My RL animu-knowledgeable friends will be interested to hear that shortly after the Pain arc finished up, I dropped Naruto for reals. I did this a few months before with Bleach. Both of these pretty much bored me to the point of not caring. No, I don’t care that Naruto became GARuto or whatever. I don’t care that the Vaizards might do something in the near future. I don’t care that Sasuke is still being whiny. I don’t care that Bleach has moved less than 24 hours in the last two years.

So what am I caring about?

Bakuman

As far as manga goes, Bakuman is pretty meta. It is a manga running in Shounen Jump by an artist/writer duo (of Death Note fame) about a manga running in Shounen Jump by an artist/writer duo. The good things about it are great writing and pacing (stuff actually happens and is interesting) and pretty neat art. The unique things that it brings are an inside look at the manga serialization process and a number of pretty cool original manga concepts that make up the manga series that are featured in that universe’s Shounen Jump.

Cross Game

Cross Game is a baseball and romance manga. It has a pretty heavy emphasis on the characters and their development outside of baseball, which is the most interesting part. It’s a pretty realistic and moving manga about some kids who play baseball. D’awwwws and BAWWWWWs all around.

Fullmetal Alchemist

You should know pretty damn well why I care about this.

Hayate the Combat Butler!

An impoverished, almost indestructible guy gets hired as the butler of a rich little girl. This is a comedy series that likes to transform into a harem series at times. The characters are all fun and the parodies and references come fast. Knowing that the mangaka is a student of the mangaka who did Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei explains a lot.

Kure-nai

A guy gets hired to protect the daughter of a rich, powerful family, at least in the beginning. I really liked the anime, but the abrupt ending made me seek out more. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be as updated as frequently as I’d like, but I’m up for more of Shinkuro’s and Murasaki’s adventures.

Liar Game

A naive, honest girl gets tricked into joining a game that risks bankrupting her, so she gets the aid of a con-artist with an M.A. in psychology. This is all about mindgames and psychology. In fact, the entire macguffin is to win mindgames. Of course, this means seeing the trickery that we’ve become so enamored with from Code Geass and Death Note.

Mahou Sensei Negima!

A ten year-old wizard in training is assigned to be the teacher of a class of middle school girls. It sounds pretty terrible and it starts off pretty terrible. The mangaka wanted to do a shounen battle manga, but was forced to do another harem series, since he did Love Hina. He basically tricked them by starting out like that but about 40 chapters in and 250 chapters later, we end up in a very different place with an unlikely and absurdly powerful shounen protagonist.

Mirai Nikki

God is dying so he gives twelve people a diary that reveals a selective near-future and tells them to kill each other so he can determine who gets to be God next. On the surface, we’ve got mindgames. However, a very whiny protagonist and his psychotic yandere makes this three times as entertaining than it would have been otherwise.

Saijou no Meii

This isn’t being regularly scanlated, but it is still being serialized. If it got regular updates, I’d be all over it so hard. This is essentially the shounen version of Team Medical Dragon by the mangaka who did Yakitate!! Japan. This contains the usual surgeries and hospital politics.

Soul Eater

Shinigami students collect bad souls in master-weapon partnerships. It’s not the most original series by any metric, but it does manage to be pretty cool. Don’t let the weak anime ending fool you. Much like the FMA anime, the direction that the manga takes is far more interesting. The nice thing about monthly serializations is that stuff tends to happen each chapter.

Here, we have shows that are really big and will continue for an unknown amount of episodes.

160 km/h

So I dropped Cross Game. Yeah, I’m a terrible person. But you don’t have to be terrible. Cross Game is fantastic and is something almost everyone can enjoy. Really, you should be watching it. Why aren’t I watching it then? Because the subs are released pretty inconsistently and I already read the manga. Hah, it turns out I’m not horrible.

Yes, Cross Game is about baseball and even though the baseball plays a really large part of the story and there will be long games, the real draw is in the non-baseball part of the characters’ lives. Apparently, this is a setup (right down to the tragedy) that Adachi has mastered because he’s been writing 20 years of manga like this.

