There’s a lot, and I mean A LOT, of anime being made every year. It’s overwhelming! Luckily, you have me, the hopeless bloke who tries to sample everything as though I’m contracted with a devil (well it’s true, and its name is addiction).
Which brings us to my recommendations! Fair warning that these will not necessarily be the most fluidly animated, most impressively scored or best written. They’re just the stuff that most got my brain spinning, heart soaring, tears flowing, or any combination of the above. I hope you’ll find them even half as interesting as I did!
Note: Only shows that have finished airing will appear here. So please don’t ask me where Apothecary Diaries is! Also I already gave a shout out to Orb: On The Movements of the Earth in a previous article.
Alright, preamble over. Here you go.
Shangri-la Frontier
The basic plot: Rakuro, a high schooler who loves playing hellishly difficult kusoge decides to try out the shiny AAAA virtual-reality MMO that’s the talk of the town, Shangri-la Frontier, for a change of pace. There, he has a fateful encounter that gets him utterly hooked to its fantastical world.
I don’t think I’ve seen any other piece of (non-gaming) media capture the dopamine highs of video gaming so well. Do you love facing off against enemies well above your pay grade? Check. Do you love exploring vast fantasy lands and stumbling into secret quests and unearthing lore? Check. Do you love figuring out cheese strategies for maximizing loot drops? Check. Rakuro himself is one of those hardcore types that would play Dark Souls with his character in bare underwear, and sure enough his recklessness gets him into a lot of fun and crazy situations. Good thing he has the skills to pull through, and soon his high level play starts making waves in the community. And as a bonus: somehow this anime has some of the best fight sequences I’ve seen in the past year. The animators were definitely riding high on a pack of Monster for some of those boss battles.
I Have A Crush At Work
The romance genre of anime has always been bursting at the seams, but the majority is sappy high schooler tangoes where the bulk of the runtime has the leading couple dance around actually dating each other until it’s time for the grand finale.
Thank god we’ve been seeing more and more love stories about characters in the higher age ranges. I Have A Crush At Work follows Matsugu and Mitsuya, coworkers who have started dating each other in secret.
It is so refreshing seeing adults handle matters of love as adults should do. They always try to communicate, support each other in advancing their careers, and don’t shy away from physical intimacy, up to and including sex. The issues they run into (like disagreeing on vacation plans) are also very relatable. This honestly works as a primer for cultivating a healthy relationship!
The Red Ranger Becomes An Adventurer
In Another World
Okay, so it’s technically an isekai, but at its heart it’s a loving parody of super sentai and adjacent shows. And believe me, it has a lot of heart! The titular Red Ranger doesn’t quite understand that the medieval fantasy world that he got transported to doesn’t quite operate under the laws of friendship and hot-bloodedness, so he tends to, uhh, misread social cues and declare his undying loyalty to people he met five minutes ago. But darn it, they can’t help but get endeared to his earnestness. Before long he assembles a new team, and together they will save the world! It’s cheesy and it knows it.
There’s a lot of excellent jokes, usually centered around Red Ranger doing something familiar to people who watch sentai, but utterly baffling to the residents of the otherworld. At one point he summons his Megazord equivalent and crushes their enemies… literally, by taking up all the space in the small cave they were fighting. I like a story that isn’t afraid to poke fun at itself. The writing isn’t only good at comedy, either; there are some genuinely good emotional beats in the latter half that caught me off guard. Obviously I won’t spoil the surprise, but suffice to say that the main character is rather more nuanced than he lets on.
Ishura
The elevator pitch is simple and elegant. It’s about a tournament where the minimum for entering is being absurdly broken. I’m talking about swordsmen that can cut through anything, dragons kitted out with legendary weapons, and even a straight up reality warper.
Except that the 24 episodes out right now don’t actually feature the tournament in question. No, this anime takes its sweet time in getting the viewers know the combatants. What are they after? What makes them tick? Why are they dreaded? These introductions often involve bone-chilling displays of their otherworldy abilities, but I was equally impressed with how the worldbuilding is woven into them. It genuinely demands you to pay attention to the details and connect the dots on your own, and careful scrutiny can lead you to revelations that only appear a dozen episodes later. Most compelling is the running mystery of a Demon Lord, that has driven countries to ruin, that has repelled even the mightiest warriors, yet somehow no one can identify who they are, what they did, and who ultimately slew them.
The one sticking point is that, well, we were promised a clash of titans. And with a third season being up in the air, who knows if that will bear fruit.
Medalist
I am intimately familiar with the underdog story. Seen it countless times. Specifically in the context of sports anime, even. And it still gets me every single time.
So yeah, I would love to meet (read: raise an eyebrow at) the person who wouldn’t feel bad for poor little Iori, overly coddled because her family and classmates think she’s so clumsy and slow that she will fail at any kind of endeavor. She can’t even engage in her hobby of ice skating because her mom thinks she’ll just hurt herself.
Then bam comes Tsukasa, the golden retriever in human form. The guy who, similarly, had to face numerous setbacks in pursiong his dream of becoming a professional ice skater. He had to work three jobs to afford gear and tickets to the rink. He had to practice on his own because no one would coach him. Simply put, no one believed he could make it. And now he meets Iori, this girl being told the exact same damn thing, and he decides to be the first person to tell her, BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. You can do it, because I believe in you.
Yes, my heart is melting all over again.
The 100 Girlfriends Who
Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You
This is, perhaps, the recommendation that will have the greatest number of asterisks attached. It is, after all, a “harem” romantic comedy, a genre that is historically notorious for being low-hanging wish fulfillment. The main guy is usually a blank slate for self-inserting into, and the girls are often mere collections of appealing tropes to take home as trophies.
Well, I can at least say that 100 Girlfriends is not low-hanging. It is, however, fucking unhinged.
Rentarou is not some namby pamby generic dude; he is preternaturally close to the embodiment of the ideal boyfriend. He’s serious when he talks about doing everything he can to make his girlfriends happy. He will stop the episode from ending if it means his loved ones will remain sad. Yeah, you read that right.
You can sincerely believe why so many girls love Rentarou. But then– gasp– you will quickly realize that these girls are living their lives outside of the dude they’re dating. They’re trope-y at a cursory glance, but as the show goes on, they do show their hidden depths. Heck, the girls even start forging friendships (and even budding romances!) between themselves, and this results in honest-to-goodness one of the best depictions of polycules I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t matter how wiry a bundle of quirks you are, you’ll fit right in. That found family aspect makes it believable as to why the harem can exist at all.
Aside from that, it’s also goddamn hilarious. The characters regularly demolish the fourth wall, make numerous references to other pieces of pop culture, and banter with all the energy of an exploding star. The HUGE cast also gives rise to constant background gags. We haven’t even talked about the insane situations they land themselves in, such as getting into an eating contest against a large robot, or having to reverse a brainwashing biohazard. 100 Girlfriends does not know the concept of letting up.
And There You Have It.
Thank you for reading all that! Hopefully I can keep up with this and make it sort of a regular feature. If none of these sound like your thing, it’s cool to give me a holler and tell me what you like, and perhaps I can tailor a recommendation that better fits your preferences. Again, anime addict. I think about this stuff way too much.
The Spring 2025 season has also started by the time of this posting, and there’s already a lot of good stuff out there. Stay tuned!
quiche.cafe 
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