I think a good ranking shouldn't be a flat number or a watch/don't watch, because every viewer will have different tastes, and different thresholds of quality. It should be a brief assessment of its strengths, weaknesses, and the interests it appeals to that helps the reader figure out whether they themselves will find watching it worthwhile.

On the flip side, it's depressing if you haven't seen DBZ.

I can still give a show a 10 and say that I wouldn't suggest it to you or give a show a 6 and say "you'll probably like this show".

The number just represents roughly how good I thought it was. How good something is and whether or not you'd suggest it to someone else are related, but they're not completely interchangeable.

In its entirety? I don't think most people have (although I probably came close. Back then, we didn't have the luxury of watching shows from start to finish).

At all? I know some people who like anime that never really watched DBZ growing up. I don't think it's sad, but it means they might miss out on a few japanese pop culture references as a result.

I think you underestimate the popularity behind Madoka.

Personally I would never actually recommend people go watch the big 3 shonens, though that is more because they really should be able to get to those without a recommendation.

Something positive to say about shonens....... at least some of them don't end in the **** middle of the story. So many good anime, died so young. Now I'll never know what happens.

The reason most "long-running shonens" (basically for some reason anything over 200 episodes gets a somewhat bad reputation at some point) have gone for so long are that they are good enough. No one thinks Dragonball Z was a realist's dream or has the best storytelling ever, but it was entertaining and is still worth seeing at least once.

They must have done something right with them, but they are not very good. I started all of them, jumping fillers, but never finished them or have any desire to continue. Not to say that aren't good shounen. I liked Hunter X Hunter enough to give it an 8, but until now, the best shounen in my opinion is still Yu Yu Hakusho. Coincidentally, or not, they are from the same writer, Yoshihiro Togashi, although I didn't know that at the time.

I just read the manga for the shonen. Ever since following the anime for Naruto I got really annoyed by all the low-quality filler between the ending of Naruto and the start of Shippuuden.

But I'm mostly a seasonal watcher nowadays, picking up the manga/LN if stuff interests me.
It's how I got started on Yumekui Merry. I picked it up because the anime OP was made by IOSYS (IOSYS was known by me through their Touhou remixes, so yeah)
The anime itself was pretty good if there weren't those annoying anime original characters and final arc (even without reading the manga you can almost pinpoint which characters were for the anime only), but the manga is so much better.
I started reading the LN for No Game No Life for the same reason, though that one is pretty loyal to its source material.

Since when as skipping 2 entire arcs been "loyal to its source material".

No, never mind. I know what you mean.
I'm just a bit ticked at what they did at the end of the season.

Recently worked my way through through the following:
Food Wars! (Shokugeki no Soma)
Broken Blade
Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?
No Game No Life

Things started or half finished in the que:
Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE!
Kamigami no Asobi
Nobunaga the Fool
Rokka - Braves of the Six Flowers
The Fruit of Grisaia
Bladedance of Elementalers


Food Wars! was a blast and I'll be really hoping that it has enough fan momentum to see a season two considering that season one only made it halfway through its current manga stockpile. My wife and I are big cooking show fans and this anime just really resonated with us.

Broken Blade was really interesting for me not only because of the premise about mecha made from quartz piloted by a race of telekinetic people who could move quartz with their minds, but because the hour-long format of the episodes was not at all something I'm accustomed two while watching anime. Each of the six episodes had plenty of time to flesh out the story and didn't feel rushed. It was nice.

The other two were just light-hearted junk food for the wife and I. Both NGNL and Dungeon really had some good ideas and I'm a bit sad that NGNL pretty much died on the vine just as it was getting really good with no Season 2 prospects currently.

Of the stuff we're working through right now Nobunaga the Fool is definitely a pretty fun mecha anime that pits the east and the west against each other as planets instead of geopolitical areas and tries to squeeze in just about every historical figure from both cultures into it. I'm also enjoying Rokka right now. We're not very far along, but I like the character designs and the story isn't bad.

