TV Shows
1.
My Love Story - First 10/10 anime since Madoka. The flawless gem of the shoujo romance genre. Great characters, great story, great character designs, great direction, just freaking great. I'm so so happy this was two seasons. I picked up every volume of the manga after three episodes, but the anime added enough value that the adaptation was still more than worth watching all the way through.
2.
Yurikuma Arashi - I liked it more than the Utena TV show but less than the Utena movie. "Good", "yuri", and "anime" is pretty much always a case of "pick two of these things", so having a good yuri anime for the first time in over five years was pretty nice. One of a very small selection of shows that I've imported rather than wait on the American BD release, and the only one to not have subs so I can't actually understand what they're saying on it.
3.
Prison School - Anime sex comedy has progressively lost its way since the 1970s to the point where there's very few good post-2000 comedy shows with sex jokes as a selling point (most these days are just simply masturbation tools with no other value), but Prison School takes the id-driven "I don't give a fuck" style of humor from Go Nagai's 1970s sex-driven comedies and infuses it with excellent artwork and plotting. The adaptation shines particularly in its VA casting choices and use of BGM to enhance certain scenes, even if it paces some of the jokes a little too fast in order to get the whole first arc into a single season.
4.
Osomatsu-san - The surprise hit of the year. A consistently funny show that is comfortable in just doing whatever the hell it wants to be. Besides the "regular" episodes focusing on the daily lives of the sextuplets and the people around them, so far we've covered otome game parodies, Robot Chicken style 1-2 minute skits, detective fiction parodies, strange vignettes starring the side characters where they don't have any actual dialogue, and remixes of plots from the original version of the show. It sticks the landing every time, there hasn't been a dull segment yet in 12 episodes.
5.
Wooser Season 3 - Guest writers this time around include Kodoka doing a murder mystery episode and Urobuchi doing parodies of Neuromancer and Blade Runner. Almost all of the episodes were really funny with only a couple duds in the whole season. Plus
the endcards make for some really nice desktop backgrounds.
6.
Punchline - Not Uchikoshi's best work by a longshot, but still good. I especially liked the character designs and color palette. Maybe the game will pace the plot better.
7.
Dance With Devils - Q: How to make otome game anime not just tolerable, but really enjoyable? A:
Turn it into a musical. Starts out unintentionally hilarious, but becomes very self aware of just how ridiculous it is a few episodes in and runs with it. Ritsuka may not be much smarter than the average otome game protagonist and she still gets jerked around a lot, but she gets points at least for standing up for herself when the bullshit piles up. The boys are mostly pretty great too, aside from the creepy onii-san.
8.
Shimoneta - Not Prison School levels of good, but for a modern sex comedy this one is still pretty damn solid. It's consistently funny, the plot moves at a good pace, and given the concept there's surprisingly little fanservice for the sake of it. The satirical element of "due to censorship, high school students don't know what qualifies as lewd or how sex works" gets a lot more mileage than I'd expect from a modern sex comedy show adapted from a light novel. That said, this would probably be a few spots lower on my list of favorites this year if the 11th episode weren't one of the single best episodes of anything I watched all year and it didn't have that one BGM evocative of the Jaws soundtrack.
9.
One Punch Man - Gotta put this somewhere, I guess. It was pretty cool.
10.
Monster Musume - I guess? There wasn't really anything else this year that caught my eye that I would call better than it. Umaru was the only other "good" show I watched this year, but that was still just a "eh, it's OK" sort of affair for me. I wouldn't really put this show on a "top" list normally but there wasn't a whole lot else this year that caught my eye. As far as dumb haremshit goes, Monster Musume is very good at being dumb haremshit.
Films and OVAs
1.
Psycho-Pass: The Movie - Not quite as good as season one but waaaaaay better than season two. God damn does that Engrish dialogue ruin the mood though.
2.
Sex and Violence With Machspeed - Imaishi please just do a TV series like P&SwG again where everything is just dumb as fuck and hilarious.
3-5. Probably some other Animator Expo stuff but I don't remember much of them other than Sex and Violence.
