Anime General Discussion Thread, Favorite Spring Season OP/ED Edition

It's time for the seasonal OP/ED roundup! I want to hear about your favorite OPs and EDs for the season (alternatively, your least favorites!). If you are looking for a collection of them all for this season, you can find almost all of them at the link below:

Collection of almost all OP and EDs for the Spring season

Just a note that you can absolutely use this thread like you would any other general discussion thread. So, feel free to post questions/comments/recommendations like any other week.

As always, remember to be mindful of spoilers. If you want to know more about how to handle spoilers in this community, check the guide here (also linked in the sidebar).

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I picked out a handful of my favorite OPs and EDs and grouped them by shows that I am watching vs. shows that I am not watching. I also threw in a couple random mentions at the end for fun. These are in no particular order.
From shows I am watching
Rock Lady OP - Ready to Rock by BAND-MAID - This is really the standout OP for me this season. BAND-MAID really killed it with this song (and all the other contributions they have made to the show). Also, just a quick mention that the ED is fantastic as well.
Too-Perfect Saint OP - Aitoka by Riria - A pleasantly upbeat song for a show that has had a surprisingly good adaptation.
NinKoro OP - Yarenno? Endless by Kana Hanazawa - You wouldn't know this was sung by the voice of Konoha in the show. The song is nothing like her character.
From shows I am not watching
Aharen-san ED - Twilight by shallm - I loved shallm's previous work for Torture Princess, and this is another great one in that same vein. This one will likely kick around on my playlist for a while like her previous song has.
Witch's Death ED - Hanasaku Michi de by Aoi Teshima - This one is haunting and somber, featuring lovely vocals.
Boy-Girl Friendship OP - Shitsumon, Koitte Nandeshou ka? by HaKoniwalily & HoneyWorks - a lot of fun
Fire Force ED - Urusiren by Umeda Cypher - This ED is just dripping with style.
Food for the Soul ED - Miso Shiro to Butter by Reira Ushio - A lot of fun and very cute.
Witch Watch OP - Watch me! by YOASOBI - Bright and smooth animation pairs well with another great song by YOASOBI.
Honorable Mentions
Dynamic Visual Style - Shoushimin OP - Kaseijin by Yorushika - There were so many cool visual styles packed into this OP. It was a lot of fun to watch. The ED also does a great job of combining live-action and animation in an engaging way.
Most Obviously Desperate to Start a TikTok Viral Dance - MIRU: Paths To My Future ED - Find a Way by MIYAVI - This was actually hotly contested with both the Ballpark ED and the ED for Himitsu no AiPri: Ring-hen. The latter of which starts with a whole live-action sequence of a dance.
Biggest Difference Between OP and ED - Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers. Seriously, listen to the OP and then the ED. The two songs are so different from on another.
Most Playable - Loser Ranger ED - Seigi by Rukurow note - I loved all the gaming styles through this ED. It felt like taking a stroll through an arcade.

My favourite OPs this season (of what I'm currently watching) are:
SHOSHIMIN
Witch Watch
I'm intrigued by the Apocalypse Hotel OP due to its way out of key singing and messy instrumental, which seem very fitting.
My favourite EDs are:
Too Perfect Saint
Catch Me At The Ballpark
Other than that, I finished Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun. Really fun anime. Love the character interactions. I never watched it before, but it felt very nostalgic. Probably because I started watching anime around that time. Shame about the ending, but other than that I had a blast.
- Also just watched the 1st 3 eps of Rock Is A Lady's Modesty. Similar to the manga, I can't really get into it. I find the toxic dynamic between the 2 MCs not fun at all. Making playing together a competition is also weird, because that's just not at all a good idea if you want to play in a band.
  For an anime that tries to get the playing look right (good job on the drums, less so for guitar, which makes sense because smaller movements are hard with mocap), they really dropped the ball on how loud a drumkit is. No way you can play along to a song on a phone the way she was or talk over it in a soft voice. You'd be definitely be hearing that thing outside of the building (unless they installed soundproofed glass) or at least in the hallway (no way that door has proper soundproofing).
  I like the premise (guitar playing girl thrust into high society has to deal with her passion not being accepted), but not the execution.