@storyteller:
At least they didn't make up 5 characters for an arc that didn't make sense and had no influence on the rest of the (manga) plot, even though the big bad was murdering people left and right
But yeah, skipping is pretty normal in adaptions (LotR anyone?), so I don't see the problem with that. The things that were animated were pretty much done by the books.

Things I'll at least try this season:
YuruYuri San Hai
Monster Strike
Onsen Yousei Hakone-Chan
Utewarerumono: Itsuwari no Kamen
Owarimonogatari (for sure)

Maybe more, but that depends on the time I'll have.

You remind me that eventually I need to watch the rest of Monogatari.

I don't know if it's just bias but I find it surprising you thought Break Blade was ok.
The thing becomes complete anime original at some point, and isn't nearly as good as the manga.

I'd also stay away from Grisaia tbh...
The VN was far better than that.

I don't read much manga so the anime is pretty much my only reference point of exposure.

Broken Blade had its hokey anime moments, and many of the generic mecha designs were kind of blah, but I liked the idea of Quartz mecha and a world where technology was almost 100% quartz/telekinesis based. Heck, even the guns normal soldiers used were basically just tubes that they could push quartz rounds through.

The wife and I made it about half way through Grisaia before we took a break for other things. I'm not sure if we'll get back to it, but the show is pretty interesting in an odd way.

I am staring to hate anime that is really nothing but a half-*** advertisement for the manga. Especially when they don't even bother to do it well.

Anything half-**** is bad

But I generally only check if a manga/LN exists after I watched the anime. Ever since Naruto I know I'll get annoyed watching a decent-good anime if they don't follow source material, so I try to stay out of those situations.
The only exception in the last few years was Monster Musume and that was just a pretty darn good adaption with some bonus stuff.

I would like to say this about long-running shonen shows, mostly aimed at mjack:

Point the first: the average anime viewer not having seen DBZ is an event horizon we are fast approaching, if we haven't already passed it. By my understanding, DBZ became popular because, essentially, it existed in a vacuum. In the 80s and 90s when DBZ aired, most anime was only really accessible to the average person via what was dubbed and aired on television (cable or Saturday morning local or whatever). For me, and I imagine for a lot of people, I grew up watching DBZ as a child because it was one of the best anime I could possibly watch at the time, and I'm sure at the time I would have called it the best cartoon on television because it appealed to all the right parts of me. DBZ and DBGT, while they hold a lot of nostalgia for me, I have absolutely no desire to re-watch any of it, and I would not tell anyone to go watch them (or Kai, for that matter).

Point the second: Based on my own experience, I think a lot of the stink that gets attached to anime that run 200 episodes or more is that people have gotten burned by some of the longer ones which they have watched. For me, Bleach and Naruto were the worst offenders, though I don't doubt that DBZ/GT did the same thing, that they would literally stop in the middle of a high-stake story to go see a completely different story arc, usually a very low-stake story. Speaking purely for myself, I also don't feel like I'm missing anything by not watching a shallow action show (I say as I watch Akame Ga Kill!...).

Point the third: Yes, if a show has become popular enough to get hundreds of episodes, there is definitely something there that is worth your attention. However, I am not about to tell someone to go sit for 256 straight hours just because this one anime has become so popular as to have over 700 episodes. Do I think it's worth a look? Absolutely worth a look, but not many things aren't. Even absolute garbage can usually have something worth looking at in terms of deconstructing it even if it's not worth engaging at its own level. To give an example, because I'm fond of doing so, if I were to say to someone, "you should check out DBZ to see how it influenced action anime after it," I would probably just have them watch either the Saiyan Saga or the Frieza Saga (both ~30 episodes) or maybe just part of either. I don't think anyone needs to watch the entirety of DBZ unless they decide from their sampling that it appeals to them deeply.

Fall anime I like so far, other than sequels:
• Concrete Revolutio
• Lance N' Masques
• Osomatsu-san
• Sakurako-san
• Utawarerumono

Things recently added to my queue:
-Bodacious Space Pirates
-Rail Wars!
-Squid Girl

Has anyone here caught these yet and have any thoughts before I get to them?