Streaming: Autumn 2017 anime first impressions

Whew. There are a lot of heavy-hitting sequels this season, and also quite a few cases of series changing streaming services in between seasons, so putting this first impressions post has taken absolutely ages. Shoukoku No Altair, Ballroom He Youkoso are both continuing from the Summer season and on top of that my schedule is already pre-filled with a staggering number of follow-ups to beloved titles, which means that anything brand new has a harder job than usual to get my attention. I also decided to try out a HIDIVE subscription since it isn't all that pricey and they snagged a couple of titles I wanted to see; the lack of apps is still disappointing. I can't get the service running on any of my usual devices at all. Please hurry up with a solution, HIDIVE, or stop enforcing exclusivity!

I don't have much time to moan about the state of streaming in the UK this time, partly because I want to go and clear New Danganronpa V3 as soon as I finish this post and partly because actually, we're in a very fortunate position now. Animax UK is as good as dead, Viewster gave up on simulcasting, and the US anime distributors finally remembered that we exist. If HIDIVE sorted out the app issue and Netflix would just stop blocking legal simulcasting from titles which would otherwise have appeared on Crunchyroll, everything would be close to perfect.

So with all of that said and done, I'll move on to the first impressions of all of the new anime content!

Streaming: Summer 2017 anime final impressions

Another season has come and gone. Summer 2017 wasn't the strongest season of anime I've followed; in fact, it was rather weak overall, which is probably for the best as there are suddenly plenty of interesting games I want to play! I'm currently working through New Danganronpa V3 and the mobile port of Gyakuten Saiban 6 (or Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice, to use its long-winded localised name). Both are fantastic and titles I have been looking forward to for a long time, so it's going to be tough going to tear myself away and watch all of the first episodes for the upcoming season in between gaming sessions!

A final impressions post requires the usual completely arbitrary top three, and accordingly here it is.

1. Tsuredure Children
2. Owarimonogatari second season
3. Saiyuuki Reload Blast

Tsuredure Children was simply the best. I looked forward to it every week despite it being different to my usual favourites in every conceivable way. Owarimonogatari was its usual self and worthy of a spot despite having a short run. And Saiyuuki was sort of average except I needed a third series for the list and it felt good to revisit the past every week.

One notable omission from the full list below is Hajimete No Gal (My First Girlfriend Is A Gal), which I finally dropped two thirds of the way through the season for being persisently mediocre after all. I had hoped for something better; instead, it got worse, and there wasn't even any worthwhile fan service to make the plot feel less awful. I also discovered later on that all of the creepy child molester jokes were actually added for the anime, a fact that is probably going to haunt me for life. I'm not easily offended but they weren't even slightly funny and just added an awkward atmosphere to something which wasn't good enough to rise above the poor taste; what on earth was the team thinking?

Streaming: Summer 2017 anime first impressions

Wow. Crunchyroll nearly completely wiped out when it came to licensing high quality titles this season; if I wasn't already subscribed for a year I'd have seriously considered taking a break if they hadn't snagged Jigoku Shoujo. It's not a strong season to begin with - the majority of titles are 'ok' rather than 'unmissable' - but it's the first where Crunchyroll's dominance in the UK has started to show major cracks. The main culprits are Amazon Prime, who have grabbed some high quality titles once again, and Sentai's new venture HIDIVE. Netflix are also sitting on the sidelines, singlehandedly justifying piracy for many viewers by withholding all international access for anything they touch and treating the anime community like a mindless cash cow. Screw Netflix.

Amazon's anime push is nothing new for this season, but Sentai's relaunch is actively frustrating. To draw attention to their homegrown service they have stopped allowing other anime sites to show their content, which means that none of their shows can be viewed on half my devices and there are no apps whatsoever since the new site is still in beta. In addition, the billing/trial system is poorly described and confusing. Even though their support team is friendly and responsive, by now we've all gone through this many times before with overly ambitious new site launches in legal streaming and it's never fun.

Manga Entertainment's Jerome accidentally hit the nail on the head in one of his characteristic Twitter rants recently when he said, "Isn't that weird? Usually consumers see monopolisation as a bad thing, but anime fans r screaming out for 1 source for everything."

