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This year gave me a few pleasant surprises: The iDOLM@STER and up to a certain point Kamisama no Memochou and Nichijou.
I went into The iDOLM@STER expecting a cheap game cash-in to drive up sales and ended up getting some pretty nice slice-of-life, comedy and even drama in the end. It was a show I started following just to see what it would be like to end up being one of my most expected shows in the season with me seriously craving each passing episode.
Then there was Kamisama no Memochou where I went in expecting yet another mediocre J.C.Staff adaptation and got instead a pretty decent above average one. It wasn't perfect, far from it, but it was pretty well made and the final arc in particular was pretty nicely executed.
In the end there was Nichijou, the show that started out as being one of the biggest disappointments of the season to end up being a pleasant surprise. I went in simply to see what KyoAni was up to next and ended up being disapointed by an original work that was quite a ways bellow the usual KyoAni standards but then the second half of the show happened and it picked up it's stride. It never reached epic levels as shown but it's sales and lack of popularity but overall it wasn't has bad some of the first episodes made it out to be. Also it was technically executed much better than many others shows as is typical of Kyoto Animation.
Just finishing up: I didn't add shows like Steins;Gate, Mahou Shoujo Madoka★Magica or even UN-GO to this list simply because they managed to drop square in the expectations I had for them. The first two were brilliant and UN-GO was pretty good with a slightly weaker first half which still leaves it pretty much within my admittedly already inflated expectations for it.
Overall this wasn't a very good year for the most part with only a couple of shows holding up right until the Autumn season where is looks like the studios went all out. Let's just see if this keeps up over 2012.
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