A decent ending. It’s not bad, but it didn’t stand out either. It was probably the most shounen episode of this entire series: the lead couple got through, while some of the minor rivals did not and have to wait for their next chance. Not very exciting, although the creators did do a nice job on the build-up and the arduous wait.
Overall, Bakuman never really made itself stand out, aside from perhaps one episode in the middle (the one where Niizuma Eiji suddenly decided to write the wrong manga and where Moritaka and Akito suddenly switched over to a battle manga). Bakuman has been more of a show to just casually watch, which it did nicely, and it kept my attention, but I’m still feeling like I’m missing something here.
In any case, for a series that you all forced me to blog, it was pretty interesting. I still really like the way that I’ve been having this contest for four years now, and yet you somehow always manage to pick out a different series: Gundam 00, Tytania, Kimi ni Todoke and Bakuman all were wonderfully diverse, and I’m definitely going to do this again for Autumn 2011.
Now that most of the Autumn 2010 has ended (with the exception of Star Driver, which will end tomorrow), it’s also time to look back on the past Autumn Season. And overall, I’d call it interesting, fun, yet also underwhelming. The thing is, that Autumn Seasons always have many more series than Winter Seasons. And yet none of the series that premiered during Autumn 2010 came close to matching the top three series of Winter 2011.
It had a lot of interesting (Yakumo, Letter Bee), unique (Panty and Stocking, Soredemo Machi) and hilarious (Milky Holmes, Squid Girl, Kuragehime) series, and yet none of them really stood out or ended up as amazing, and all of the ones that did have ambition were held back by something (almost always having to do with being too short and failing to actually notice that). We’ve had more major seasons that only showed four shows to continue past 13 episodes, but the shows that did continue were absolutely amazing. Take Spring 2008: Himitsu and Real Drive were some of the very few series that were actually long, but they really were some amazing and unique series. Here, Letter Bee, Bakuman and Star Driver: they all just didn’t want to be the hit of the season, it seems. Instead, it mostly stands out as an overall very fun season to watch, because again: there were a lot of fun and interesting series.
Rating: (Enjoyable)