In my mind, there's a simple explanation. Competition is important. The ideal anime streaming market would have sites like Crunchyroll, Netflix, Amazon, Funimation and HIDIVE all streaming every show, worldwide, with subtitles in multiple languages. If Netflix wants to push this stupid enforced 'box set' marathon model, let them do so. If HIDIVE think they are best positioned for providing a unified streaming-and-physical service to the US and English-majority regions, let them. If Crunchyroll think a completely free service on a delay is worth more to fans on a budget while Viewster think fans deserve day-and-date with adverts, fine. The customers can pick which site they find easiest to use, and everyone has legal access to as much anime as possible. The best sites will get the most customers and the anime industry will get feedback on what works best, without all of the lies, exaggerations and excuses.

What we have now is not competition. It's the opposite. As a fan, I don't want to watch some random shounen anime on my platform of choice, so I have to follow the shows I want to watch to the platforms where they end up even if it destroys my viewing experience, as it can easily do when a service is poorly run (Animax UK, I'm talking about you). Fans can't afford to subscribe to half a dozen different platforms to watch half a dozen different shows. Fans can't afford new computers just to have something which works to stream through a certain badly-written website. Fans can't afford to spend hours each week trying to piece together the puzzle of working out which site has the show they want to see for their region (if anyone has it at all) and which language options are available where. It's even worse for casual or new fans, who have no real investment in the industry to encourage them to put up with all of this disorganisation.

Piracy is flourishing because of this baffling parody of the spirit of competition, where the services with the most money grab all of the best shows and lock them away from potential viewers. For most of these sites the distributors aren't being paid based on the number of viewers, they're being paid based on how exclusive their contract is. Distributors like Jerome are incentivised to give exclusivity contracts to each service (or not stream at all, thanks Jerome), and thus we end up in a situation where almost every single title this season is exclusive to one streaming service in the UK. The services don't even specialise in anime genres, so one season you'll have to go to Amazon Prime for your mature, female-orientated entertainment and the next that stuff will be on Crunchyroll instead and Amazon Prime only has action fantasy shows. The cheapest way to subscribe is via annual subscription, but to subscribe to each and every streaming site costs several times more than most fans' anime budgets. Ironically, this current interpration of 'competition' is probably crippling the spending power of Jerome's own physical anime buyers more than he realises.

In short, anime streaming is still a huge mess and the distributors are completely to blame. But as I love anime and hate piracy, I'm forced to put up with it and can't do anything about it other than complain.

So let's switch topics and talk about my first impressions of this latest batch of anime. On top of the titles I liked from the selection below, I'm still streaming Boku No Hero Academia, Nobunaga No Shinobi and Sakura Quest from previous seasons. Crunchyroll's lineup page still has a blank slot which I'm guessing will be filled later in the season too.

Streaming: Spring 2017 anime final impressions

Time is passing by too fast for me. It's difficult to keep up, yet despite some travel I managed to complete all of the shows I was watching in the spring anime season. It looks as though Crunchyroll has lost its monopoly on content at this point, with me finally subscribing to another platform ready for summer to avoid some of the blocks on exclusives the industry seems obsessed with inflicting upon us. What a pain.

I'll talk about it more in my summer 2017 post, but I ended up picking up Re:Creators right at the end of the season after finally gaining access to it. Everything else is largely unchanged from my first impressions post so here is my top three:

1. Uchouten Kazoku
2. Shingeki No Kyojin
3. Berserk

Not a big change there, except that somehow Berserk's terrible animation trounced SukaSuka's melodramatic romance in the final ranking. It wasn't the most life-changing season. All three of those shows are sequels!

