It’s boring and disappointing but that’s exactly what I love about it. Definitely worth watching and highly recommended.

As has been said, the visuals are amazing.

I stopped playing it after the credits rolled only for someone to tell me there’s a secret Act 3 if you do some really specific stuff. I don’t really care for games that require guides, especially if they gate a bunch of content behind it, so I never came back to it.

However, I did enjoy the first two acts of Silksong much more than the first game. I was never a big fan of Hollow Knight and considered it among the worst of popular metroidvanias. But Silksong was pretty good outside of the fetch quests. Unlockable alternate move sets was probably my favorite bit

P3P uses the same combat system as Persona 4 and 5, while the original P3 and P3FES system was quite different.

The actual changes are pretty subtle, but it makes the whole system feel totally different. The “1 More” mechanic did not activate on partial knockdowns with multi target moves, and being knocked down would result in skipped turn. Being hit while knocked down would also undo the knockdown.
Basically, multi target moves were much more situational, type weaknesses were much more dangerous (for both player characters and enemies), and there was a lot of potential strategy in getting enemies to skip turns.
I think it was a lot more interesting this way and P4/P3P/P5 simplified it to the point that P5 added a “play the game for me” button that autoselects the best move.

I agree with the other commenter that both P3Re or P3FES would be mostly the same as what you’ve already experienced, but I think it’s worth it for the epilogue, especially if you liked the characters in the base game.
Between the two, I would personally recommend FES but I think most people would recommend Reload.

Surprised I didn’t see anyone mention Persona 3 FES.

The definitive version of Persona 3, before they simplified the combat system for 4, 5, and remakes of 3.

The epilogue of the game, The Answer, has the best story in the series.

Persona series is [almost] totally standalone; no need to play 1 or 2 first.

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I turned it off a long time ago, I don’t think this is new.

FLCL is probably my overall favorite and I think this scene demonstrates a lot of its different styles with more silly and serious cuts. For just the best of the character animation, I think this scene is one of the best.

5 Centimeters Per Second is also one of my favorites and definitely my favorite of Shinkai Makoto’s stuff. People talk about visuals where “you could pause it on any frame and have a beautiful image” and I think that’s really true of this one. The honestly excessive use of really complex lighting gives it a really nice and unique vibe. The “ray racing on” of anime.

Kizumonogatari uses 2D animation on top of 3D backgrounds. Feels very unique, and on top of that, it’s just really tryhard good animation. Each of the three movies have their own strengths, too. 1 is the most aesthetically consistent, with the artstyle giving off a really specific and deliberate vibe. 2 is overall the best looking and includes the most diverse character animations. 3 has its iconic final fight and mixes up the artstyle for a really climactic moment.

The iDOLM@STER Movie: Kagayaki no Mukougawa e! has amazing quantity and quality of character animation, but the emphasis is honestly on quantity. Skip to any random scene in the movie (even outside of the performances)and chances are there’s an average of 4 moving characters on screen at any time. Really impressive, I kinda had my jaw dropped every time they do a wide cut of 20 characters, especially during the performances.

Quick bonus round: Kanon for the unique wintery aesthetic, Gunbuster for strong imagery, Evangelion also for strong imagery, Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou for expressive animation, Omoide Poroporo for great style, Welcome to the NHK! for color design, You’re Under Arrest for great action cuts, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya for being overall beautiful in so many ways, Nichijou & CITY for style and animation, Soul Eater for the fight scenes, and I could maybe go on all day 😢 there’s so much good visuals in anime

edited to include more animation links

Good anime but a TERRIBLE adaptation of the book.
It was interesting to make the boy (I forget his name) the main character, but every other creative liberty they take is baffling.

If Alyx counts as Half-Life 3, surely Opposing Force was Half-Life 2, Blue Shift was Half-Life 3, and Alyx is like… Half-Life 7 or something.

Endless Eight

Sports anime about things that can only vaguely be considered sports.

Hibike! Euphonium, Initial D, March comes in like a lion are more obvious ones but band anime like K-On!, Bocchi the Rock!, and Nana also have a similar appeal.
These all have some kind of competition or performance involved, so they are structurally similar to sports anime with character drama and training/practice leading up to a big climax that caps off both the drama and the training.

