Attack on Titan failed to end this year, resulting in people poking fun of the fact that its "Final Season" has been broken up into three parts releasing in three different years. It'll probably all be worth it in the end, but in the meantime this is yet another year I'll be leaving it off since I watched enough to only want to consider new or finished series this year. Legend of the Galactic Heroes is in a similar position, though in its case a fifth season has not been announced yet. I'm just assuming one will be because there's a lot more of the novel series left to adapt.
The series below are the eight I liked enough to finish, presented in the order I completed them. My top three picks of the year are marked with an asterisk (*).
Arcadia of My Youth *
The lone movie of the bunch and admittedly a nostalgia pick, but the reason I'm including it for 2022 is because this is the first time I watched the uncut dub. I was introduced to the movie via the dubbed and edited (to remove the worst of the violence and the "boring" stuff) Vengeance of the Space Pirate release as a teenager, but I'd heard there was a full version of the dub somewhere out there and finally found it this year on Retrocrush. If you've ever been curious about Leiji Matsumono's Harlock series, this is a nice self-contained entry point. Parts of it haven't aged well. It's got logic gaps, things that don't make sense, the science is outright bad (DNA does not work that way!), but for all that, I found it a memorable story about standing up to live the way you want, even though that may mean a life of hardship and pain. Might be my all time favorite movie, and certainly the most watched.
Ya Boy, Kongming *
Three Kingdoms tactician Zhuge Liang (courtesy name Kongming) dies campaigning on the Wuzhang Plains and is reborn in modern day Tokyo as a younger version of himself. At first he thinks he's in hell because it's Halloween and people are dressed up weird, but one thing leads to another and he ends up meeting Eiko, an aspiring club singer hoping to make a career out of her music. Charmed by her talent, he pledges to be her tactician and they embark on a journey to make her a star. It's a really weird premise, but it works! The music portion of the show is handled extremely well, but there are also lots of easter eggs for viewers familiar with the Three Kingdoms period (particularly pop culture depictions of it).
Spy x Family
I like to think of myself as an early adopter of this one. I started reading the manga when the first chapter dropped in English and fell in love with Loid Forger and his fake family (which will surely end up a real one by the time the story is over). Though the stakes are nothing less than world peace, he has to go about it by infiltrating a parents' meeting at an elite children's school which requires him to not only have a child, but a wife, in order to appear like the perfect nuclear family in a society modeled after 1960s East Germany (complete with secret police known for hauling off people who don't seem quite right). But what he doesn't know is that his new daughter is an esper and his new wife is an assassin. It's a bit of genius that only the daughter knows everything that is going on, but it's all filtered through the mind of a five-year-old.
Love After World Domination
The title is a little misleading, since our central couple is not waiting until after world domination to have a go at a relationship, but it's admittedly a striking title. Our leads consist of the red ranger of the Gelato 5 superhero team (what we would consider Power Rangers in the US) and one of the enemy generals from the evil Gekko organization that is trying to take over the world. This is a comedy, so it's perfectly possible for Red Gelato and the Reaper Princess to sneak away for some alone time in the middle of a battle, especially since ordinary citizens are so blase about the fact these battles happen in the first place. It's all very silly, but Fudo and Desumi do their best to support and understand each other and the shenanigans are usually happening around them rather than doing anything to suggest the possibility they will ever break up.
Fanfare of Adolescence
One of those niche appeal sports anime that speaks specifically to people like me. We follow a group of students through three years at a high school jockey academy intended to propel them into careers in the racing industry. Pacing is a little unbalanced considering half the episodes are devoted to the first year, followed by an abrupt timeskip that moves away from our primary protagonist to upgrade our deuteragonist to co-protagonist, and it doesn't quite work. The CG for the horses is also a bit off at times, though I completely understand not wanting to animate all that by hand.
Phantom of the Idol
One thing I love about anime is that it has a very easy time blending the fantastic with the everyday, and in this case Yuya Niyodo, the lazy half of a male idol duo, meets the ghost of a popular idol who wants to keep performing. The two strike a deal where she gets to possess him and perform and he gets to reap the benefits of not having to work. (Yeah, he's a bit scummy, but he gets better.) The anime really goes all in with the song performances, so if you love music, there are a lot of original songs written specifically for this series, and Yuya's VA does a lovely job with conveying the two personalities inside the same body.
My Isekai Life: I Gained a Second Character Class and Became the Strongest Sage
I am generally a reluctant viewer of the current isekai genre, what western viewers might call "portal fantasy," because there is a certain sameness to a lot of it. Most of them involve a generic medieval European fantasy world, often with menus and restorative items and essentially being a video game without actually saying it is one. So I generally only watch if I like the particular take a given isekai has, and in the case of the blandly named My Isekai Life, it's that the main protagonist is obscenely powerful but just wants to travel around as nondescript wandering adventurer with his gaggle of slime buddies and a nervous wolf, except he's a nice guy who he can't help but help people out even if it means slaying things he really shouldn't be able to kill.
Raven of the Inner Palace *
I love Raven of the Inner Palace for its lovely worldbuilding that takes the general trappings of imperial China and weaves it into its own mythology. We follow the Raven Consort, an unusual member of the imperial court in that she is the only consort who does not perform nighttime duties for the emperor and she has the power to see and send off the dead. The English translation choses to subtitle the names as they would be read in Mandarin Chinese, which can be confusing if your ear is good enough to understand the spoken Japanese, but I feel it was the right choice given the setting. I hope when the novel series comes to the US it makes the same choice as I would love to follow Shouxue on to further adventures, but it's going to be really hard to get used to her being called Jusetsu.
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