Streaming: Spring 2017 anime first impressions

What on earth happened to anime streaming this season? Right as we had finally settled into a wonderful era of Crunchyroll getting UK simulcast rights for almost everything on offer, Amazon Prime and Netflix have both stepped up their plans to grab exclusive licenses with bizarre global strategies; in Amazon's case, they've started licensing some titles for the US only which has left other English-speaking regions in the dust. It's as though we've gone back in time several years! The situation is worsened by UK licensor Manga Entertainment continuing to sit on its own licenses instead of putting them on some kind of simulcasting service. Their decisionmakers don't like Crunchyroll or dub-only outlet Funimation Now, but in the absence of any viable alternative Manga Entertainment continue to license shows and provoke the pirates by squatting on the digital rights for the UK. And so I don't buy from Manga.

I'm desperately hoping that this mess is just a temporarily blip on the path to progress, though it's not exactly unusual for the anime industry to shoot itself in the foot and prevent those who want to from watching and supporting their favourite titles. Global streaming is always such a mess.

All of my ongoing shows have finished other than Nobunaga No Shinobi, which has a second season continuing straight on from the previous one. So will anything new be joining it in my weekly viewing schedule? Let's see.

Streaming: Winter 2017 anime final impressions

Another busy season for me outside of this poor blog, which is limping along on these anime roundups alone these days. I've only been keeping up on the shows which aired on Crunchyroll which was rather convenient and economical. It feels as though this era may be over moving into the spring season, sadly, as it's absolutely loaded with service-specific exclusives; even losing just one must-see title in winter to Amazon Prime was a shame.

I dropped Fuuka partway through its run after realising that it was never going to become the alternate version of NANA I was hoping for, and from all accounts it seems that I dodged a bullet there. I also dropped Ao No Exorcist for no reason in particular. It was too confusing trying to stitch the canonical events from the previous adaptation together.

So let's go with this for my top three:

1. Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu
2. ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept
3. MARGINAL #4

The other reason for my lateness in posting these final impressions (and consequently, my first impressions for spring) is a little silly. I loved my top show so much that I was afraid to finish it for quite a few weeks, and ended up trapped in an extended winter much longer than I planned. Several of the shows - most notably Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu and Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans - were such emotional rollercoasters that they left me in tatters. I hope the current season will be kinder.

Streaming: Winter 2017 anime first impressions

It feels so good to be back on schedule after a truly exhausting six months. This season was looking like a light one for a while, being comprised almost entirely of fluffy moe shows about giggly schoolgirls and a bunch of sequels. Somehow, though, I've ended up stuffing my schedule with a whole bunch of titles; it remains to be seen how many cling on for the whole season!

Now that Crunchyroll has devoured most of its competitors in the UK streaming scene, it looked as though they would be making a clean sweep of most of the worthwhile licenses this season - The Anime Network, Amazon Prime, Daisuki and Netflix have grabbed a few titles yet almost everything else is coming through Crunchyroll directly. The service really does represent incredible value for money for a fan in the UK these days.

Still, things are always unpredictable in the world of anime licensing. Right before I finished mopping up the last few first episodes to finish this post, Amazon announced that they would be entering the anime streaming business properly with a dedicated anime service named Anime Strike! At first glance it seemed like a pretty good deal; the Amazon exclusives each season are annoying, but for less than $5 fans could subscribe to have full access to the simulcasts and also the rest of Amazon's rather impressive digital anime catalogue. If anyone was going to rise up and become a true rival to Crunchyroll, perhaps Anime Strike would be the first to succeed!

Upon closer inspection, however, Anime Strike is a really, really bad deal. You have to pay $4.99 per month, which is comparable to Crunchyroll's subscription fee. And on top of that, you have to pay the $99 per year for an Amazon Prime account, making the true cost of Anime Strike more than $13 per month - around twice the price of a Crunchyroll subscription if you're signing up for anime alone and don't need the other Prime features. Meanwhile, Crunchyroll offers a free ad-supported service for those who can't afford to pay, along with more languages, more regions, scheduled simulcasts on a proper timetable and more content. The icing on the cake is that Amazon's Prime Video player is nowhere near as good as Crunchyroll's unless you're using it on Amazon hardware, while the market leader supports a huge range of devices to stream the anime you're paying for onto your consoles, phones and tablets. Paying twice as much for a tiny fraction of the content (Amazon Prime has two simulcasts compared to Crunchyroll's sixty this season) isn't appealing at all, and it feels as though doing so would send the message that Amazon's tactic of grabbing the worldwide streaming rights for new titles straight from Japan and releasing them only to a small subset of regions is acceptable. It's not acceptable. It encourages people to pirate anime.

