I was just an ordinary high school student, but then I began watching anime. ^_^
I'm into philosophy, interesting scenarios that are meaningfully explored, and good things in life and humanity. I prefer my anime with some extractable substance, message or point of meditation.
For me, good anime goes all the way with its concept, story, character interaction and message, pulling as few punches as possible. I feel it's a waste when an anime keeps its content and delivery lukewarm and safe, avoiding opportunities to make a real emotional or intellectual impact. Even heavy violence and lewdness can be "safe" if they don't change or communicate anything in the story. I generally dislike overpowered main characters, slow or anticlimactic relationship drama, ambiguous symbolism, and promotion or sentimentalization of rigid principles or morals. That makes me not care much for such acclaimed works as One-Punch Man, Kids on the Slope (Sakamichi no Apollon), Angel's Egg, and most shounen shows.
My favorites Only Yesterday, Summer Days with Coo and My Neighbors the Yamadas are prime examples of where you can go even with "tame" subject matters when the makers don't restrain themselves with arbitrary limitations and conventions. Do take a look at my list of favorite anime!
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Here's my rating scale.
☆☆☆☆☆ | 10/10 – A superb anime with a story, theme, message or execution that had a great impact on me.
☆☆☆☆ | 8/10 – An absolutely great and enjoyable anime that I can easily recommend to someone.
☆☆☆ | 6/10 – An entertaining anime, although it could have been better in some respects, or it just didn't leave a very strong impression.
☆☆ | 4/10 – Kind of passable, but the anime has some big issues from my standpoint, and I didn't like it as a whole. It was likely boring, lame, frustrating or lacking substance more than it was entertaining.
☆ | 2/10 – The anime has very critical issues that made it quite pointless for me.
I only use a true 5-point scale to keep things clear and interesting. My ratings and reviews are not highly technical. They're also not meant to be objective, because that would make them useless. Rather, I focus on some key issues to determine whether an anime was a meaningful watch for myself or people of similar tastes. If you'd like to discuss a rating I've given, I'd be happy to share my thoughts.
Life on anime
- 30 Minutes
- 11 Hours
- 4 Days
- 1 Week
- 1 Month
- 0 Years
Anime list
2,398 total episodes
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Thanks for the recommendation, Celeriac! Have a lovely week🌞
Thank you.. You have weird tastes but interesting ones so we shall see if this is a follow for the ages :P
Hi Celeriac! I really like your bio. Nice to meet you.
Thank you for your comment, and your compliments. I'm honored that you're using my watched list as inspiration for future reccommendations for yourself.
If you haven't found it already, I also have a list of my Favourites of All Time that might be worth a look.
You make a very good point about there being "no perfect anime" and the limitations of a no 5-star rating habit. Many of the shows I've rated 4.5 stars would easily score over 90% (Most of my top 5 at least 95%+), but I haven't wanted to translate it into a 5-star rating because it feels like over-rating. Though, if I think of stars as like a school's grading scale, and how strange it would look if a teacher never gave A's or A+'s...
...I think you're making helping me consider revising my system!
Copying my forum post here for fun:
It's easy to score anime when you don't give yourself or your individual judgment more credit than deserved (which is very little). You love it, score high; doesn't raise your passions or you're mixed, score medium; you think it's lame, score low. Regardless of how acclaimed or important the anime is supposed to be in some grand scheme of things.
Personally, I think a 10-scale is already too precise, and it encourages people to instinctively use only the upper half of the scale for any serious ratings, and the lower half for different shades of complete shit: many reviews will get hate for rating a (in their humble opinion) middling anime 5 or 6 out of 10, like it's some kind of ultimate insult that can't possibly be a seriously considered score.
Scoring individual aspects is pointless, in my opinion. Either you think it's good or not and you verbally explain yourself for why that is. At least I'll never consider watching any anime purely because someone thought it specifically had good animation, sound, story or characters separate from everything else. If they matter so much, it'll show in the actual verdict in any case.
For a review or score to have any meaning in the first place, you'd have to know what the reviewer likes and doesn't like. Even better if the preferences match your own. That's why extremely technical scoring and attempts to seem overly objective is ridiculous, in my opinion.