In my previous years of aniblogging, I’ve written posts with resolutions about things I want to start doing or improve upon in the next year along with predictions of what might happen.
While I have given up on producing predictions, I still have some goals (I don’t really feel like calling them “resolutions”) that spawned from thinking throughout the year of how I can be a better blogger or at least a more frequently posting one.
Technically, this scene was from 2013.
There are a lot of anime series that debut each anime season and many of them I don’t get around to sampling, either because I was watching other shows and/or I felt indifferent toward plot descriptions I read before they started. As weeks pass and people continue to talk about certain shows (mostly in a positive light), I think about maybe trying the ones I passed over after they finish their runs.
This post contains lists of anime series that premiered in 2014 I haven’t tried yet but still want to in the new year, broken down by debut season. I used general buzz from people I follow on Twitter as well as user ratings on Anime-Planet in compiling the titles. I also listed the shows I completed, started and dropped so that readers know what I did try during the year and, in some cases, need to finish.
Feel free to respond in the comments with recommendations of which series to definitely go for and which I shouldn’t bother with.
(By the way, some of the titles I listed below were profiled in Flawfinder’s countdown of disappointingly bad shows – I might be a little more cautious about those.)
D-Frag! was a series I sampled when it debuted in January and then forgot about until I returned to it in July after it finished airing.
#dfrag I think I like the chibi & reaction faces in this show more than the intended jokes. pic.twitter.com/Kv3QebnWdK
— Tom L. in springtime ❤⚖⚽⚾ (@calaggie) January 28, 2014
At first, I thought the show was okay but as I went along with the series, I opened up to most of the characters and their straightforwardness so I enjoyed it a lot more by the end.
After finishing the anime series, I’ve been getting the manga as Seven Seas publishes English-translated volumes in North America and it has the same humor as its anime adaptation.
I was glad to hear during the summer that FUNimation plans to release the show on home video in 2015 – I’ll certainly try to support it and attempt to listen to a likely dub.
At the beginning of the year, I got the idea to attempt to review one anime for each letter of the English alphabet during 2014. The thought was that I’d have about two weeks to watch a show or movie and write a post about it and that seems pretty easy, right?
Well, I fell behind the pace and I stopped after letter “C” when I realized I didn’t feel like making up the ground I’d lost.
The anime I did end up writing about were:
A – AIR
B – Book Girl (Bungaku Shoujo) movie
C – Chibi Maruko-chan movie
I liked all three of them (unfortunately, I lost the review posts when I had to restart the blog in October) and I enjoyed trying out a new project to start off the year, even though it fizzled out by March. At least I got chii from Oishii Anime to join me in blogging different anime for a couple months.
Encouragement of Climb was probably my favorite short-episode anime series of 2013 so I was excited to see its second season with longer episodes and double the amount as well (24 fifteen-minute episodes compared to 12 four-minute ones in the first season). Unfortunately, there was a licensing issue that complicated Crunchyroll’s simulcasting of the show following episode 1 but that got cleared up in late October with the previously unreleased episodes being added all at once and new episodes were released on a regular schedule once again.
One main arc that played out in the first half of the season involved the four main girls attempting to climb Mt. Fuji, the tallest mountain in Japan.
Space Dandy was an interesting experiment in broadcasting with English dub episodes premiering on North American cable before their respective Japanese airings. It was also a showcase for different animation directors & writers and that led to varying visual and storytelling styles over the course of its two seasons. I’ve only seen the whole first season and the first episode of the second but I do intend to finish the rest of the series next month, especially after seeing Scamp of the Cart Driver include 4 episodes from season 2 among his 10 favorite Dandy episodes.
The soundtracks for each season featured a range of artists including Taku Takahashi (previously contributed tracks to Panty & Stocking‘s OST), headline composer Yoko Kanno, KenKen, Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro, OGRE YOU ASSHOLE and many others.