Thankfully Anime Strike is US-exclusive at the moment (hello, region locking!) and if the online reactions are representative of Prime customers' feelings on the matter it doesn't look as though it's going to be a roaring success over there. Perhaps it will be rethought before daring to step outside its home turf to be steadfastly ignored by the rest of the anime-viewing world.

With my commentary on that brand new drama over, I'll move on to my first impressions! The ongoing titles I'm still following are ALL OUT!, March Comes In Like A Lion, Nobunaga No Shinobi and Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans. Everything else is new.

Streaming: Autumn 2016 anime final impressions

I've been trying to take it easy this season since I came in so late that it was tough to get caught up on everything. Still, there were quite a few good shows which prevented me from watching as little as possible and easing myself in gently. It helped that I was able to watch absolutely everything I wanted on Crunchyroll alone (for once), avoiding the hassle of juggling half a dozen different streaming services with their own unique annoyances.

Although they started out reasonably strong I ended up dropping Touken Ranbu: Hanamaru and Magic-kyun! Renaissance due to time constraints; neither really succeeded in keeping my attention. And I wonder what happened to the promised Watashi Ga Motete Dousunda (Kiss Him, Not Me) simulcast? It never turned up. UK license-holders Anime Limited say the signed paperwork was turned over to Crunchyroll but the show remained region locked away from the UK right until the end. A pity.

It's difficult to rank individual shows for this post-season ranking. There were a lot of titles I enjoyed but my favourites changed week by week!

1. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
2. Yuuri!!! On Ice
3. Drifters

Yuuri!!! On Ice was amazing, a real surprise bursting with idealism and elegance. On the other hand, this year's long-running JoJo's Bizarre Adventure saga somehow kept things bonkers from start to finish and was like nothing else I've watched all year. Then there was Drifters, which I'd been looking forward to for ages and found even better than the manga. They're all completely different shows and incomparable, so the ranking is even more meaningless than usual.

Streaming: Autumn 2016 anime first impressions

I've finally caught up with the start of the current anime season, less than a month before it's scheduled to end. Taking back control of my life is a slow process! Everything changed once again this season, as Funimation have turned their new service into a dub-focused portal while letting Crunchyroll have the rights to their subtitled anime. It saves me some money as I no longer require two subscriptions. Meanwhile, however, The Anime Network has made another attempt to lock content to their own home-grown service to tempt people away from the market leaders, but it's a poor value proposition with only one exclusive show streaming to the UK. No thanks. I'll stick with Crunchyroll and pass on that one show. Animax UK have no acquisitions at all (hurrah!) but Daisuki and Amazon Prime have a couple. I've also had the good fortune to be able to see a few films in the cinema across the UK recently, including Your Name. (Kimi No Na Ha.), La Tortue Rouge and the first two parts of Kizumonogatari. All were great.

The excellent JoJo's Bizarre Adventure was my only ongoing commitment so I would normally have avoided picking up too much this season, except that a whole bunch of titles I was previously following have returned with sequels. So there hasn't been all that much room for completely new shows in my weekly schedule.

So without further ado - I need to start work on my final impressions post soon - here's the current rundown of UK simulcasts!

Streaming: Summer 2016 anime final impressions

Did the season end already?! Between my packed schedule, real life stresses (I'm never moving house again) and keeping a close eye on Sengoku Basara news (which I badly need to write up into a news post), I feel as though it only just began. It doesn't help that I've been forced offline for a very long time due to problems with my Internet connection. I even ended up dropping Love Live! Sunshine two thirds of the way through simply because I was getting too backlogged - it was too much like the previous series only with less likeable girls and I wasn't enjoying it. Without my sudden and inexplicable addiction to Mystic Messenger the last couple of months would have been rather dull.

