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 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.