So 2007 was arguably one of the best years for Anime in a long time with lots of highly rated shows with high production values, great stories and top notch animation. Shows like:

• Claymore
• Code Geass
• Bamboo Blade
• Darker Than Black
• Dennou Coil
• Ghost Hound
• Kekkaishi
• Lucky Star
• Mobile Gundam 00
• Nana
• Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei
• Seirei no Moribito
• Skygirls
• Sola
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

There are just too many shows to mention them all in one post (don’t flame me if I missed some of your favorite shows;  these are the ones that were most memorable for me). So in 2007 we were pretty much spoiled for choice when it came to the amount of good Anime shows. To put it into perspective, at the same time last year I had around 17 titles that I was actively watching and downloading.

Now my question is where are all the good shows of 2008. I regularly browse local Anime forums and you always come across the generic “What is hot for 2008″ or “Shows to look out for in 2008″ threads that are on posted them. I usually go through these and download at least a couple of episodes of each show, to see if I would enjoy them and if it is worth it getting the rest. And to put it bluntly almost all the new shows this year is just mindless drivel. Shows like: To-Love-Ru, Mnemosyne, Kanokon, Rosario Vampire and Spice Wolf are all just shameless fanservice shows they do try hard and hide that fact with a weak story but it makes it only more obvious to the people who watch it. Don’t get me wrong I do love my fanservice shows but when a show pretends to be something else by using a weak story it puts me off completely.

Then there are shows like: HTO : Footprints in the Sand and True Tears. These are the tried and tested romantic drama genre, unfortunately this genre has already been perfected by shows like: Sola and Kanon 2006. So these shows end up trying to hard and it shows, as you can predict the outcome of the story well in advance of the ending.

So after going through most of the new releases of 2008. (Watching 3 or 4 episodes of each show.) I came up with a short list (A very short list. LOL!) of Anime shows that I can highly recommend to anyone, and that is well worth a watch.

• Code Geass R2
• Macross Frontier
• Soul Eater
• xxxHOLiC: Kei

It is a bit ironic though that two of these shows namely Code Geass R2 and xxxHOLIC: Kei are second season shows, which leaves us with only two new shows. So the amount of good Anime shows this year so far has drastically decreased as I went from 17 titles last year down to only 4 titles this year. I am hoping we see a improvement in the quality of the shows getting released this year. It might still be a bit early to tell but June is almost upon us and then its already half a year done and gone with.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Anime, Larch. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.