Cav829

Whew boy. Saw this late. Glad to see the love for Haibane Renmei in particular.

Certain parts of my rankings change all the time, so everything from like.... 5 through 15 is flexible. I'm going to reference my MAL to figure this out. I'm going to also mention I think Odd Taxi might end up on this list, but it's a little too recent for me to put it there quite yet. You should all watch Odd Taxi though. Vivy as well while I'm making recommendations

HMs: The Woman Called Fujiko-Mine, Kizumonogtari and Monogatari season 2, Higurashi, Hajime no Ippo, FLCL, Gankutsuou, Giant Robo, Ghost in the Shell: SAC, Cromartie High School, most every other Miyazaki film or Satoshi Kon film not mentioned, Kara no Kyoukai 5 (the whole series is great though), One Punch Man season 1, Madoka Magica, Your Name

20. Re:Zero (that second season cemented it in my top 20. By the time this series is done, it might be top 10.)

19. Macross Plus

18. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

17. Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket

16. Evangelion franchise (while it has its ups and downs, holy hell was that last movie a reminder how good it can be)

15. Great Teach Onizuka

14. Slayers Next (I love the whole franchise to death, but Next is my favorite)

13. Millenium Actress

12. Mawaru Penguindrum

11. Steins;Gate

10 Paranoia Agent

9. Grave of the Fireflies

8. Perfect Blue

7. Spirited Away

6. Serial Experiments lain

5. Castle of Cagliostro

4. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

3. Haibane Renmei

2. Cowboy Bebop

1. Revolutionary Girl Utena

The one thing that never changes is my top ranking. Utena is just a very special series, and one that holds up compared to any other medium. It is often mentioned in reverence by many modern writers and directors. I cannot recommend it enough.

Florida and Shanghai are fairly close in terms of worst teams in the league. The only thing honestly that might keep Florida above them is TviQ. Florida cheaping out and not picking up backups is really hurting them as it's clear that Logix's lack of flexibility is hurting them when he's not even able to keep up with most of the better Tracers in OWL.

I think you're starting to see tiers emerge:

Top Tier: Seoul, New York, London

Second Tier: Dallas, the two LA teams

Third Tier: Boston, Houston, Philly

Bottom Tier: San Fransisco, Shanghai, Florida

Dallas will eventually get better once the Mercy meta ends and they play more together. They are just awful at playing around a Mercy right now (most Western teams are), and their dive is trash without Harry on Lucio and until they build better chemistry together. Dive was always the weakness of that team, and even when playing pretty poorly overall they still held LAV fairly close.

San Fran will likely move up to third tier once Super and Sinatraa are able to play. Also, their Mercy play is abysmally bad. The thing that gives me hope for them besides the end of the Mercy meta is that Babybay has been playing much better than I thought he would.

Boston is definitely the surprise of the league so far almost entirely because of Striker. They're not going to be in the playoff hunt, but they're safely out of the basement of the league. Some would say Houston is underperforming, but their lack of a top tier Tracer player always concerned me. Jake and LiNkzr are individually really good DPS players (LiNkzr is the best non-Korean DPS in OWL IMO), but high-level Overwatch is so Tracer dependent that they still haven't figured out as a team how to best cover for the deficiency. Clockwork is just way overmatched by all these incredible Tracer players.

New York is easily the most impressive team to date. About their only weakness has been Libero's occasional inconsistent play. But they have one of the best tank duos, arguably the best Tracer player, a scary good Zen player and their bench option DPS player has been playing like an video game endboss. New York vs. Seoul is going to be very telling.

@y2ken: From what I understand, that is definitely one of the things driving the amount of accounts running cheats in China.

Say what you will about EA, the way Blue Hole has handled the cheating situation is as scummy as anything in recent memory. The fact they went and 1.0'd a game they knew had massive underlying coding flaws is crazy, and the fact they haven't gotten called out as much because they're not a big name publisher is even more disgusting. It's even more the reason I 100% agreed with Peter Brown and Gamespot's approach to handling the game.

@slag: I look forward to your thoughts on it.

@dray2k: Thanks, man! It certainly has been a good year for Nintendo to say the least.

As someone who plays a lot of Fire Emblem Heroes, let me not recommend Fire Emblem Heroes for your own sanity and free time.

That said, it's extremely F2P playable if you're into Fire Emblem as they hand out orbs for summoning like candy and separate the whales into their own special tier in Arena.

New Year's Dash spoiler:

Good thing Naito's career is dead so he can feud with Jericho. GG, Reddit.

@slag: Thanks, man. I'm looking forward to your list.

Look... They killed Mass Effect. Okay, that game is not actually the worst game ever if you want to compare it to Steam shovelware, but man is it the game that pissed me off the most. "Profoundly mediocre" is probably more accurate post them cleaning up all the bugs, although the awful writing is a step below that.

The one benefit of snowpocalypse was getting to wake up in the dead of the morning to watch Wrestle Kingdom live.

Once again, Wrestle Kingdom set the bar so impossibly high for the rest of the year. There were at least 5 4 star matches. My friend actually texted me at the end of Jericho vs. Omega saying "That's the best Chris Jericho match of his career," and I'd have a hard time arguing with that. And we've been watching Jericho matches since the ECW days.

You've got 2 days to get caught up now so you can watch Wrestlekingdom on Friday.

Also I've got like ten Omega matches this year alone you need to watch if you haven't.

Different strokes for different folks. I never expected it to compete for top 10 given Ben's and Alex's soft reactions to it. I couldn't dream of making PUBG my Game of the Year this year with all the problems it has (if it was published by EA instead of Bluehole and GotY happened maybe a week later so the full force of that botched XBox release was felt, it could have been a contender for Hottest Mess top 3). Also the staff is way more on board with Destiny 2 than either I was or most circles I hang out in are. But it's their list at the end of the day.

I will say this is the first year in some time my GotY list comes much closer to matching Gamespot's than Giant Bomb's did. I really like their top 10 despite the lack of Cuphead. I also appreciated Peter Brown's great writeup of why they handled PUBG the way they did.