Real world politics are depressing right now so here's Arslan

Thankfully, Funimation Now and Crunchyroll made catching up relatively easy since both services have schedules and episode tracking, features which I've asked for countless times on lesser streaming sites without any success. I closed my Funimation Now account at the end of the season since they're switching to focusing on dubs and the site isn't really functional for me without a quality selection option or an app for any of my devices, but it was still a better experience than Animax or Viewster.

First and foremost, the post-season ranking.

1. Arslan Senki
2. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
3. Binan Koukou Chikyuu Boueibu Love! Love!

My prediction wasn't too far out except that the sequel to Binan Koukou was even better than its first season and I'd apparently underestimated quite how much I loved Arslan Senki. Danganronpa 3 was good fun too, but the annoyance of Funimation's new website made it a nuisance to watch. I'll give it another spin on Blu-ray in future to accompany the next game release.

As I want to get caught up on the already-half-finished autumn season straight away, my comments may be shorter than usual.

Streaming: Summer 2016 anime first impressions

This season is crazy; between Funimation and Crunchyroll viewers in the UK have been utterly spoilt for choice! Even though my money is worth less than it was last season thanks to political upheaval, I feel I'm getting a lot of value for money from my Funimation Now and Crunchyroll subscriptions. The Anime Network and Animax UK haven't really done anything noteworthy but Daisuki have grabbed a few of Funimation's titles on a delay to provide an alternative for those in other regions, and Amazon are showing a single series for those who already have a Prime account or consider one show worth the cost of a subscription. I was in Paris for Japan Expo at the start of the season so it's taken me longer than usual to get caught up on all of the new first episodes.

In addition to the embarrassment of riches provided by the two main streaming services this season, Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney) and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure are both continuing from spring. It was tough to pare the available titles down to a shortlist to fit my schedule and some may still be dropped later on to accommodate the realities of working life.

Here's my slightly belated rundown of the simulcasts available to fans in the UK this summer!

Streaming: Spring 2016 anime final impressions

I have to start this post with a brief rant, unfortunately. I complained in my first impressions that Sakamoto Desu Ga? (Haven't You Heard? I'm Sakamoto) - which happened to be one of the shows I most wanted to see - was unavailable to us in the UK. At the time I blamed Sentai for only picking up US rights even though they serve UK customers on their streaming site, but it turns out the real reason is much more dumb and depressing.

Manga Entertainment are one of the biggest (and oldest) anime companies in the UK. At the MCM Comic Con event at the end of May they formally announced that the rights for Sakamoto Desu Ga? (Haven't You Heard? I'm Sakamoto) lay with them. The head of the company, Jerome Mazandarani, went on Twitter to explain that he had the streaming rights but deliberately refused to make it available here because he wasn't offered enough money to allow the simulcast sites to show it (the amount he indicated was $150 per episode - which actually sounds quite generous given the size of the UK streaming market).

You would think that turning down a free offer of cash of any amount sounds crazy, but it makes sense when you understand that the staff at Manga are furiously conservative and believe that allowing viewers to watch anime legally makes it impossible to sell on home video. This puts them in a weird position where they don't want to allow people on low incomes to have legal access to anime (streaming is much cheaper than buying DVDs) but they also hit out at the companies who support fans by offering premium editions on disc and free simulcasts for those who can't afford the disc releases until prices come down. I personally think that Manga UK's business model is completely unsustainable, but if they want to lose goodwill and the benefits of the advertising potential simulcasting offers then there's nothing I can do to stop them.

However, in one final twist of the knife, footage emerged from the Manga panel at the event which showed Jerome telling the audience how he'd recently watched the latest episode on Crunchyroll (via a VPN or proxy of some kind, because it's not available in the UK thanks to him). He's worried about legal streamers reducing his sales, yet not pirates or those who watch streams from other countries to evade barriers he created?

Screw you, Manga UK. You're the reason I'm not buying your discs, not Crunchyroll.

