By Dustin Cabeal

Here’s the thing, there was a lot of anime this year. Almost thirty new shows every season of which there is four seasons in the year. I checked out at least 15 to 20 shows per a season, sometimes more. Yet, I have a very short good and bad list of anime. The main reason being that so much of it was “meh.” I can’t hate the year for anime because the shows on my list got me excited. They made me impatient to see them each week and in the case of Erased the frustrated me with delight each week. Out of all the shows on my list, no others have left me so upset by the fact that I had to wait for more. The very nature of weekly shows is that we’ll have to wait and yet that was the one thing that I didn’t want to do with Erased. It was that fucking good.

This story, like Re:Zero played with time a bit. Our main character has moments in which the scene will reset, and he attempts to find the problem that he missed. In the first instance that we see, he finds a driver of a truck asleep at the wheel about to blow into some kids. After a major event in his life he finds himself back in the 80s as a child, now trying to prevent the death of three students his age which will hopefully change the future in which his mother is killed.

While I’ll admit that the ending isn’t as strong as the beginning, overall, it’s still a wonderful anime that I have recommended to countless people. It’s also the only show on this list that I’ve already re-watched. When something like Erased comes around, it’s special. It’s an anime that winds up on “best of” lists for years to come and rightfully so.