Yata’s Top 25 OPs of 2023

Hey, y’all. Yata here. One more article before the self-imposed hiatus returns, and it comes in the form of what I cut my teeth doing for a dozen (!!!) years: rambling about anime openings. If you’re new here, welcome! Prepare to get irrationally disappointed. If you’re a returning reader, you’re welcome. I braved the deluge so you don’t have to! That’s right, for the sake of due diligence, I watched what I believe is every opening from 2023 that fits my established criteria. Here’s a refresher on what counts:

• The OP must have debuted in 2023. It can come from a series that premiered before 2023 and/or will continue airing after the year ends, but the OP in question had to debut this calendar year.
• All people are biased, and I’m inherently fonder of series I’ve seen and liked since I’m able to parse additional context from their OPs. The same applies for genres of shows and songs that happen to be more up my alley, though I do my best to keep an open mind.
• OPs from movies are excluded. Only OPs from TV anime, OVAs, and ONAs were considered.
• My rankings are mostly arbitrary and based on music composition, audio production, lyrics and delivery, visual production, audiovisual sync, artistic creativity, and pretty much any other metric relevant to absorbing this stuff. Some of these aspects are weighed more than others based on what I feel the OP in question was trying to emphasize, but I don’t give the individual metrics ratings of their own during the ranking process. Their pros and cons still ultimately come second to my personal enjoyment.

And of course, remember this list is just one guy’s opinion. You’re entitled to your own, but there’s a pretty good chance you also haven’t sat through all 200+ OPs from this year, most of them multiple times over, so maybe my take is worth hearing out, ‘kay?

Yata’s 2023 Anime Year in Review & Top 10

Yata here. You know what time it is! Another year of anime in the books, another massive recap article to compensate for how little we here at For Great Justice post anything these days. In my annual recaps, I usually outline every anime from the past year I bothered to check out, but in 2023, as with 2022, I ended up attempting nearly every new anime that aired a premiere during each season’s standard “first impressions” cycle, making the first chunk of this list—the part where I name-drop every show I let go of after its premiere—intimidatingly long. I’ll still mention them all, but I only have so much bandwidth to spread here, and I’d rather talk about series I watched in their entirety, so an actual list is all you’re getting for the stinkers, nuance be damned. Please forgive the abridged format.

Otherwise, this is business as usual. Tiers named after quotes from a unrelated time-killer that defined my year (in this case, Game Changer and Make Some Noise shorts on YouTube. Oh, the hours I’ve wasted…) will mark our progress, climbing from immediate drops to mid- or late-season drops, then on to completed entries, rising in quality from what I reckon are the weakest titles I finished all the way to the best. My top 10 will be ranked. Which anime from 2023 were my absolute favorites? Read on to find out.

Yata’s Top 10 EDs of 2023

“Already? Yata, you usually don’t post these until December!” Look, extenuating circumstances occurred: I moved across state lines over the summer, and thanks to a combination of overlooked deadlines (oops, my fault) and DMV delays (not my fault), I essentially didn’t have a road legal car for all of October, rendering me a homebody in my free time. I could rant about the state of car dependency in this country, but that’s not what this blog is for, and needing something to do while biding my time, I made more than just a head start on my OP and ED lists—I outlined the former (that is, chose its final candidates) and completely finished the latter, months ahead of schedule. Yes, I know a few Netflix ONAs have yet to air, but seizing the opportunity, I asked my followers on Twitter if they’d rather wait until year’s end to see this ED list or indulge me by letting me churn it out now. By a narrow margin, immediate gratification won, so here we are.

Yata’s Top EDs of 2022

Howdy again, y’all! It’s great to be alive, and I say that with particular gusto as, mere hours after my previous post on this here blog, I came down with a 103.6ºF fever. The culprit? You guessed it: COVID. Yes, I was vaccinated and boosted—this current strain going around doesn’t give a fuck. That it could’ve been even worse (and that I made it three years before succumbing for a spell) doesn’t escape me, and I consider myself extra fortunate as I’d accomplished almost all of my year-end projects just in the nick of time to rest up and recover with nothing hanging over my head.

That said, there was one last loose end to tie up before sending the blog back into hibernation: my top 10 EDs of the year. With my OP lists, almost anything is fair game: whether I watched a show or not, whether I finished it or not, I’ll give any OP eligible in the time frame a look; I want to witness and promote the best of the best. But EDs, while a craft onto themselves, have a lower bar to clear. Fewer of them stand out. The ones that do manage to stand out do so a lot. And so this year, already spit-balling 10 I wanted to highlight solely out of shows I finished, I eschewed the notion of checking out every 2022 ED in the database. I revisited those from every show I watched, but I knew what picks would most honestly reflect my faves from the year and I got them right the first time around.

Yata’s 2022 Anime Year In Review / Top 10

Another year of anime in the books, y’all! 2022 was full of teases and delayed gratification—hyped hits of yore received middling continuations, several less than stable productions were forced to hiatus, and the year undoubtedly peaked in its final season, the three leading up to it sorely lacking contenders for all-time great status. But peak it finally did, and now that the end is upon us, it’s about time to give y’all my personal recap, repping every show I checked out, ranging from atrocious one-and-dones to my absolute favorites.