With that off my chest, here's what I thought of the spring anime season shows that I followed. Funimation Now and Crunchyroll combined to satisfy all of my requirements this season, making it easier than ever before to stay up to date on all of the shows I wanted to watch (other than Sakamoto Desu Ga?). Both services publish a schedule and release episodes punctually with warnings of any service interruptions to allow fans to plan ahead, and for the first time I was able to finish the season when it actually ended because nothing was held back for weeks in this country. I suppose I should be disappointed that Funimation Now delayed the launch of their console apps but I'm honestly so frustrated about Manga and other UK-specific concerns that nothing else seems all that important.

First and foremost, the post-season ranking.

1. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
2. Joker Game
3. Kiznaiver

Hey, my prediction was quite accurate this time! There were a lot of average titles and very few gems, but JoJo, Kiznaver and Joker Game were definitely the most interesting shows I most looked forward to watching each week. JoJo is continuing on into the summer season, thankfully. Morikubo Showtaro has been my favourite thing about the episodes to date.

Fourth place isn't that bad, Atsushi...

Streaming: Spring 2016 anime first impressions

Even setting aside the matter of whether the individual shows are good or mediocre, this season marks a huge change in the viewing experience for anime fans based in the UK and Ireland. After moaning after them in every first impressions post since I started this blog Funimation have finally sorted themselves out and opened their simulcast offerings up to fans in my country. This has virtually doubled my access to streaming anime overnight and to make things even better the service they offer is actually good, with basic features like schedules, social media notifications and a decent browser video player all up and running on their beta website. When their apps are ready the Funimation Now service will be as good as Crunchyroll and I dearly hope that the day will eventually come where everyone outside Japan has proper access to legal streams.

It's not all happy news though. Viewster's anime streaming enterprise has completely self-destructed, ruining my hope of a multilingual, pan-European service to rival Hulu in the US. Animax UK hasn't managed to license anything at all this season which makes their reason to exist questionable (arguably a good thing; their service is so poor that they couldn't organise a bun fight in a bakery). The Anime Network have continued licensing UK exclusives (ok, one show) but aren't doing a very convincing job of justifying their price tag for anyone living outside their core market. Meanwhile Daisuki continue to hang around, and while they have no content I'm interested in for the spring season I hope that their situation doesn't change. There's also a worrying trend brewing with big announcements from Amazon and Netflix which I'll be talking about more later on.

Politics aside, it's ultimately the quality of the anime which matters and I've managed to watch at least one episode of everything I'm likely to have access to by now. So here are my first impressions.

Streaming: Winter 2016 anime final impressions

What a solid season this has been for anime! There have been the usual trials and tribulations of trying to watch everything legally without the opportunity being yanked away by the industry at every turn, but I've still managed to have a lot of fun in between the challenges of my real life duties.

Crunchyroll and Daisuki have been providing the most attractive service this season with most of the big shows covered, though Daisuki is crippled by lengthy delays for its Funimation titles even though there's nowhere else to watch them. Exclusivity sucks. Still, we have Funimation's new UK service starting up soon and things should improve if that's a success. I didn't bother subscribing to The Anime Network in the end because three shows (only one of which I wanted to see) aren't enough to be worth a subscription and their push for exclusivity annoyed me. Viewster has crashed and burned and I don't think that they're going to be offering anything to UK fans for a while if the rumours are to be believed. It's a shame; I really wanted them to work out as a Europe-wide alternative to Hulu. As for Animax UK... well, I keep hoping they'll quietly give up and leave the country if they can't commit to providing a basic level of service. They're an absolute joke.

Here's my ranking at the end of the winter season.

1. Osomatsu-san
2. Boku Dake Ga Inai Machi (Erased)
3. Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu

It was a tough choice. The quality of my favourites has been insanely high lately, and several of the shows which didn't make the top three would easily have qualified in quieter seasons. I was surprised by how much I ended up looking forward to each new episode of my top choices.

The season in which I become obsessed with this weirdo

Streaming: Winter 2016 anime first impressions

What a bizarre season this is shaping up to be! The UK streaming situation is always a mess, with a different jumble of underfunded, confused companies splitting all of the simulcasts haphazardly between themselves and leaving the average viewer struggling to watch the shows they want.

