Summer and Fall 2014 Anime on Crunchyroll

2014 has been a pretty good year for anime, and it was even better for mecha fans with several good mecha series.  This fall also has a number of series that I'll be watching and it is going to keep me pretty busy with regular television also at a bumper crop for me to watch.

Still waiting for Girl's Und Panzer 2nd season or the OVA here.

The shows I've watched to completion or will watch to completion so far this year are:

1. Sword Art Online, 2nd season.
2. Log Horizon, 2nd season.
3. Argevollen
4. Aldnoah Zero
5. Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun
6. Denki-Gai
7. Love Live! 2nd season
8. Golden Time
9. Nisekoi
10. The World is Still Beautiful
11. Persona4 the Golden
12. Witch Craft Works
13. Beyond the Boundary
14. Maoyu
15. Rail Wars!
16. Arpeggio of Blue Steel
17. One Week Friends
18. Silver Spoon 
19. Shirobako
20. Nanana's Buried Treasure

There's plenty of other interesting anime to watch too:

• Fate/Stay Night Remake
• World Trigger
• Akame ga Kill!
• Terraformars - not too sure about the whole martian roach thing, but it might be popular like Attack on Titan
• Chaika - The Coffin Princess
• Celestial Method
• Parasyte -the Maxim-
• Black Bullet

I tried watching a few more like Captain Earth, Nagi no Asukara or Glasslip, etc., but I wasn't able to get into the shows because of the plots or the characters.  I think my favourite shows this year are Sword Art Online, Aldnoah Zero,  The World is Still Beautiful, and Witch Craft Works.  They seemed to have the best stories (Persona is always good, but it wasn't really new as it follows the game) and characters.  Rail Wars and Arpeggio were fun shows too that I like, but all of these shows were entertaining overall.

For mecha shows, Argevollen and Aldnoah Zero are pretty good, with Aldnoah Zero being the better show for story and originality.  Argevollen is a fairly good mecha anime with a brash young pilot who does learn the ropes and self-control.  The world is weird as there doesn't seem to be any air power - no planes so far - but the ground combat is good.  The cast is fairly well rounded out with a few mysteries to the various characters that I'm sure will be resolved as the series runs on. Aldnoah Zero has a princess of mars coming to earth to promote peace.  She survives a martian assassination from her own side, but this triggers a full scale invasion of earth.  Any show that has a princess firing a grenade launcher is a winner in my book, but the princess is a good character that is somewhat innocent at heart and the protagonist is one cool high school mecha cadet.  The show is different from some of the others as the earth mechs are completely outclassed by the martian tech and each battle has the hero trying to find a weakness in the enemy to exploit.  This kind of reminded me a bit of Starship Operators.  Nice cliff hanger ending at the end of the current arc too.

Sword Art Online II had some good fight scenes (including the one between Kirito and Sinon shown above) in the new MMORPG called Gun Gale.  The old characters were kind of sidelined in this one, but the gun / tech action instead of swords / magical action was a nice change.  Kind of funny that there isn't a commercial crimes division setup yet for online games, considering the scandal that Sword Art would have created, but it was nicely done overall.  There's plenty more anime entertainment out there and new fall shows are still being announced on Crunchyroll. 


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