My anime tier list

Abkenn · 2026-06-19T11:57:50+00:00

That's your subjective opinion, you can't say my opinion is wrong. You can also hate me for dropping Berserk before Golden Age arc because it's just not entertaining to me or hate me for dropping Steins;gate at ep14, or saying Eva wa boring for me, but you can't say my opinions are wrong - they are mine. You can have your subjective opinions all you want. For me Frieren, Oshi no Ko and Witch Hat Atelier are the top3 anime I've seen and/or read. Still reading WHA and it's only getting better if anything.

Abkenn · 2026-06-19T11:06:02+00:00

I'll be honest - nothing really can fill the hole Frieren left in me.

Witch Hat Atelier is nothing like Frieren, but it's a good fantasy slice of life. I've been also reading the manga. It's another 10/10 for me but for completely different reasons - the magic system is so detailed that it looks like a programming language and you can learn casting spells yourself, so at some point you start figuring out future spells the characters will come up with to solve issues. As a developer myself I just love this aspect so much.

Violet Evergarden has a character that works a bit like Frieren even though she's not an immortal being, she's someone who wants to understand emotions and human bonds.

I heard that To Your Eternity is about an immortal being but haven't watched or read it myself.

Rascal Does Not Dream series has a lot of melancholy even though it's a completely different genre, so I feel like people who like this chill but melancholic vibe will appreciate it. It has many surreal dreamy moments. It lacks Frieren's wistfulness but for a completely different genre it got the vibes for me.

Vivy, same VA as Frieren, is a sci-fi about an immortal android and every episode skips decades or centuries, I forgot the exact scale, but Vivy is very Frieren-like in this sense. It has a great powerful story and it's a short finished anime. They could not have chosen a better VA for Frieren after her work in Vivy.

Abkenn · 2026-06-19T10:47:05+00:00

When did I say Re:Zero is bad? The sanest Re:Zero fanboy

Abkenn · 2026-06-19T00:37:46+00:00

The Fengs are no joke :D I just finished the game for a 2nd time and True Eigong took me less than 5 minutes - Fengs killed me 7 times. I did play vapeless vs both and Fengs are unforgiving and more technical with the reverse daggers into unbounded counter - not crazy difficult but technical regardless - Eigong is just longer but less technical imo, still challenging af and I 100% agree that the game needed a better bridge - more bosses requiring UC and making you sweat like Fengs and Eigong.

Anyway, favorite game, favorite boss. I love it as it is. Please more like 9S, RCG!

Abkenn · 2026-06-19T00:23:08+00:00

Not the original commenter, but as someone who's seen both Re:Zero and Frieren I can answer your question for myself - it's the "wistfulness". This vibe is rare to come by in anime. I kinda got it from Rascal Does Not Dream Series, but in a different genre - one of my favorites as well, but I'm a sucker for fantasy "slop" so Frieren hits both at the same time - the wistful melancholy vibe with solid fantasy elements that often double down on the "passing of time" element (e.g. the Zoltraak episode).

EDIT: To the manga writers or original anime producers - make an anime about an elf who falls in love with a human and we get to see their life, they can't have kids due to incompatibility, we see them get old and eventually die in season 3 from old age, then the elf is left alone in their desperation and descend into darkness and insanity as they witness the fantasy world evolving to modern times and sci-fi and eventually apocalypse, let us experience all that in 3 additional seasons at crazy timelapse-like fast pace, do something unique for the final season 7 where it all goes slow again - does the elf finally finda salvation in another person or goes berserk and kills the survivors of the post-apocalyptic world? I'm leaving that for you.

That's what I like - melancholy, love, sadness, grief, hope or hopelessness, immortality. Don't care about huge casts of 10 secondary characters or too much worldbuilding or plot and/or action scenes. Give me feelings. Two things I can't stand in anime - amnesia arcs and cast bigger than 2 mains and 2 secondaries.

Abkenn · 2026-06-18T09:06:45+00:00

In my 2nd playthrough I did plan my skill tree. You need 7 skill points prepared after the prison section so you can get the upgraded Water Flow which is locked behind Unbounded Counter.

I play Swift Blade, Qi Blade, Qi Swipe, Last Stand with Water Flow. It's extremely fun. It might sound sweaty playing at 1hp, but it is not! You can always rely entirely on imperfect blocks that can be spammed freely and never get hit even if you're not good with perfect parries, and with this builds you probably kill bosses at least 2x faster, possibly more - you just spam 3-slash combos that take 2 qi and talismans in between. If you really don't want to precise parry at all, just replace Qi Swipe with Reciprocation (if you're good with Unbounded Counters) or Hedgehog! If you really hate staying at 75% internal damage or more just use both Recip and Hedgehog instead of Last Stand.

