AnimeReviews Turns One Year Old

A whole year in anime reviewing has ended. Today AnimeReviews turns one year old! In celebration I’ve decided to write a little bit on the reviews of yesteryear, the few upcoming changed that will probably happen in the following weeks and my hopes for AnimeReviews in the near future. Come on in and enjoy the blabber. There’s cake!

A year in numbers

The part all people love to hear. Let’s do it!

7.5 – the average review score on AnimeReviews.
27 – the number of Blu-ray/DVD reviews written this year.
129 – the amount of posts we published this year.
220 – comments written this year.

The mission

If you never ever buy anime feel free to skip this paragraph.
I’ve written extensively about the raison d’etre of AnimeReviews and you can read all about that in the About section. The issues that caused me to create this website are still widely apparent to this day. The amount of websites that review physical copies of anime can still be counted on one hand. It’s not entirely uncommon to see only one result for a physical review of an anime series. This is an unhealthy situation that lends too much opinion to too few people. In operating AnimeReviews I feel we are offering a valuable second opinion. Here are some things you should know about reviewers at large: they might misunderstand a series, might be paid to praise a series they hate, are too lenient on a terrible show/movie or are in an inappropriate mood to appreciate one.  Missing out on a great series because the only one reviewer that reviewed it gave it a bad score is regrettable thing. That is why AnimeReviews was created and will continue to exist.

Website structure and future projects

When this website was created I was a CMS noob. I’ve since taken the time to learn HTML and CSS, which helped the website look a little more passable. In the future I would really like to lift things up a bit. My two big objectives are to create a more dynamic reviews section (with a tile for each series/movie and the ability to filter series by grade/letter and later by genre) and to change the visual representation of the reviews (specifically the “pros”, “cons”, “final score” and “product detail” parts). Of course to do that I must learn PHP and Java Script…yeah. We’ll see if I can get a vacation from work to learn these…
I’m also considering doing more YouTube videos, but it is immensely time consuming and remains as a possibility to be explored if enough time can be procured.

One thing I decided pretty early on in the inception process of AnimeReview is to keep the website commercials-free for the first year. Of course no commercials means no budget at all for the website, not even for simply keeping it afloat. For that reason I might imbed one or two commercial widgets in the near future. I’m doing this to keep AnimeReviews alive, not to make a profit. We all know you can just use a spam-blocking add-on if you are allergic to commercials so please (kindly) deal with it.

Recruiting new writers

We are looking for new writers who are interested in writing posts or articles on anime, manga, cosplay or Japanese video games. This is not a job listing – AnimeReviews is not a profitable website nor is it a company. Those who wish to apply should understand they will be working for free. That said we are very lenient in how we work. We will gladly accept you even if you tend to write twice of thrice a month. So if you are looking for a place where you can post your valuable opinions, plug your website, and receive thousands of page views every month give me (Nadav) a shout using the Contact Us tab. One thing though – we are looking for people who can write in proper English and know the meaning of the word moderation. The only exceptions to these rules are in the case of Japanese speakers. If your native language is Japanese and you would like to express yourself in you native language (for any reason whatsoever) we can translate your posts/articles for you before uploading them to the website. I do that on a weekly basis for Kazuo.

Some anime that surprised me

This is the part where I talk a little bit about series I reviewed this year. The anime that surprised me the most for the better was The Melody of Oblivion. Such an intelligent and well-executed series. Such impressive scope and intricate details. It’s a pity this is also one of the most underappreciated anime series out there. I wish more people would try it out. On the other side of the spectrum I was surprised by how terrible Fate/Unlimited Blade Works turned out. Not only was the original production rushed and lacking in both context and character development, the English localization was also terrible. The entire movie feels like a cheap turnoff that doesn’t rise to the high standards of the rest of the Fate franchise. Fate/Unlimited Blade Works receive a final score of 2 – the lowest score on AnimeReview this year and was the most disappointing title I reviewed on physical media in 2012.

Timelines for future reviews and regular posts

Last year I tried relentlessly to provide one review each week. For the most part I did succeed in that – almost each week had a review. But as my work takes its toll and I am forced to work overtime in real life coming up with the time to watch an entire series every week is almost impossible. Writing three regular posts for the website each week is also proving to be difficult, with both me and Kazuo being very busy at this time of the year. This is partly the reason we are recruiting new writers for the website. But unless some nice people show up and provide extra posts and articles expect the amount of regular posts to drop to two per week and the amount of physical anime reviews to drop to one per two weeks. I would love to sit all day, watch anime and write reviews. But alas I need to feed my children poor self. Who would have thought?

Thank you for reading AnimeReviews. We hope you enjoy our reviews and will continue to follow us in the upcoming year.