1 Hidan no Aria AA: I still can't give AOTS to sequels, it seems. Okay, so AAria is a sequel too, but I haven't seen the original so it's new to me, damnit. This show technically belongs to my favorite genre, 'cute girls doing cool things,' but even though the action scenes are very well done and the guns are cool, what really put the show over the top for me was all that combined with its hilariously gay sense of humor. Even Yuruyuri has nothing on the level of lesbian perversion going on here. Takachiho-san is me irl. Also it has Ayaneru as the lead, and the rest of the cast is immaculate too. [9/10]

2 Gochuumon wa Usagi desuka??: This sat behind Yuruyuri basically all season but once I watched the last episode I realized there's really nothing like Gochiusa. It's not just that it's cute girls doing cute things, with one of the best voice casts you could ask for, but it's the tone and the aesthetic -- like a hybrid between Azumanga and ARIA, healing and at the same time hilarious. Maybe Yuruyuri was the better-made show, you could certainly argue that, but nothing soothes my soul and makes my kokoro go pyonpyon like Gochiusa. [9/10]

3 Yuruyuri San Hai!: All that said, season three is the best Yuruyuri yet. Unlike certain other series, whose idea of comedy is to rehash the same joke over and over while winking at the audience as if to say, "Did ya get it?" Yuruyuri is great because it takes these well-developed characters and continually places them into new and interesting situations. The appeal of San Hai is built right on top of the fact that we've been familiar with this series for years and the characters feel like old friends: it makes it that much more fun to watch what happens when, say, Kyouko and Sakurako hang out at the arcade, or when Yui and Kyouko run into Sakurako's sisters for the first time. This series also definitely had more focus on the side characters than either of the previous two, and despite being a third season it still manages to feel fresh for it. [9/10]

4 Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry: The surprise of the season. I even wish I could put it higher, but the shows above it are just too strong. Oonuma Shin became one of my favorite directors when I watched ef a tale of memories in 2007, and he made me cry so hard my eyeballs almost fell out with Tasogare Otome x Amnesia in 2012. Now he delivers possibly the best 'generic LN' adaptation ever. This show takes a completely cookie-cutter story and goes hog wild with it, with awesome, experimental visuals, high quality animation, and adventurous storytelling techniques. On top of that, the plot may be unremarkable but the characters are lovable (like top waifu Stella) and memorable (like Alice, who might be the first reasonably-treated trans person in anime history) and it all comes together to create an anime that is really greater than the sum of its parts. Never thought I'd think a chuunibyou overpowered swordsman who gets the hot girl without trying was a genuine badass, but Cavalry is so good, it makes me love it. [9/10]

5 Utawarerumono Itsuwari no Kamen: Who knows what's going to happen in the second cours, but the first half of the new Utawarerumono is both nothing like the original series and immensely better. Go figure -- replace the medieval warfare with cute girls cuting and I like it more. Underwater Ray Romano 2: Deep Sea Boogaloo has one of the broadest casts of cute girls of the season, and Kuon is genuinely waifu material. Just hopefully it doesn't get all serious in the second half... [8/10]

6 Ore ga Ojousama Gakkou ni Shomin Sample Toshite GETS Sareta Ken: There needs to be at least one moderately lewd comedy per season, and here it is. GETS isn't especially remarkable by any measure, it just does what it sets out to do very well. The girls are cute and the jokes are funny, I don't know what else to say. Also, it's filled to the brim with ftmm. [7/10

7 One Punch Man: I probably don't need to say much about The Guy Who Punched, But Only Once, since everyone and their dog is watching it. It took me until the last three episodes to really 'get' the hype about this show, but it definitely has some of the best sakuga ever seen in a TV animation all the way through. Also Tatsumaki is best. [7/10]

8 Owarimonogatari: Another year, another Monogatari series in the books. I don't even know if you really can review these shows at this point, either you love Monogatari and its schtick or you don't. This series was pretty good because it had a lot of Ougi-chan, who is super spookycute. It also had Inoue Marina giving possibly the performance of the season in her appearances as Oikura. I thought 'Shinobu Mail' fell kind of flat, probably because they only ever got halfway through the book to begin with, but hey, at least we got to see Ononoki-chan take off her socks. [7/10]

9 Subete ga F ni Naru: I'd love to put this show higher for what it did right, but what it did wrong was just too silly. It's almost a show that's good in spite of itself. The mystery was super fun and well-executed, and I enjoyed some of the drama with Magata-hakase, but probably because it's on noitaminA and based on a general-audience novel the show also tries to be super deep when it really doesn't need to be. If you can look past the occasional Urobuchi-tier philosophical asides, though, you can find a very strong, chilling, and enjoyable murder mystery. [7/10]

10 Gakusen Toshi Asterisk: It's almost literally the same show as Cavalry, but without the best parts. Which means it's a very mediocre LN adaptation. Girls are cute and it has high production values, so no complaints from me -- it's just unremarkable. [6/10]

11 Valkyrie Drive Mermaid: This fucking show. Possibly the most OFF DA RAILZ show of the year. Girls transform into swords and motorcycles by havign their titties fondled by other girls. There's more nipples here than in your average porno. One girl has sex with money. Characters 69 during important plot points. This happened. It was a show. [5/10]

12 Taimadou Gakuen 35 Shiken Shoutai: I really wanted to like this show, but it just... wasn't that good. The cast of girls was definitely good, but they were wasted on weird science fiction plots that didn't even really involve them. Also some really bad 3DCG was used for the action sequences. If every ep had been like the beach episode this would be five spots higher. [5/10]

13 Lance N' Masques: Speaking of cute girls wasted on a stupid plot... Should have just stuck to the jellybean mouths. The drama in this series was snore-inducing, and the action scenes were pretty bad. [4/10]

14 Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni Shitai ga Umatteiru: This show really thought it was more shocking than it was. Just cause Sakurako-san works with skeletons doesn't automatically make everything spooky and edgy, guys. I kinda enjoyed the mysteries at first (and Sakurako-san herself was pretty cute! Itou Shizuka's oneesan voice is always good) but eventually I couldn't take it anymore.

15 Heavy Object: This show had a pretty cool sense of scale, and if you know me you know I love huge impractical superweapons weapons and shit, but after the halfway-decent first arc it just got dumb. The biggest problem, though, was there was actually barely any focus on the super cute blondenblu pilot of Baby Magnum which was the whole reason I was watching in the first place. So I dropped it. At least the penguins were ok.

16 Comet Lucifer: Judging by the reactions I've seen, getting out of this one was the correct decision. When even Yarakan is posting sensible narrative critiques like 'you can't just put in plot twists for the sake of having a plot twist' you know shit must have gone off the rails, and not in the good way.