This time, Funimation have finally stepped up to the plate after years of grabbing UK rights for titles they had no intention of allowing UK viewers to watch and announced that they'll be giving us access to their relaunched 'Funimation Now' streaming service in February. To help us wait for the Funimation content to become available, Daisuki are streaming five of their shows on a one-week delay. Not ideal, but at least Daisuki always publish titles on a regular schedule.

Crunchyroll have an excellent lineup this time around too, with (mostly) worldwide rights for most titles. We also had some activity from The Anime Network (Sentai) who decided to announced that they would stream their titles to the UK themselves instead of adding them to Crunchyroll. In truth their own service is exceptionally expensive for what you get in the UK - three simulcasts and half a dozen catalogue titles - but it's nice to be remembered.

It's easily the best anime season we've ever had in terms of UK availability.

Viewster and Animax seem to be sitting the next few months out entirely - Viewster has one new delaycast but it's a continuation of a title licensed for a previous season, and Animax was completely quiet until a handful of Funimation shows were silently listed on its site. No episodes are available at the time of writing this three weeks into the season, however, so I'm unable to add any further commentary. Neither Viewster nor Animax can keep to a regular schedule and they're difficult to recommend.

Several series are continuing from autumn, namely Haikyuu!!, Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans and Gintama.

Some shows are continuing from previous seasons, too

Streaming: Autumn 2015 anime final impressions

My personal life has been horrendously busy lately, and not in a good way - work has quite literally taken over my life. I didn't even notice Christmas even though I'm supposed to be relaxing now (in some strange universe where working every hour I'm awake is 'relaxing'). I'm not sure how great the quality of my writing will be under the circumstances, but tradition is tradition and now that the autumn 2015 anime season is over I want to post my thoughts about the shows I watched from the fragments of it which my sleep deprived brain can still remember.

Nothing much has changed with the UK-friendly streaming providers, and FUNimation have apparently been selling a few exclusivity contracts to companies like Animax, which is frustrating when Animax's service isn't very good. Exclusivity contracts suck for fans. I still have no idea when anything not on Crunchyroll or Daisuki goes live because Viewster and Animax don't really do schedules or announcements properly. Speaking of Viewster, I think I'm falling out of love with them now they seem to be holding back all of the features I actually want behind their expensive Omakase service. I have way too much Sengoku Basara merchandise lying around to even begin to consider paying a premium for a bunch of anime-related toys I don't want.

Anyway, my ranking hasn't changed much, except that Dance With Devils became available to the UK and upstaged everything else with its inherent stupidity. It turns out that fluffy supernatural shows are exactly what I need when I'm exhausted.

1. Dance With Devils
2. Gintama
3. Diabolik Lovers

The new Mobile Suit Gundam almost made it into the list too. The story gets a little weak from time to time and the strange hairstyles bother me, but those fantastic climaxes as the end of each episode have been way too exciting. It's a shame its UK streaming arrangement isn't that great.

'Twas the season of demons and vampires

Streaming: Autumn 2015 anime first impressions

I almost had a clean slate for the start of this season as the majority of the ongoing titles I was watching came to an end recently. Only Ushio To Tora and Gintama are continuing for now. Unfortunately, a lot of the new titles seem to be on the weaker side so it's mostly sequels to old favourites making it onto my schedule for the season. Perhaps I'm becoming harder to please, or perhaps there are just too many wobbly light novel adaptations which all blend together.

Crunchyroll started off with the strongest lineup and for once, they don't seem to have any new titles which are completely unavailable in the UK; Daisuki and Viewster have grabbed everything Crunchyroll missed out on getting proper rights for. Daisuki in particular have quite a few titles this time. As usual, Animax UK held their cards close to their chest and kept quiet about their simulcast plans until several weeks into the season, as though to force me to delay this post. Nothing has actually become available on their website yet though so I'm posting it anyway because I need to catch up with my life.

The awful vampires are back, yay!

Streaming: Summer 2015 anime final impressions

This season has been a chaotic mess, with a disappointing number of shows announced at the start and then several more joining them every week as deals were done behind the scenes to liberate the licenses FUNimation was witholding from us. My personal life has been a nonstop whirlwind too - as the drop in the frequency of my blog updates shows - and I'm looking forward to finally having some time to catch up on my online life over the next few months. Hopefully.