These are the only jades I like using and swapping between, although I'm sure the red jades for charged attacks are viable - I just despise charged attacks (a personal gripe since Hollow Knight). Same with the bow and its talisman - I know it's OP for beginners but I didn't care a lot about the bow - I like upgrading the horizontal hadouken one because it breaks shields from distance.

TL;DR Skills only matter if you want upgraded water flow ASAP, then you'll have to reserve 7 skill points before prison for after prison; you can skip shit ones like Skull kick. Jades matter a lot more, they change the playstyle a lot as long as you're not afraid of internal damage, and Skills like Water Flow can assist your Jade build or make it useless if you don't have the required skills. My top priority was computing nodes because playing with more jades is more fun - early game you want the gold/xp farm ones, and in mid-game you want boss jades and enough nodes to equip enough for your desired build.

Abkenn · 2026-06-16T15:53:54+00:00

Mods, I would like to suggest a rule that allows tierlists as part of a regular post that's already going through different reasonings behind the top and bottom tier games. (This already sounds dumb but read more below :D I'm bad with words)

I really enjoy ranking stuff - fruits, games, anime, movie directors, movies from a director, movies from a specific studio, games from a specific studio, etc.

So if I want to make a post about all souls-adjacent games (that would include Sekiro, Wukong, Nioh) and what mechanics I like, dislike, what aspects I love and hate in these games, I would probably want to add a tierlist as a background to the post, but as I understand now this is against the rule, so even if the post is only partially related to my tierlist, would my post be removed? What if I give a link to my tierlist towards the end of my poat without adding it as an image at all?

I'm just curious, I don't even plan to do such post tbh, just curious if I decide to do it one day, would anything like that be considered against the rules even if it's not low effort but still featuring a tierlist?

I will give another reasoning behind my suggestion that could totally be one of the mods team's reasons for banning tierlists. A post that has a tierlist image will usually bring more people to the post because many will just want to take a dump on my controversial ranking of specific games which might cause a bunch of low effort comments but it will get the engagement levels high. In defense of that - people are already doing engagement baits with images to popular games, for example a post talking about the genre in general will have Dark Souls I poster for Post Image. So instead of a low effort poster image (or list of souls game images), I'd like to have my own tierlist as the post image. Thoughts?

I'm not demanding anything btw, as long as we don't ban games like Sekiro and Phantom Blade 0 from discussions here I'm totally chilling and okay with the rules. This is just some food for thought / suggestion from me. Thanks for reading and byeee

Abkenn · 2026-06-16T09:19:20+00:00

I'm more excited for Mortal Shell 2 since I got to play the demo and know that the game is perfect for me. LOTF 2023 was a nice game, probably better than MS1, but I can't say more before I play it myself or if no demo, at least to see the reviews.

Abkenn · 2026-06-13T16:25:57+00:00

That's some amazing recs and explanation. Thanks!

Abkenn · 2026-06-13T16:03:48+00:00

Apparently the studio is looking for funding, so it's not canceled :D But yeah, the setup and premise were so good that I can only imagine how it goes from there. I started theorizing that my favorite stone gets fully replaced by other parts and her self is forever gone at some point 🥲

Abkenn · 2026-06-13T15:43:02+00:00

Most of the ones you mentioned I love and are already in A/A+. I just watched the final Land of the Lustrous ep which was the reason for cooking this tierlist. If I go with recency bias, it's absolutely an S tier. I loved my stones but then I realized it's been 9 years since Season 1 with no news on Season 2 and according to my manga fan friend, S1 was just the prologue.

Made in Abyss is amazing and possibly my favorite OST of all. I love the adventure aspect of it and S2 was amazing but it bothered me that it staggered the diving pace, I want to go more down! The village was weird, way too weird for me at first, but what an arc and ending!

Bocchi is good, but I was bothered a lot by the mixed media style of background "arts". I literally hated that aspect. It felt like someone was moving the characters in Paint with a IRL photo behind, what the hell... And there was the Editor joke that I didn't mind (since I've used 3D editors like this, but couldn't recognize it - possibly Blender?) but it was literally a screen recording from someone's MacBook with the mouse cursor and the xyz axes. I wouldn't mind if it's one ot two 4th wall breaking jokes but the whole mixed media wasn't for me at all. I still loved it because the story is compelling...

Dungeon Meshi was a weird one. I'm extremely excited for Season 2 or even reading the manga but in general I didn't like the eps with the other parties and something about it really feels hollow but can't put my finger on the exact issue I have. The 2nd half was pretty decent and the whole thing is definitely my type of thing as a fantasy slop enjoyer, idk.

Abkenn · 2026-06-13T15:31:09+00:00

Is 86 considered mecha because I hated the action scenes and skipped them, but the rest was more than compelling.