Ｈ！Ｉ！Ｎ！Ａ！

I really like the Hayate no Gotoku manga and I liked the first season the most when it was animating the manga arcs. Call me a purist, I guess, but I’ve found that more often than not that it’s really hard for people to come up with good stories for characters that they haven’t written. Even for a gag manga like Hayate, a lot of the filler, while pretty good as far as filler goes, just felt really off at times.

So I’m really happy that JC Staff is going back to animate the many manga arcs that were skipped over in the first season that I really looked forward to. Some people seem to think that this season doesn’t deliver in the crazy humour and constant references and I’ll counter this by mentioning that there is some plot this time and that there are still many, many references. If you’d ever taken a look inside he manga, you would be confident that we’re getting the same Hayate that we’ve come to expect.

My favourite part of the first episode? The ED. Hinagiku > all. The OP was less awesome. It was weird hearing Elisa not singing something TENMON composed. They probably should have gone with KOTOKO again.

Equivalent Exchange

Remaking something that only came out five years ago seemed really odd to me at first. Then I remembered that the same happened for Kanon. But then I realized that the first Kanon was pretty bad and that the first FMA, other the terrible WWI end and Hitler movie, was acually pretty good.

Even though I started reading the manga and even though it really was a lot better than the anime I wasn’t sure how I felt about BONES remaking the anime to follow the manga storyline. The biggest problem for me was that the manga still wasn’t finished. What would happen if they miscalculated and we were given another subpar ending?

But another part of me was watching Soul Eater. Soul Eater was, for me, the biggest example of why I should want a new FMA. Everything about Soul Eater’s production was phenomenal. I knew that no matter what I thought about the adaptation of the story, I wanted an FMA that looked as good as Soul Eater.

After the initial announcement, I forgot about it until the OP and ED was announced. Once I heard that YUI was returning with the FMA OP and hearing the song, my interest in the new anime was revived. I went into the first episode eagerly. 「again」 is a fantastic song. The ED, Uso, isn’t bad either, especially when watched with its animation.

Since then, I think my enthusiasm for FMA petered out a bit. It’s not the fault of the show, it’s just that there were more interesting things capturing my attention and the fact hat this was my third time going through the beginning of FMA. It’s not exactly compelling once you know what happens that well. That’s not to say I’ve lost interest in the show completely. I’m certain that once we hit manga material, my interest will be sufficiently piqued.

Haruhiism

Haruhi returns with an unknown episode order. The earliest speculation had Endless Eight at one episode, but now it’s looking like three. I suspect that means Snow Mountain Syndrome won’t get animated, since I would lump it with volume 7. This also pretty much means that Disappearance and Sighs are probably going to take longer than everyone thought.

The ED, 止マレ！, has no dancing, but it does have some shenanigans that you can only pick out if you watch each episode’s simultaneously. The OP, Super Driver, is more in keeping with the eccentric stuff, what with all the subatomic particles floating in the background and comic book onomatopoeias. The songs for both aren’t great, but the animations make them, which if you think about it, was exactly the case for the first season.

Fullmetal Alchemist

I’ll be honest: I wasn’t that excited for this remake. It could have been that I wanted Bones to make something else (Ouran 2?). It could have been that I didn’t want to see the first bit of the series again. Anyway, all of that was rendered moot once I started actually watching it. I really, really like YUI and I really like her new song, which happens to be the OP. And I was reminded that I really liked FMA.

Saki

I was expecting this to be pretty bad. I think I like it though. Unfortunately, the mahjong terminology is pretty impenetrable to people unfamiliar with it. I have a really cursory knowledge of mahjong, but I don’t even think that if I knew how to play that it’d help with whatever ruleset they’re playing in. I can’t say I like Rie Kugimiya’s taco-girl voice, but otherwise, the cast seems pretty solid. Also, that mahjong table they have is pretty pro. This is also the first time I’ve liked GONZO’s CG since Last Exile. It fits with the intense mahjong playing pretty well.

Natsu no Arashi

This is confusing and weird. And not even SHAFT weird, just normal weird. I’ve got to watch more of this because I am lost.