Witch Watch and To Be Hero X OP look amazing.

Weekly ranking roundup:
Anime Corner - Full Results - Weekly Winner: To Be Hero X
Reddit Karma - Weekly Winner: Apothecary Diaries
Credit to /u/Abysswatcherbel for making the chart for reddit karma and /u/Nooble5 for the Anime Trending chart.
Something finally topples Witch Watch from the top of the AC chart, and it came from all the way down in 12th place last week. I am curious to know how To Be Hero X would be placing on the reddit chart, but unfortunately the reddit mods have decided to not allow discussion of the show since it doesn't meet their standards of anime enough to be on topic for the subreddit.
- Weekly Winner: To Be Hero X

Went through them all again and here are my favorites this time:
OPs
Black Butler: Emerald Witch Arc - I love the storybook aesthetic and the overwhelming use of green. I have my issues with this series, but this OP hits a dark and oppressive tone that I think works very well.
Hero Aca: Vigilantes - this show is a love letter to american superhero comics and the OP exemplifies that very well (and is also a bop)
Shoushimin S2 - on the surface it's got tons of impressive art style shifts, a fun song, and interesting visuals, but I'm sure that deeper in there are clues to the mysteries that i don't have the context to decipher, lol.
To Be Hero X - this shows off the show's mix of animation styles and also its mix of superhero action with hints of darker mysteries
Witch Watch - I love this OP so much and it makes me wish I liked the show more, lol. The characters are so expressive and them having fun is infectious
EDs
Classic Stars - I really like the song they put together for this, and I think the boys' singing goes well with the instrumentation.
Gundam GQuuuuuuX - they made the interesting choice to have a bunch of shots with one camera angle and I think it worked really well. The backdrop is so detailed and we get to see a lot of really cute little scenes of their daily life (I like it when the cube falls down)
Ninja and Assassin Under One Roof - fun and colorful, and gets extra points for heartlessly deleting characters from the ED after they die
Rock is a Lady's Modesty - while it's mostly just pans across static images, the stylization and coloring really give a strong vibe
To Be Hero X - very moody and emphasizes the way that becoming a hero often becomes a tragedy rather than a dream come true.
Mentions (honorable or otherwise)
Normally I really like EDs with a rougher style like Ann Shirley's, but the color flashes made this really hard for me to watch
I wanted to like Fire Force S3's ED, since the animation and rap parts are really good, but the autotune on the singing is just too much, it hurts to listen to.
Himitsu no AiPri's ED has some extremely scary live action versions of the main characters. No thank you.
Miru's ED features the robot character doing what looks like a tiktok dance ??
Princession Orchestra's OP's melody strongly reminded me of D.N.Angel's
I think it's funny that almost none of the characters in To Be Hero X's OP or ED are in the first three episodes (I'm a bit behind) of the anime basically at all, lol. Nice gets some screen time in the OP, but I have no idea who anyone else is.

The only ones I've seen are to the only series I'm watching this season - Apocalypse Hotel, which is of note for an oddly off-key OP.
The first time I heard it I just took it to be the OP as sung by an awkward and poorly skilled robot, endearingly trying to sing a song that's more upbeat than she is, and I loved it. I still do and I still do.
So I started off the week finishing up Noein: Mou Hitori no Kimi e, which was excellent. It's part political thriller and part coming of age story, played out against a backdrop of quantum mechanics and multiverse theory, and just very well done.
Then I watched both seasons of Getsuyoubi no Tawawa, which, in spite of its four minute episodes dominated by fanservice is actually pretty good.
Then, somehow, I ended up watching Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na! for the third time, and enjoyed it all over again. (And just thinking about it, I now have Easy Breezy stuck in my head).
And at the moment, I'm watching Mekakucity Actors, which atarted off being all style and no substance, which is particularly disappointing in this case, since its style is just a retread of the Monogatari series. And I don't just mean that it's the same basic style - it's the same sort of character designs against the same sort of backgrounds (and seems as if they could be literally the same backgrounds) doing the same stylized gestures and motions accompanied by the same sort of droning narration of the same sort of edgy pop philosophy. So basically the anime equivalent of reheated leftover cup ramen.
The first time I saw a character do this damned head tilt, I almost shut it off right then and there.
Thankfully, it does seem to be finally revealing some actual substance (seven episides in) though whether it ends up being enough to be satisfying or not remains to be seen.
- Out of curiosity, what did the SHAFT head tilt do to you?
  
