5th Annual GB Anime Poll for Duders: LFG In Another World Edition

It Begins...Again!

Hello Duders and Dudettes of Giant Bomb! As the holiday season approaches and final exam papers are...well, finalized, it's time to get voting on your favorite anime of 2015! In years past, we've had Daily Lives of Highschool Boys take home the first one in 2012, and then Kill la Kill seasons 1-2 taking home consecutive victories in 2013 and 2014. In 2015, One-Punch Man landed a decisive blow, easily sending the rest of the anime world flying. Now this year the field's open for someone else to take home the crown!

This season saw some unexpected continuations of older franchises, like Lupin III, Macross Delta (good luck finding a legal copy stateside, thanks to Harmony Gold), Dragon Ball Super, Osomatsu-san, and more. In video-game land, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney finally got an adaptation! So did PSO2 (sort of!) and Tales of Zestiria/Berseria! You like sports shows? This year had some real good ones, from rugby to ice skating to...butt sumo.

However, if I had to pick one big, overarching theme this season, it was normal people in strange new fantasy worlds, fighting to survive. Whether they were the more-serious fantasy of Grimgar, the true horrors of respawning found in Re:Zero, or the completely absurd RPG world of KonoSuba, one thing's for sure, you'll never look at these "fish out of water" settings the same way again.

Or maybe you will, but try not to get yourself killed so often.

How do I vote?

Click here, and enter your username and choices in the respective fields. You can ignore all but the first two questions if you wish, but you'll be missing out! If you need help remembering which anime aired this year, @takashicheahas compiled a big list to peruse through and pick out which show(s) are "Best of 2016" worthy.

How will the votes be counted?

The votes will be tallied by weighted vote first, followed by unweighted vote as a tiebreaker. So if you want your show to have a better shot at winning, you should put it higher on your ballot.

Is this an official Giant Bomb thing?

No, this is all me with help from taka and love from the denizens of the GB Anime & Cartoon Megathread. Feel free to stop by, we don't bite!

What if my favorite show started before but continued into this year?

For super-long shows or shows with separation between seasons, you'd be only considering the episodes or season that aired this year when making your choice. I don't have a real way of enforcing this, so we're just going to go on the honor system here.

Can I still vote for a show that's not on the list?

If it aired this year and it's missing, let myself or @takashichea know and we'll add it. If it didn't air this year, then feel free to vote for it anyways, just know that it probably won't count.

Anime is for Jerks!

Yes. Also, that's not a question.

How long do I have to vote?

I'll end this around the second weekend of January.

Have fun!

Thanks! Just shoot me a PM or reply below if you have any questions or comments.

I voted. It was hard to decide in terms of best sporting anime: Haikyu, Keijo, and Yuri on Ice for me personally.

This has been such a weird year for me. I think I have only watched one 2016 anime this year, despite being interested in a number of new shows. It almost feels not worth it for me voting.

Still, I admire your effort Doc for putting this together again.

Let me or DocHaus know if there is anything missing on the Gdocs, folks. I'm online almost every day at Anime Vice and Twitter or have questions about the validity of one entry on the Gdocs.

I'm not getting the internet scuttlebutt claiming this was a "bad year" for anime. I certainly feel the year was front-loaded, wherein my personal favorite shows all aired at the beginning of the year rather than the end. Nonetheless, there were plenty of quality shows to write home about this year. Maybe everyone is just trying to recover from their One Punch Man sugar-rush.

I only voted for JoJo and Mob Psycho. The only 2016 shows I actually watched (I haven't finished Mob though).

If I've only watched two shows from 2016 should I still vote? I wasn't enamored by either of them and I didn't even realise one came out this year, but it's all I got.

@zombiepie:

You're right. There wasn't a lot of hype for the fall 2016 season compared to Winter and Spring.

Heavy Hitters (1st Part of Year): ERASED (had mixed results but had a lot press attention), KonoSuba, Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, Re:ZERO, Kabaneri (also mixed w/ fans), My Hero Academia, Kiznaiver

Heavy Hitters (2nd Part of Year): Yuri on Ice (social media mostly), Keijo, Drifters, Haikyu, Food Wars

@takashichea: Oh I think Erased was fine and one of the best of the year.

I can't wait to read the definitive anime top ten on the internet because I didn't really watch any this year and other sites have crazy people voting most of the time.

@bollard: It's fully up to you, but if you don't feel strongly about any one show, feel free to abstain and await the results in a few weeks.

@zombiepie:

I enjoyed ERASED, too.

If I could continue to ape Giant Bomb award categories I would say: PLEASE STOP! Time travel depression porn. I realize that anime fans are generally head over heels in love with these kinds of shows for at least the last 6 or 7 years and hell some of the ones this year will probably even top the GBAD ranking this year. I just don't think that concept is as novel anymore. To me that premise feels like it's trying to play off a false sense of empathy in some ham-fisted ways that I personally don't appreciate anymore. I feel like my top five shows this year will have a bunch of feel good stuff on it. These days I tend to gravitate to stuff that puts a smile on my face as opposed to furrowing my brow in frustration. Different strokes I guess.

