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Okay, this is ages late. In my defense, I’m not even sure what there was new last season.

First off, I was in the middle, or more likely, near the end of several series last time, and they all carried through to good endings. Megalobox II and The Great Pretender especially were very good from start to finish.

Arcane — Smudge and I decided to try this out at the tail end of the big push on it. We watched the first episode, and put it on the ‘to watch with the guys’ list. And now we’re… two-thirds through? At any rate, this is a very well done series on several levels. This is the best-developed steampunk world I’ve seen since Girl Genius started (and may well beat that). Lots of very believable, if often not very nice characters. The writing it top notch, and is doing a good job with a complex structure.  And then there’s the animation, which also top-notch on several levels. This is easily some of the best CG there’s been, because they went for a style, they stuck with it, and they made it work. And then the quality of animation itself is just wonderful with lots of natural motion and real emoting.

World Trigger — I have recently gotten through all of the very long first series, and am now into the second one (I started watching about when the third one started). It continues to be quite good, and I think the current juggling between the usual ‘shonen fight tournament’ and outside events is helping the pacing. And of course, while the series is half about what’s going on outside of combat, the combat itself is dominated by tactics and teamwork, and not “powering up”.

Restaurant to Another World — Okay, this is the new thing from last season I’m aware of. But we got a late start and are about halfway through. And it’s pretty much the same as before. Nice, fairly simple stories wrapped around food porn. It’s wearing a bit thin for me, but it’s still an enjoyable series, that you should not watch while hungry.

Wakfu — By happenstance I noticed that Wakfu had gotten a third season while we weren’t looking, and was available on Netflix. We’ve just just started this, so there’s not a lot to say yet. It is looking to be an extended ‘climb the tower quest’ all season, which isn’t the most promising, but there’s enough going on character-wise that it will probably pan out.

Edens Zero — Okay, SF done by the creator of Fairy Tail. If you’ve seen that, you know what you’re in for. Smudge and I are finding it fun, the plot is maintaining a good pace, there’s certainly been some good humorous moments, but it’s nothing really special either. I really want a guide to the cosmology of this universe, because there’s a lot of places for ‘I don’t think that word means what you think it means’.

Kingdom — This… can be good, and when it is, it can be very good. And as a historical on the Chinese Warring States, has interest there. However, the production is fairly low budget, and the Funimation dub is also low budget (it’s bad when the narrator is your best voice acting). Despite being generally historical in nature, it does suffer from showing its shonen marketing too much, and the depiction of battles is fine… until it turns into Dynasty Warriors. So much promise, under delivered.

Pokemon Journeys — This has gotten better, but is still bottom of the heap, especially for recent Pokemon series. Showing all the various regions of the games at various times is not a bad idea, but it still needs a better continuing plot and character arc than the World Coronation Series worldwide tournament.