  It told me to not expect anything original - to just settle in for the same insipid, contrived edginess they've already beat to death in the Monogatari series

Favourite opening song: Inertia by Hiroyuki Sawano (To Be Hero X)
Runner-up: Plazma by Kenshi Yonezu (Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX)
Favourite ending song: I don't care by Hoshimachi Suisei (Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX)
Runner-up: KONTINUUM by SennaRin (To Be Hero X)
My favourite songs this season are in fact not the OPs and EDs, but the insert songs:
PARAGON by Hiroyuki Sawano (To Be Hero X)
New Type of Hero by Chatterbox (To Be Hero X)
JEOPARDY by Hiroyuki Sawano (To Be Hero X)
I picked up To Be Hero X over the past week. The plot is kinda basic and it relies on shock value heavily, but I have been enjoying it so much regardless. The drama and politics(?) is like a blend of One Punch Man and Oshi no Ko. Also, it doesn't have a single soundtrack that I dislike. Each one of them is a banger.

In non-OP/ED stuff:
I realized late that I'd missed a few anime because (for whatever reason) I thought they were sequels/spinoffs that required prior knowledge:
Hero Aca Vigilantes - turned out pretty good and fun, but I got really frustrated with how the whole franchise continues to be weird about women (and also I liked Shinsetsu Man when he was just helping people in mundane ways)
Umamusume Cinderella Gray - It seemed like a decent sports girl anime, but I don't really like sports girl anime lol
Gundam GQuuuuuuX - (I thought it started with a movie but later learned that was just the first few episodes bundled together or something) This is definitely stylish, but I feel like the lore is a little dense for beginners, even if veterans keep telling me it's fine. There was way too much jargon I did not understand at all
To Be Hero X - Absolutely stunning visuals mixing 2d and 3d animation, and I'm hooked on the story, but I'm not confident it will be able to keep it up. It's interesting that its premise is very similar to the central lore conceit of Hanako-kun (which was on my mind because the season just wrapped up)
After a lot of deliberation and some unfortunate cuts, I trimmed my list to show my friends down to: Apocalypse Hotel, Catch Me at the Ballpark, Gorilla God's Go-To Girl, Ninja and Assassin Under One Roof, To Be Hero X, and Too-Perfect Saint. And after a lot of deliberation and some unfortunate cuts, we ended up with an overloaded schedule with: Apothecary Diaries S2, Wind Breaker S2, Apocalypse Hotel, and To Be Hero X (we usually try to stick to 3 shows)
This doesn't really bode well for next season for us, since Dan Da Dan, Dress-Up Darling, Reborn as a Vending Machine, and Hanako-kun are all coming back, and To Be Hero X will be in its second cour.
- This is definitely stylish, but I feel like the lore is a little dense for beginners, even if veterans keep telling me it’s fine.
  Speaking as someone whose prior experience with Gundam has been limited to series not part of the main continuity (Wing, part of SEED and I think the first few episodes of X, none of it recently) and a summary or two I read back in the day . . . it is dense enough that I was having a bit of trouble with some terminology that was thrown around in the first episode. The second, ironically, was somewhat easier to follow despite being a lot more lore-steeped, because while it also dumped a fair amount of terminology without proper explanation, it was stuff related to the brief history/political summaries I'd read before, rather than the nuts and bolts of mecha combat. I haven't gotten to the third ep. yet.
  Overall, I would rate it as more difficult for someone coming in cold to follow than Your Forma, despite the latter having been deliberately decapitated. I suspect that I would have dropped this if I hadn't had those half-remembered old summaries of the Universal Century to fall back on.

13 comments

From shows I am watching

From shows I am not watching

Honorable Mentions