleasures in anime?
There’s several series I will only watch subbed under duress - Cowboy Bebop (the dub is so superior to the original voice acting even the original creators prefer it - Faye, in particular, is much improved), Higurashi (Keichi, the twins, and most of the adults are OK in the original, but Oishi, and the other girls…augh), and ROD the TV (Anita, my favorite character, makes me want to poke my ears out with pins, Michelle is little better), in particular.
I recently bought a Slayers Next DVD set (on sale!) and rewatched the series. It was actually just as good as I remembered it. Not like Sailor Moon. I tried to rewatch Sailor Moon and couldn’t make it through the first episode.
I was a huge fan of Bleach until the most recent storyline with Orihime (I hate that girl).
Others I’ve liked:
Inuyasha
Wedding Angel Peach (a bit ashamed of this one)
Saint Tail (ditto)
I used to be much more of a manga fan - X, Magic Knight Rayearth, Fruit Basket, Card Captor Sakura, Rurouni Kenshin, Saiyuki, Kocha Oji, and a bunch of other stuff that escapes me at the moment.
All things being equal, I prefer good dubs to masterful subs*, but if a dub is incomplete or incompetent I go to the sub. There are a few exceptions, basically anything that was on American TV from 1998-2004 or so I’ll watch dubbed because that’s how I’m used to it. Try as you might, you won’t get me to watch Digimon subbed despite the music and writing admittedly being objectively better in the Japanese version.
I actually have problems with subs for a lot of shows anyway. Translators – ESPECIALLY fan ones tend to suck, having issues such as over-reliance on translator notes.
Don’t be ashamed of watching Sailor Moon! I loved it when they first showed it in the 90s, and still have VHS tapes of Sailor Moon R. Did you know they’re planning a new Sailor Moon anime for next year? Supposedly the storyline will be closer to the manga.
As I may have mentioned in previous threads, I am currently obsessed with Hetalia. I only get to watch that nowadays because the episodes are five minutes long. If I had more time, I’d watch Ordinary Lives of High School Boys and Tiger and Bunny.
I recently watched and liked Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt. It was… something, certainly. It took 2-3 episodes for me to really like it though, the pilot really isn’t that good at all.
Though I do hesitate to call myself an Anime fan – anime is a subgenre of a medium, I like certain anime, I hate saying I’m an “anime fan” because it seems like I’m saying I like shows for being anime rather than shows that happen to be anime.
I dislike dubs because they usually sound stupid. That said, it’s the reason I gave up watching dubs. It may or may not be true anymore, but I enjoy subs enough that I see no reason to switch back.
I really enjoyed the Soul Society arc in Bleach(First 60 or so episodes). Then the show, and the manga, turned into a disaster. On the other hand, I thought Naruto was a slow moving and hence somewhat boring anime, but I have been more and more impressed by the manga. It has consistently been inventive, clever and plot driven in a sub-category(shounen) that is usually not any of those things.
My favourite anime is probably Samurai Champloo.
The quality in dubs varies considerably, however, the average level of talent has gone WAY up, I’d say. I rarely encounter a dub that’s flat horrible, though not even companies are a guarantee of success. Even within a single company like Funimation good and bad dubs (not just anime, dub quality) are all over the map.
Both Bleach and Naruto suffer from what I like to call “Dragonball Z syndrome” where the power scales start getting ridiculous. Rather than making the enemies more CLEVER, they just make them scream louder and their Arbitrary Power Numbers bigger. Naruto is a lot better about it (or at least it used to be, I heard it went more that way with the Sage Mode stuff), but I really can’t watch anything that’s not DBZ where that happens. I don’t read/watch One Piece, but from what I’ve seen of it, since everybody is sort of stuck with their power, it really avoids the sliding power scale problem and I have to commend it for doing that in a popular Shounen anime.
I never saw too much of it when it was on due to the timeslot, literally all I remember is “Dude, Shinji, NOT COOL, she’s unconscious”, and Shinji being kind of an annoying twat. I’ve absorbed most of the ending episodes by osmosis.
Bleach is completely ridiculous about the power level thing. It doesn’t even make a pretense of offering an explanation. It’s just random, meaningless power boosts where Kurosaki Ichigo will have the biggest one at the end, and all fights get decided purely on the basis of power level.
Naruto on the other hand impresses with its creative approach to fights. Even though he does ‘power up’, it always happens in a very organic way that makes sense and fits with the character and his situation. Every single time. And the best part is, he doesn’t win the fight purely on the basis of the power up! There’s always smart tactics, teamwork, or character specific reasons involved for the good guys winning(or, as it does happen, losing). Very rarely do I ever get the feeling that the mangaka pulled a cheap power boost and finished a fight. With Bleach, that’s practically the only feeling I get.
I think One piece - while it used to be good in the beginning, has drifted a great deal. And everybody isn’t stuck with the same level of power at all! Only the type of power. And god the storytelling is so self indulgent. It’s a lot like how I think The Wheel of Time series must be. So many extraneous characters, sub plots and places, for absolutely no reason at all.
I have a soft spot for high-school comedies. I’m currently watching Hyakko, which gets funnier as the story develops, but others that I’ve enjoyed include Binbougami-ga, Haruhi Suzumiya, Kare Kano, and The World God Only Knows. And, in a completely different genre, I really like Zipang. However, the one that I think all anime fans should watch is Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which completely deconstructs the magical-girl genre.
The one I am obsessed with right now is Sword Arts Online. In the near future they devise the technology for plugging your brain into a computer to play MMO. On the day the titular game of the anime was launched, people realized that they could not log out of the game normally, and any means to deactivate their connection will immediately fry their brain…
I was watching Myself : Yourself the previous weekend and find it to be a rather human, engaging slice of life anime. No monsters or save the world, just a bunch of teenagers and their slightly larger than life problem.
One which I think was were really good was Another - it’s a horror story, rather like Final Destination, where students (or their relatives) in a particular class will just dying off one by one for no reason and they have to figure out what they can do to stop the curse.
And oh, my all time favorite - Mononoke(nothing to do with Princess Mononoke)- it’s about an exorcist who can only dispatch spirits if he learns of their reasons of existence. Hence it’s more of a slow pace mystery/deduction anime where the protagonist gradually uncovers what’s responsible for the spirit. It is presented in a glorious Japanese woodblock style art
All those animes are rather short, about 12 to 24 episodes each.
The last thing I watched and really liked was Witch Hunter Robin.
I am out of the loop today… In the 90s I went to anime club, and even went to Anime Expo one year…
Fellow Sailor Moon fan here. I had all the horrid-looking dolls even. I feel it opened the door for a TON of other magical-girl shows like Pretear, Card Captor Sakura, and Magic Knight Rayearth. Yeah, I have some catching up to do. :sweatdrop: What other magical girl shows should I take a look at? Any recommendations?
Prefer subs to dubs almost universally. But I’ve been watching so long I’m probably a bit of a purist.
