low effort.. no art here.. just regurgitated trash.
go look at 80's to 90's sci-fi, mecha, horror and cyberpunk and you can see there was love, attention to detail and 90% of the anime was anime story...

now 50% of it is filler
20% is story.
and 30% is fan service < also filler


it's like they forgot how to make piece of art... frame by frame attention to detail...
art that took time, money and work just to add detail and eye candy.

anime today feels like a distilled formula for money.. a formula that many are doing so were given few options for good shows.

Even the fan service has up to 30% filler now? So they really were getting bigger, I thought I was just seeing things! But if you ask me, I'd call that eye candy! It takes a lot of "work" to look that good.

Grumpy old man yelling at clouds again.

Yakitori:Soldiers of Misfortune is pretty okay though.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbgkuC8od98

It's possible that in order to feed the need for more and more series to export, Anime studios are producing too many shows, which creates bad conditions for workers and reduced quality overall, but there could be some kind of quality-filter bias going on.

Meaning, there was a lot of garbage produced every year in the 80s and 90s anime also, but we only remember the series that stood the test of time, so the current lineup suffers in the comparison to the real classics.

Same happens with movies. If you only remember the few classics from each decade and you compare them to the movies that are released each weekend now, you would think things are going downhill, but there was a lot garbage being released every week even during the golden age of Hollywood, we just forgot they even existed.

In any case, I seem to find a couple of anime series that I consider good every year and a few that are entertaining, and I am not looking that hard.

Why old was better than now, new?

Short history lesson as I lived it.

Disney was king and the Japanese wanted to xerox that shiatsu....But in the attempt, created something different. People cultivated this new shiatsu. Over and over again revamping it. Until it met the boiling point. The market dropped out before the 80s and all the major companies dumped all the super expensive studio equipment into the general market place. So cheap was it, that normal fan groups got together and made "art houses" or groups of fans. These folks would compete indirectly. Coupled without any restrictions, the imagination was the limiter.

Now a days, it should be cheaper than those days of old(it is). But groups are broken and little to no interest exists from the younger crowd of Japanese. Which is ironic in this day and age of instant communication.

Anime in 2025 looks much like it did for the past two decades: I'm sure there's plenty of good out there, but first I'd need to part the seas to get past all the Shōnen nonsense. But what it's worth, I've been enjoying anime of four decades ago and thriving.

Here's a task for you; call it a challenge:
Make your next thread a *positive* one.
Pick a favorite topic and write what you love about it.
You can do it.

edit:
I see you already did with the System Shock 2 modding post.
Very good. Keep it up.

Those are just the popular ones. This makes me wonder if you really do just like these, and not much else. That is quite possible. But maybe its just that you dont go too far out of the way to find others. I want to give some suggestions, but im resisting the urge, because that would totally derail the thread.

So instead of derailing the thread completely I'm just going to go semi-off topic, and complain about how streaming runed my hobby. Im a collector. That hobby requires physical copies to be released. There are a few still, but not anywhere near as many as there used to be. So for me anime in 2025 is really depressing.

...Superbook is a popular anime? Mushi-Shi is spoken of outside of anime clubs?

Though, you can also see I've also disliked some popular choices too.

Oh, no, that's not really what I meant. I guess now that I think about it I can see where it would have seemed like a criticism. I meant more that your list is pretty small. Also, as for you anime club reference, I didn't mean to say popular among all people ever. I kind of did mean anime fans. And 'well known' would have been a better choice of wording than popular.

I am a big anime lover but i stopped getting anime around 2015, because the quality was mostly gone and done.

So. now i only own "classic animes".

Basically everyone agrees that the working conditions in the anime industry are terrible, animators and other staff work for the love of art, they've been attempts to reform the industry but as you can imagine, if the anime is a big hit it's also super profitable and suits don't want to change a thing

But beyond that, it's the exact same it has always been, tons of shows exist for the sole purpose of advertising a manga or light novel and unless you like the genre or original work, that make up for most of it so naturally it feels "overfilled"

grumpy old man revolutionized cyberpunk 2077 few years back so let that sink in.
every time silver hand speaks it's my words.
hope you all enjoyed the ripp off pond smith wrote

dog town was our vision of a world without ncpd annoying us.
only the gods know the truth.
https://youtu.be/XG6ctYRulEQ?list=PL2AQ-Ws6tXvg4omfJYgm21LvYd3dMCyXu
go boot up cyberpunk and listen to the intro.
then click the link.. "just understand the gods that run this planet are douche bags"
Pond Smith owes me a AAAA writers fee... and knew he had to pay me but had platform control.

on the subject of me let it end here.. focus on the topic...

Anime is cringe compared to the places we have been.

I'm a huge fan of Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex and I love all the songs by Origa (RIP), among others. I've also really liked the movie Akira, don't see many like it. For me those are classics among the many from back then (80s and 90s mostly. (A few that came out earlier also)

But I also love Solo Leveling (currently airing season 2 on CR Winter 2025), even if they did skip a few good points from the Manga (no idea about LN, if it exists), but still amazing when combined with the music and everything else.

Though I admit there isn't much else this season I cared for. Some nice ones are coming next season, though again, not as many as I'd hoped for.

While some of the older anime were classics (and will almost always be remembered fondly), there are plenty of anime since then that have been quite amazing too. After all, many were inspired by those classics and these are leave a lasting impression. For future generations, they're probably considered classics at some point.

As to how the industry works, I don't know much, so it's hard to comment on it. Though it's always a bit sad to see profit winning over love of creating anime or anything else for that matter. But that's just a reality we face these days.

[Side Note: I'm already sad Amazon removed my favorite Transfer via USB option for Kindle. Which makes me all the more glad that things we buy on GOG are things we own forever.)
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