The stars of the anime season have to be the folks at Viewster, who have been expanding their UK simulcast offerings at a phenomenal pace. Crunchyroll has been reliable for the titles they managed to license here while Daisuki at first seemed to be fading away like so many streaming services in the past. They acquired a few delayed broadcasts with little warning, though, turning things around for now.

The only thing stopping Viewster from being as good as Crunchyroll is the roll-out of their ad-free subscription, which so far seems rather costly and limiting for what I want. Still, it's early days yet and hopefully they'll consider an international-friendly digital-only subscription option for those of us who don't want to receive boxes of merchandise with our simulcasts. Meanwhile, Animax UK added a couple of 'simulcasts' (on an eight-week delay) without actually announcing them properly, but they still haven't managed to get organised enough to communicate their schedule to viewers.

My ranking hasn't changed much from the previous final impressions post since the continuing titles remained strong:

1. Arslan Senki
2. Gintama
3. Shokugeki No Soma

It should be called Daryun Senki, though.

I say that, then use a screenshot of someone else

Anime news: Viewster's subscription service is coming

I've been talking about Swiss-based video service Viewster in my anime posts for a while now. As the only worthwhile rival to Crunchyroll in the field of legal anime streaming which serves the UK, I've been very interested in seeing them gradually increasing their support for anime fans.

There's a lot about Viewster I like. They have a bunch of FUNimation titles which will never appear on Crunchyroll at all for political reasons, they are responsive to customer feedback, they understand the simple concept of people being multilingual and don't lock the language of their subtitles according to the viewer's country, and they have a strong European focus - instead of treating us as a bunch of foreign pirates like most of the US-centric services.

It's been great watching all of these FUNimation and Anime Limited titles for free in recent seasons while still supporting the industry but I've often lamented how irritating the ads are. I don't have television so to have my viewing interrupted isn't an experience to which I have ever become accustomed, and one of the strengths of Crunchyroll has always been that you can choose to pay a small fee if you want to watch in 'premium' quality without the interruptions.

Well, it turns out that Viewster have been listening and they've recently announced that they are going to be offering a paid subscription service for users who want to watch in higher definition and without advertisements. It appears that the new 'OMAKASE' service will experiment with a few premium bonuses such as boxes of goodies for those in a select number of countries. I suspect this will be a short term scheme to try to make their offering stand out from the competitors, even if I'd personally prefer they focused on the streaming side and kept it international.

While the free ad-supported service will still be available, those who choose to subscribe can start signing up to try out the premium service while it's in its early stages. The best part is that they're not asking for any money or commitment at the moment.

If anyone wants to give the service a try, my sign-up link is here - if I can get 20 people to sign up they'll give me something (I have no illusions about being popular enough to actually achieve that). Still, I'd genuinely like more people to give Viewster a try in the hope that Europe can finally have a proper unified streaming service one day. Dividing the region up into smaller groups of countries which can't support anime releases at all has left most of us lagging far behind the US.

(Maybe one day, the Sengoku Basara Judge End anime will even stream in full to my country. I've still never seen it with its official translation, despite being one of the minority of fans who openly enjoyed it.)

Streaming: Summer 2015 anime first impressions

It took forever for the UK-accessible simulcasts to get started this season. I would have posted earlier except there aren't that many titles even including the delayed ones; this is going to be a very quiet season for me in terms of anime viewing. Crunchyroll, Daisuki and Viewster have all announced a few titles but Animax UK hasn't done anything yet - not that communication tends to be one of their strong points.

Arslan Senki, Gintama, Ore Monogatari!! and Shokugeki No Soma (Food Wars!) are all continuing into the summer. Most of the new titles I want to see are locked away by rights holders based in other regions, leading to one of the weakest UK-accessible anime seasons in ages. There are several good shows airing right now so why do we mostly get the fluffy school comedies?!

At least we got GANGSTA. at the last moment