Not much change in the layout this time; I’ll start by listing some of the easiest drops, work my way up to ones I wouldn’t have minded continuing under better circumstances, then hop into what I did finish, from regrettable letdowns I wish I let go of earlier to honorable mentions that barely missed my top ten. Those ten studded titles have earned their own blurbs as a longer pitch to sell you on their strengths, and in between the two halves of the list, I’ll also mention any anime films I saw which received a screening or streamable release in the U.S. in 2022 (though they may have premiered abroad earlier than this year).

The tier titles this time are quotes courtesy of Brian David Gilbert, whose videos I have binged to keep me sane over the last month or two. They’re just what were freshest on my mind—and many of them fit what’s coming uncomfortably well.

Without further ado, here’s my anime recap of 2022:

Yata’s Top 25 OPs of 2022

“For Great Justice isn’t dead! For Great Justice isn’t dead,” I continue to insist as it slowly shrinks and transforms into an annual dumping ground for my thoughts about anime themes and little else. But hey, dril’s still kicking, and I don’t even have an usurper on my hands to wrest this blog away from me, so I might as well dust it off and get busy! It’s fall, and you know what that means: time for Yata to marathon every OP and ED that aired in 2022 and select the best of the best for the ani-blogosphere’s most niche awards.

And yes, I’m doing OPs first this time—a certain esteemed adaptation happens to be airing a different ED every week this season (you know the one) and I’m not publishing that list until my eyes and ears get to witness them all. That’s not the case with this year’s OPs, as just about every significant title has aired its token offering(s) by now. Over 200 OPs of “research” later, I’ve narrowed them down and selected the lucky few I most wish to highlight.

Yata’s 2021 Anime Year In Review / Top 10

And just like that, another year’s over. 2021 was one hell of a mixed bag for me personally, but as far as anime’s concerned, it seems like one of the most productive years for the medium in recent memory. You have to look at the big picture, though; half the reason this year was so unforgiving in its deluge of output was due to pandemic-delayed series finally seeing the light of day. Factor in the industry trend of increasing quantity (I tried over 100 anime this year—that’s a first), and if you were bored by anime in 2021, you must not have been looking hard enough for stuff to enjoy. There was plenty of it.

…And a lot of forgettable filler, as the laws of proportionality would have you suspect. The following rundown aims to cover all of them, starting with the premieres I curiously tried for an episode or two but nonetheless dropped. After those I’ll do the same for shows (and movies) I finished, with my top ten picks each receiving their own dedicated entry. Everything before the top 10 isn’t individually “ranked” per se, just grouped how I see most fit to illustrate the impressions they left. Those groups need names, and keeping these tiers aligned to a theme helps get the point across better, so this year, let’s go with uhhhhhh quotes from that one A/C Repair skit. Why? Why not? It had to be something.

Without further ado, let’s send out the year with the little diligence I have left and a boatload of sass.

Yata’s Top 25 OPs of 2021

Hi, everyone! Yata here, and welcome to the second of my three late-year posts as we wrap up what anime had to offer us in 2021. If you missed my Top 10 EDs of 2021 list, make sure to give that a glance, and of course stay tuned in late December or early January for the grand finale: my Top 10 Anime of the Year and general 2021 Recap.

But before that, I said we’d keep the theme song trend going, and I intend to. You either love it or hate it—this annual list of my favorite OPs has been a feature of the For Great Justice-sphere since even before the site’s inception, and in recent years I’ve dragged myself through anisong hell by attentively marathoning every single OP from that calendar year just so I can say nothing slipped by me.

By my count that left me with just over 200 openings to slog through for 2021, and slog through them I did; the OPs that were amazing this year were amazing, but they weren’t particularly abundant, meaning I kinda had to pad out the bottom half of the 25 with some personal pleasures as opposed to only rewarding crowning artistic achievements. The number’s part of the brand, though—I refuse to change it at this point.

Yata’s Top 10 EDs of 2021

Hey, everyone. Yata here. Last time I logged in to post, spring had just sprung, but in the months since, mostly for work-life balance-related reasons, myself and Haru thought it best to put lengthy For Great Justice projects on hold.

Up front, I’ll confirm that hiatus from seasonal coverage will probably continue into 2022, but I still feel motivated to give our readers and friends something after all the radio silence, so my annual wrap-up material—my Favorite EDs, Favorite OPs, and Year in Review/Top 10 posts—will still arrive as usual, spaced out every few weeks before January if all goes well. To kick it all off, why not get the shortest one out of the way first?

Spring 2021 First Impressions

Hello everyone, and welcome back to For Great Justice! A couple brief weeks ago, Yata delivered some overdue final verdicts on the winter season solo, and with the turnaround to the start of spring being so quickly in tow, it’s once again just him covering this batch of first impressions.

But fret not—whether it’s due to prior COVID-delayed shows seeing the light of day or an unrelated uptick in interesting titles, this spring is stacked with hit sequels, reliable adaptations, and promising anime-original works alike, boasting one of the largest crops of Potentially Not Garbage synopses I’ve seen yet in my six and a half years of seasonal coverage.

Below are my first impressions on thirty—yes, thirty—premieres, and since the field is so large this time, I’ll give you an added bonus and tier-list them. Best of the best first, rest and the worst afterward. Keeping the explanations concise, here’s what I intend to watch this spring and why. A hellish schedule has never looked so heavenly.