[Wings of Fire]

*gives Strike Witch a warning for spam*

Recently I've been marathoning quite a few older shows. Here are some highlights:

Gunbuster: Stupid and sloppily written but with the sincerity and heart of gold. The first four episodes were kind of crap but five was great and six was a masterpiece. Not as great as everyone made it out to be, but a damn fun watch.

Berserk: Probably the biggest surprise of the year. I'd heard bad things about the anime adaptation (Probably a good thing I haven't read the manga) but I never expected it to be so serene and human between fights. Had a very well built up plot with endearing characters and was a nice self contained low fantasy story until the demons showed up. Amazing soundtrack, but fuck that ending.

Vision of Escaflowne: Horrible. Maybe the worst thing I've ever forced myself to watch to the end. Embarassing characterization, a nonsense plot hung together by cliches and one of the most low effort endings I've ever seen. I hated the final arc. Hated hated hated it. There was a bit where it weirdly tried to shoehorn in a nuclear weapon allegory into this dumb high fantasy world and I just couldn't take it remotely seriously.

Cowboy Bebop: A nice surprise given how negative I was about it going in. It's by no means a masterpiece. The dialogue was sloppy and all over the place, episodes lacked consistency in quality and characterization was perfunctory. Also, Spike was a really bland protagonist. Still, when it was on game it was really on game and six or so episodes were absolutely stellar.

Samurai Champloo: From the same director of Bebop, this really was a masterpiece. Great characters, every episode was fun and the dialogue (and especially the dub script) were exceedingly tight. A real blast to watch and it was so worth it by the end.