12 Days of Something III: The Definitive List of Best Girls, 2013 Edition

This isn’t a post intended to raise debate. The answers have already been settled. These are the best, acceptable and worst girls from harem anime this year, objectively.

Needless Attention to Detail in Walkure Romanze

The better onsen episode this week was White Album 2, but that would be too easy to write about

By most reasonable subjective measures, the eroge adaptation Walkure Romanze is not a very good series. It’s so derivative that it could also be considered Infinite Stratos with horses and armor in place of personalized mecha suits. The harem lead in this piece, Takahiro, is just as overpowered as Ichika is in that series and just as oblivious to the emotions of others, but still has all the girls after him for pulling off moments of brilliance. That’s not what I’m here to talk about in this post, though. Instead, there is an incredible (by the standards of harem anime) attention to detail in the show’s universe that is undermined by the quality of everything else.

Walkure Romanze: A Quick Take

Mio finds herself in all sorts of problems due to a horse called Sakura in the first episode of the visual novel adaptation of Walkure Romanze. Saved from the horse by the boy she likes, Takahiro, she tries to think of a way to get him to pay attention to her. Meanwhile, he is attracting the attention of the contenders in the school’s jousting tournament to serve as their begleiter as he was once a talented jouster himself before suffering an injury. Mio’s plan to make Takahiro a carrot-based lunch takes an unfortunate turn and she finds herself facing a joust duel with Bertille, an arrogant 2nd-year student.

A Look Ahead to the Fall and Why it Doesn’t Really Matter

There’s the big image you come to expect from me at the end. I, of course lead with this under-appreciated character.

I will get this statement of fact out of the way quickly. There are 47 series airing in the fall. Only 2 of them are continuations of series that began in the summer. One of them is Kingdom which doesn’t really count. When you have that many shows I think it’s kind of pointless to write a lot on each and every series. I think I wrote about 3000 words on 20 organizations engaging in a competitive business against each other over the course of 9 months. That’s the most distant description I could write of describing sport I could think of by the way.

Not even having a popular voice actor can make minor characters popular.

I’m still going to look ahead to the coming season for the reason that it presents an interesting case. There is a hell of a lot of noise when it comes to looking at what’s being released. Light novel adaptations, sequels, sports anime, game adaptations and combinations of those 4 are the dominant shows. I think one can’t go wrong with a known quantity with this much going on. I don’t blame anyone for that because inevitably there’s going to be a ton of crap. Hidden gems are extremely unlikely because everything is known beforehand in this blogosphere. When a series is announced, it seems like a perception takes effect based on just a few facts about it and its either terrible, great or forgotten entirely. I’m still going to watch most of these to get an impression of where they are coming from and I present these to you knowing that I’m just as biased as everyone else. I’ll try to keep it short since I don’t think you want to 5000 word walls of text.