@mezmero: There have been a number of them by this point, but I don't think Groundhog's Day is that big a genre. When They Cry ended in 2007. Stein's;Gate was 2011. It's just that both Erased and Re: Zero was this year, and it played a small part in this season's Jojo. If you wanna stretch the concept a bit, time travel to prevent a tragedy was also the plot of Orange. And in terms of video games, Life is Strange and Undertale did it recently too(Not that Stein's;Gate and When they Cry weren't games first).

I agree with you about the positive stuff. It's been a downer last couple of years for me, and I'm gravitating towards funny stuff. Having said that, these shows don't fit into a depressing category for me. They always have a happy ending, besides Life is Strange I suppose. That was a dumb ending.

@redhotchilimist: Well you touched on the popular ones that I was thinking of. I think when anime does it it's also usually in a style that I find crappy looking more often than not. When They Cry was interesting conceptually but stylistically bankrupt in my eyes. I thought some parts of Steins; Gate are okay but I was not as enamored as most people were with it overall. I also don't like these shows because of how they set a precedent for just making the blandest looking character designs and letting the premise do the heavy lifting as if that excuses a crappy aesthetic. At least the video games you mentioned didn't have a look or style to them that made me want to barf. I prefer cohesion above exploitation in this case and those are two examples of the former in my opinion. For the record I thought ERASED had an okay look to it but I did not watch all of it.

Western time travel stories are usually bad and full of inconsistencies. Anime at least has world building in their time travel stories. Most explain their time travel rules early on as they become essential to the plot. How does the West do time travel? The last one I saw was Looper and it was simply too broken to enjoy.

I wish to echo the "Please Stop" Award is worthy of a trend which dominates an entire industry with moribund sources of entertainment attempting to ape a popular creation. There were at most two or three shows. Secondly, none of those shows came across as shameless cash grabs worthy of condemnation. Each featured a different interpretation of the theme rather than churning out the same garbage.

And if we are going to move forward with the "Please Stop" Award then I would like to propose "Some asshole gets stuck in a video game/virtual reality world," because that shit is really driving me crazy.

I can't believe they are still making that the "stuck in VR" genre a thing.

I mean I realize it's an unpopular opinion, again people seemed to eat up that bullshit this year. I personally just didn't care for it. I'm no stranger to having unpopular opinions about anime.

Well I can't argue that point, though I might have awarded that a couple years back. Even the shows that I think were okay at doing it (Log Horizon, Hunter X Hunter: Greed Island) I didn't like very much.

Got some bad news about people traveling to VR world. I'm afraid its a long standing story trope that isn't going to leave. I laugh because when I was a kid it was western novels doing it as a D&D coming to life setting. Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson and Guardians of the Flame by Joel Rosenberg come to mind. Sometimes we get lucky and there is a good one that pops up from time to time.

It was because of this list last year that I watched One Punch Man and Food Wars so I'm excited to reap the benefits of all your hard watching. Keep up the good work.

I reckon overall this year was pretty good; Re:Zero was amazing, Mob Psycho 100 was a blast, and Erased was incredible. I was let down by some anime (Berserk), and was surprised by how good some were (Yuri on Ice). So all in all, not too bad, but I hope next year is a bit better.

Already a few faves are emerging from the pack, but there's still plenty of time to get your votes in!

Also, to those who asked me elsewhere, Thunderbolt Fantasy is eligible for winning if you wish to vote for it.

@dochaus:

Someone in Anime Vice told me I was missing a series. Thought I tell everyone in case they have seen

She and Her Cat -Everything Flows- (Alias: Kanojo_to_Kanojo_no_Neko__Everything_Flow)

I added to the Gdoc a few minutes ago.

I didn't watch enough new shows this year, especially because for the first three months of the year I had no internet access, and my free time was pretty limited the next five months. Though I can't wait to see the results of this cause I'll have some new shows to catch up on.

Didn't watch much this year either, but Re:Zero, 91 Days, Mob Psycho and One Punch Man were all pretty sweet. FliFla and Keijo are entertaining but I haven't finished either. One of them gets the fifth spot by default I suppose.

Came to this thread looking for this exact information. Now I have to cut 2 shows out of 7 I really loved and that's gonna be harrrrd.

I should probably vote in this again. Will @zombiepie let me vote for Kill la Kill again?

1. Re: Zero
2. ReLIFE
3. Erased
4. KonoSuba
5. Flying Witch

That is the correct answer btw. I thought Erased was going to be my top show when it was airing but I had no idea how great Re: Zero was going to be.

A reminder for those of you still slacking that the poll will be closing very soon! Get your ballot in now while you still can!

@daveyo520: Kinda wish I'd put ReLIFE in my list now, it was unexpectedly quite good and the whole series coming out at once was nice.

This poll made me realize 3 things:

1) Death Parade came out in 2015.

2) I really like that dumb Tiger Mask show

3) Much like in games of 2016, taking a genre and executing on it perfectly gets more points from me than "Trying something new".

@belegorm: Ya I think sadly a lot of people forgot it and it didn't get the hype it deserved because it all came out at once.

@daveyo520: Hey, I remembered that show! It was my biggest surprise of the year. So many things could have gone wrong, but they didn't. I want another season!

@zomgfruitbunnies: I have resorted to reading the manga to see what happens after.

The polls are now closed! Results will be tallied over this weekend! Give your chosen favorite your spirit energy, or hamon, or whatever you nerds prefer to increase their perceived chances of winning.