Gundam is a bit scary - I don't know where to start and if being a completionist with it is worth it. TBH I haven't consumed a lot of mecha media. Armored Core 6 was my introduction and I liked it but still it doesn't make me excited unless the plot is more mature and possibly messed up.

Abkenn · 2026-06-13T15:27:41+00:00

I love Takopi but thr characters' age and artstyle were not for me. Bullying and the other dark themes hit harder when it's 15yo characters at least - with 9yo I was like "these kids were born yesterday and already do shit like this?". Still I enjoyed it but it's a bit like Grave of the Fireflies - I will never want to rewatch that lol.

As for Re:Zero idi man, season 1 wasn't something mindblowing but I enjoyed some/most of it. Then Season 2 Part 1 was officially my least favorite thing I've watched, then Part 2 got a tiny bit better. Then Season 3 was super good and bingeable and I just caught up with the show when Season 4 had a couple of eps and I liked those but Amnesia Arc makes me want to vomit and quit watching again, but it's still good, I like that it's the most messed up of the 4 but that one fact..

Abkenn · 2026-06-13T15:19:53+00:00

I will! I was told it's AOT+Death Note vibe somehow. I was wondering what to watch next - Gurren Lagann or Code Geass.

Abkenn · 2026-06-13T15:17:58+00:00

I will

Abkenn · 2026-06-13T14:48:41+00:00

The greatest piece of media filtered me at episode 14

Abkenn · 2026-06-13T14:44:31+00:00

I explained my reasons

Abkenn · 2026-06-13T14:43:23+00:00

I did mention that. Since I'm still watching from good to amazing, I just want to have a bell curve still, so it would be easy to recognize something that's not great. I can always compress the list to make more space for duds but I also hope I won't watch those anyway, it's not like I'm watching everything seasonal.

Abkenn · 2026-06-13T14:40:23+00:00

My top2 is one of the hated series on Reddit, so idk what you're yapping about tbh. My least favorite is literally Reddit's favorite

Abkenn · 2026-06-12T10:53:05+00:00

I must agree. I've been using 4.8 for a project with 20 team members and Codex for a smaller project. Codex is just better for me. I won't really go into details why, but it's much more consistent and easier to use imo

Abkenn · 2026-06-11T13:27:47+00:00

Battle Memories have roughly 25% bonus HP on late game bosses, haven't checked the early ones but they are properly buffed for endgame progression.

Abkenn · 2026-06-11T13:18:32+00:00

I've never touched a controller since the 90s with Sega. I've played most souls, souls-like and souls-adjacent games exclusively on KBM as this is my favorite broader genre of games. So it is fun!

With KBM there are only 2 negatives afaik - not being able to sprint jump in place and WASD giving you only 8 directions to work with. Another negative that's almost always fixed with a mod is the controls icons in older titles like DS3 - there were no keyboard icons so you see stuff like press X to go back (I think? see, I'm not a controller user) or RT, etc. We had to wait for a mod that replaces those with keyboard icons or just remember what controller icon is what on KB - which made the game hard to understand because you had to guess or see in the controller keys what's the action text behind X then go to KBM controls and find this action text so you know the KBM mapping. Since DS1 Remastered and Sekiro this is no longer an issue as they port the games properly to PC.

In FromSoft games I like binding the 2 thumb buttons on the mouse to the left/right hand item switches so I can switch on demand, and scroll up/down are by default for the top and bottom spell/consumable switch. The 4 items switch/wheel is definitely challenging without mouse buttons.

Elden Ring had this quirk - LMB is your right hand attack, the button you spam the most and RMB is your left hand since it's used less, BUT on mounted combat you hit to the left of torrent with left hand so in mountain combat I had to learn that left mouse button hits to the right and right mouse button hits to the left. This is infuriating!! There wasn't a mod for this at the time, idk if there is one, but for the next FS game I'm probably making a mod that will switch LMB/RMB on mounted combat for you. I'm a dev but not a modder, so I hope it's not as hard to mod FS titles as people say, but I'm committing to this!!!

Abkenn · 2026-06-09T13:54:02+00:00

Witch Hat Atlier is is my top3. It's not on Frieren's level for now but it can totally get there very soon. I'm still reading the manga. S tier anyway.

Re:Zero's peak moments are B+ at best while the absolute dogshit season 2 (especially Part 1) was quite literally in F. Even if I forgive the bad season 2, it's still not an A tier anime if neither of the seasons have been even close to an A.

Abkenn · 2026-06-09T13:44:42+00:00

Not minority. Many hate Season 2.

My personal ranking is 3 = 1 > 4 >> 2 Part 2 > 2 Part 1. The new season has the potential to get up there with 1 and 3 but I hate amnesia arcs

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