Oldtaku: Anime for Grownups

This is probably the most important thing you can know about sorting through the morass of anime that arrives every season. When you’re a kid everything is fresh and new – I can remember with some shame now watching and liking everything, including awful crud like Genocyber. The only thing that was so bad that even as a teen I knew it was awful was M.D. Geist.

Well now it’s ‘been there done that’ – how do you know what to watch? Well you could read my Spring 2008 Anime summary and hope my tastes or like yours. Or you could grab the first episode of each series and give it a quick runthrough.

So, the rules:

1. You can often tell if an anime is awful in the first five minutes. Harem, porn game to anime, kiddy pokemon type shows, are all almost immediately identifiable. If it looks like that, then just fast forward through the show looking at short bits.
2. 99% of the time if the first ep is bad (or unpromising) then the rest of the series is downhill from that and you can just write it off. Though see below for some exceptions.
3. To make it easier, anything based on a video game is (almost) guaranteed to suck.
4. If the first ep is good, then you need to watch the second ep, because 80% of the time the series just goes right down the tube after that. The first ep is usually where the interesting setup comes in, if any, but once they’ve got that out of the way then it just turns into high school and/or formula domestic comedy.

There are some counter-examples to the one episode rule. In particular, Higurashi no Naku Koru Ni’s first ep is deceptively bland, formulaic, and harem-setup. This is a trap. It slowly unravels the normality till by episode 8 it’s the most intense (and bloody) anime I’ve ever seen. Now that still may not be your cup of tea, but the first episode is not representative of the rest of the series.