Ladies and gentleman fall has drifted away and it’s time to stay bundled up for a few months. After this year’s practically abysmal summer season of anime, fall was there to pick up the pieces and offer us some absolute bangers. I’m here today to share some final impressions of the anime I watched as we closed out this year. Let’s get into it.

Akudama Drive

I almost, ALMOST made the tragic mistake of ignoring this anime when it came out. You see Kinky and I are busy people so we each investigate some anime and report back to the other. I wasn’t entirely brought in from the premise alone yet Kinky was going to try it out regardless so I asked him to get back to me. After a few episodes he told me to pick it up and the rest is history. The artstyle, the atmosphere, this anime did a hell of a lot to differentiate itself and provide some amazing moments while doing it. I came to grow to like characters I hated at first. The more I watched the more invested I became. Some uh, “events” that occurred may have even made me a little sad if you can believe it. The story pretty much wraps itself up in this one season so I doubt there will be another, or if there is it may be a same world different characters situation. Honestly though I hope it’s left as is. If you haven't watched this anime, wait for a dry season and go back to watch it. Trust me I don’t say that often.

Adachi To Shimamura

I was fucking lied to. I was told, multiple times, in reviews that this anime would be amazing. It would redefine romance. No characters had ever been written so carefully and lifelike. I’m not sure if the light novel was an amazing piece of literature that will go down in history, but I AM sure the anime is a piece of fucking burning garbage that wasted my time. I would say this anime had a small cast (maybe four or five people at maximum) and yet I still only remotely cared about one of them. Shimamura was the sole interesting character to me in this story and even then I say that with the LEAST amount of respect possible. Listen up writers, if you’re doing a romance the most important thing is to sell the emotions. I should be understanding the dynamic of the relationship and either rooting for it to succeed or fail. Sometimes even hop back and forth. In this anime I couldn’t possibly care less about these two’s romance. It was the same generic bullshit of “I..I should tell her I like her… HEY! I LIKE..! UH! I LIKE ORANGES!” “Oh my god, you like oranges haha that’s so cute.” Holy shit it was bad. Then at the end of the episode one of the girls would say some gigabrain philosophy shit that was probably articulated way better in the light novel. Overall I was promised a genre defining romance story for yuri and I ended up with one of the worst romance stories I’ve ever seen. Rant over.

Fire Force Season 2

I’ve probably talked about this enough, but this was quite possibly the greatest turnaround all year for me. After the first season I was hoping Fire Force would be discontinued so I’d never have to sit through another episode. I watched season 2 to shit on it with Kinky, and suddenly it’s like all aspects of the anime improved. Character writing, world building, animation, soundtrack (okay fine the soundtrack was already good). Sure there are still some hee hee ha ha funny xD random moments in the series that grind my gears, however I’m able to overlook them as I’m interested in other aspects of the show which was the missing piece for season one. I’m not saying it’s a top tier shounen that everybody needs to watch. It’s a hell of a lot better than season one though, and if you were on the fence before here’s confirmation that it does scale up.

Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni Gou

It took me too long to figure out what this was. It’s not a remake. It’s not a sequel. It’s a reqeul? It’s remaking a lot from the past anime that I watched while changing a lot of aspects as well. I’m not deep enough into the lore to have a full grasp of the timeline so that’s about the best summary I can give. What I do know is this: I was pretty disappointed at first. The gore was censored to hell, and characters were doing things that were so ridiculous (my man Keichi surviving like 20+ deep stab wounds). Then the later arc of the season hit: trying to deal with Satoko’s abusive uncle. The situation spanned several episodes and kept flipping back and forth. The heroes would be backed into a corner, then someone would help and they would regain footing. Someone would give up, and then the others would inspire them. These episodes were the highlight so far for me because I kept thinking “nah this is Higurashi, it’s gonna end in tragic bloodshed. Well, I think… Wait, are they changing the formula? No… they can’t be…” As a kid I was scared shitless by this anime, but now with this version the horror and gore have been too weak to make me feel much. That being said, this wishy-washy direction that the second half of the episodes took was much more engaging and breathed some new life into the series for me. I hope they do more mind fucky stuff like that as we progress into the winter season episodes.

Munou Na Nana

Another anime that I almost passed up. This time I was the one who checked it out first to report back to Kinky, and man after the first episode I was so glad I did. This anime made its potential clear after episode one to be a thrilling mind games experience. My only fear was that it would turn into an edge festival of “how ruthless can we make this girl” instead of focusing on building characters and trying to say something meaningful. Much to my delight the show didn’t go the edgy route and in fact I ended up caring about these characters a lot. The last episode really hit a man in the feels as the kids say. If you like those Death Note-y anime where it’s all about solving cases and trying to outsmart other people this is an easy recommendation. Go back and watch it, it’s worth it. The series left on a COMPLETELY unfinished note though so you might want to wait and see if we get a season 2 confirmed before diving in. God I hope we do. 

Noblesse

This is the first WebToon that completely let me down. Tower of God had an interesting premise and lovable characters. The God of Highschool had cardboard characters but industry-leading fight animation in my book. Noblesse has neither. The anime boasts a pretty large cast and most of the time I couldn’t even tell who was supposed to be important or someone to root for. Over time that feeling faded away and was replaced with “oh, okay that’s the person I’m supposed to care about. I don’t though.” The fight animations are the normal anime bullshit of BIG BUNGO BLASSSSSST! “Sorry, kid. Using my Dark Edge Scythe of Forgotten Souls, I was able to predict your Big Bungo Blast and sidestep it. Now, I will bestow upon you a five minute speech explaining why the audience should care about this conflict.” Maybe I’m being a bit harsh but recently shows like Demon Slayer and God of High School have proved that you can make some absolutely beautiful fight animation so I can’t give brownie points. The plot of the series wasn’t that engaging either and god help me if I was supposed to learn a moral or lesson from this anime. Honestly the best part of this anime was the comedy, which isn’t good if you’re not a comedy anime. People seemed to enjoy the WebToon so it was likely just another poor adaptation. I definitely don’t recommend this anime though and I won’t be coming back if it receives another season.

Jujutsu Kaisen

YESSIR watch it. Watch it you fuck. Mom’s in the hospital? Bitch your mom could be five minutes from the grave you need to start watching this anime. Okay okay I’ll calm down. Yes it does borrow a LOT from the shounen formula. But.. it just does everything so well. Carving out a unique atmosphere. Having characters that aren’t one dimensional. Fight animation and OST that reminds me I can’t go easy on Noblesse. If you HATE, and I mean DESPISE the shounen formula then yeah I guess skip it. But if you like it, even a little bit, give this one a try. In a mere 13 episodes this shounen has done more than some will do in their entire runtime. Philosophical debates, tragic moments, big conflicts, character growth, it’s all here and more. The pacing doesn’t fuck around. On top of that the opening and ending are both fire so that’s a little bonus for ya. If I could only continue watching ONE anime from this season it would be this hands down. Unless some manga readers know it becomes a piece of shit later I see no reason to miss this one.

Phew, that was a long article. If you’ll excuse me I need to give my fingers a break. As always these are the anime I managed to find time to watch and these are just my opinions. Did I not talk about a good anime you watched this season? Need to add something that I forgot to mention about one of these? Have a completely different view on something? Say goodbye to fall anime 2020 in the comments below!