Maybe this genre isn’t so niche as these shows are all very popular, but I don’t often see people consider them to be similar in any way.

Good pick. I would say Haruhi Suzumiya, Gamers!, B-Gata H-Kei, and The Tatami Galaxy also fit this description.

It’s not actually a tier list, I just used a tier maker website to put together this play order and put rough labels on them. BotW and TotK are far apart cause we didn’t want to play them back-to-back.

Also, who’s the genius that said we don’t play Hyrule Warriors, and what is wrong with them?

I humbly admit that I am the genius in question.
Doesn’t really look very fun or interesting, and it’s certainly not mainline. So to be honest, I didn’t even consider including it. Maybe I will try it at your recommendation.

Currently playing through all the Zelda games with a friend in this curated order:

So far I recommend it, although I’m only 3 games in.

I just finished Wind Waker and it was far worse than I remembered, and I didn’t remember it being very good in the first place. Probably a conversational opinion, but I think Wind Waker is the most lazy and forgettable Zelda game. Curious if anybody liked this one for more than just the music and artstyle.

I can’t wait to move on to the DS games which I really like, but I’m waiting for my buddy to play Wind Waker first.

There are 8 anime that made me cry, in order from ~2019 to 2024:

1. Sora yori mo Tooi Basho
2. Hibike! Euphonium 2
3. Mawaru Penguindrum
4. March comes in like a lion
5. Clannad: After Story
6. March comes in like a lion 2nd Season
7. Toradora!
8. Spirited Away

Highly recommend all of these

The tl;dr is “Yui x Ritsu”

The slightly longer story is that if you watch K-On! while really trying to overinterpret every interaction and assume more stuff is happening off-screen, a few romantic dynamics develop, with Yui x Ritsu being the most obvious.

The full story is 13+ charts and an 8 page writeup that I did as a personal project to justify this overinterpretation. I may post it somewhere if I ever decide to clean it up and make it presentable to the public eye, but there’s a lot in there. Ui x Nodoka. The Azusa->Yui->Ui and Jun->Mio->Azusa parallel. Yui-Mugi breakup arc. The Azusa human instrumentality arc.
My friends have called me schizophrenic for making these charts and while I don’t agree with their non-clinical use of the word “schizophrenic”, you should know that when I say “speculative / non-obvious” for K-On! in particular, it’s at about that level of extreme interpretation.

Cardcaptor Sakura, Princess Tutu, Toradora!, Maison Ikkoku, Chuunibyou, and Kare Kano are all contenders. If I can expand to speculative / non-obvious romance, then K-On!, Hidamari Sketch, Hibike! Euphonium, and Bocchi the Rock! are also up there.

Overall, the main couple from Cardcaptor Sakura may be my favorite, just extremely cute and well-paced. Miya & Yuno from Hidamari Sketch are also a really great couple.
Also, shoutouts to this guy who did an extreme overanalysis of how gay Hidamari Sketch is.

Pseudoregalia is insanely good

Remember some years ago when people were posting online like “in Russia it’s illegal to post this picture of Putin 🤣” with this pic?

Now that’s the USA.

As someone who actually did learn Japanese through watching anime, it took me about 3 years. I started watching anime regularly in 2018 and when I was watching Hori-san to Miyamura-kun in 2021, the last two episodes had not been subtitled, so I watched them raw and mostly understood it.

A lot of people will say that it’s impossible to learn just via watching anime, but have not actually tried it. Yes, if you have subtitles on, it’s easy to let yourself totally ignore the Japanese. But it’s not impossible, and if you are focused, you can still learn even with subs turned on.

Later on, I started taking classes in Japanese at college and started learning a lot more. But just knowledge from watching anime was enough to pass an oral placement test and skip the first 2 semesters. If you are serious about learning Japanese, I recommend taking classes or studying it seriously online. There’s also better input resources than anime such as streamers or even conversation analysis audio for linguistics research.

But I am convinced that anime is still a very good tool because many people like anime and are already very motivated to watch it. This is a very big strength because the biggest obstacle to learning language is giving up. This, combined with Japanese’s very very simple grammar and verb conjugations actually makes it a very easy language to learn, imo.

Imo, pre-2012. I think you could also argue that 2018 or 2020/2021 is the start of the modem era of anime, or even 2006.