Selections from my Anime Playlist

I love anime music.

I know it’s not good, strictly speaking. Most anime songs have very similar structure. They always have this 2 minute and 30 second bit in the middle that constitutes a complete song on its own and makes the rest of the song feel like unnecessary padding. The beats and rhythms and melodies and all that other musical stuff that I don’t understand that well usually sound pretty similar to the rest of the anime songs that came out that year. The lyrics are about yearning, probably unrequited teenage love, expressed with weird, vague metaphors that sometimes don’t make a lick of sense and include English words for no reason. The vocalists are often pretty bad. Sometimes they’re so bad you can hear how bad they are in the song itself, like the lead singer of can/goo in “Oshiete Ageru”, the opening of Doki Doki School Hours. Other times they can be made good enough with Autotune that you can’t hear it unless you download a concert recording someone made from a live show and hear how awful they are, as I experienced with the lead singer of L’Arc en Ciel and “Ready Steady Go”, the first opening of Full Metal Alchemist 2003. I acknowledge all of these things.

Yet still, I love anime music.

I’ve been listening to anime music since 1999, so I’ve got a lot of it, from a lot of different shows across a lot of years. My affection for the song often has little or no relation to my affection for the show itself. There are songs I love from shows I hated. There are songs I hate from shows I loved. My two most hated anime songs are “Haru no Mukou” from Hanasaku Iroha and “Sexy Sexy” from Gakkou no Kaidan, but at the time I loved Hanasaku Iroha, and I hated “Sexy Sexy” long before I ever saw Gakkou no Kaidan (in trolldub form as Ghost Stories, courtesy of ADV). This list will be a look at some of the most notable songs I still carry along on my playlist into every new phone, tablet, and MP3 player (yes, I still use those) that I acquire, and the shows they came from, and what I remember about that show, or don’t, as the case may be.

“It’s My Style”, Rikujou Bouei-tai Mao-chan

A bouncy, energetic song sung by Yui Horie, who is quite possibly my favorite anime voice actor / singer of all time, and was even before I knew that she voiced Tsubasa Hanekawa. This was the first ending song from Rikujou Bouei-tai Mao-chan. I never actually watched this show, though the trailer did show up on a lot of DVDs I used to own. It was about little girls who fought aliens with magical tanks and submarines and planes. The trailer reminded me a lot of The Centurions, a Saturday morning cartoon I used to watch about these three beefy military guys, each of whom represented one of land, sea, and air, and each of whom had a special combat suit for doing battle in his chosen niche, except with cute elementary school girls designed by Ken Akamatsu instead of beefy military guys.

I’m pretty sure no one remembers this show. That will become sort of a theme as we go down this list. Yet, for me, the song transcended. It’s just so peppy and happy, and I love the lyrics that innocently assert the singer’s energetic dedication to being herself, with lines like Akiramenai! Furimukanai! Sore ga watashi no sutairu. (“I don’t give up! I don’t look back! That’s my style.”) Even though that’s not my style at all, it’s so fun to belt out those lyrics after a hard day when I feel like the world has denied my own style.

“Kuchuu Meiro” and “Anemone”, Kamichama Karin

I love Marble. Even though they’re a fake anime band that only ever released anime OPs and EDs, putting their existential status only slightly above Houkago Teatime, I don’t care. I’d still put them up there with any real band that actually exists. Their sound is very pop-folk inspired, with lots of acoustic guitar and sections where the vocals are allowed to stand largely alone. Their songs have a peculiarly spiritual enchanting nature. Probably the only way I can describe them would be Regina Spektor crossed with church choir crossed with anime song.

Marble will definitely appear again on this list, but for now let’s talk about Kamichama Karin. I never watched this show, but I did read a few volumes of the manga, which was Koge-Donbo’s followup to Pita-Ten about a girl named Karin who gains the powers of the goddess Athena and fights alongside and against other teenagers who have the powers of various other Greek gods. It’s very magical girl-flavored, though it also has some of the feel of superpowered hero team stuff from the 90’s, like Gatekeepers. Koge-Donbo was always a strong artist, and she had her flaws as a writer, but she knew how to make you feel for characters, usually by killing off their parents. I’m surprised she didn’t remain popular through the moe boom in the early 2010’s. Her adorable art style, her talent for affecting drama, and her tendency to introduce dark elements into cute cotton candy worlds all would have fit right in.

With this series I made a mistake I used to sometimes make with manga, which was picking up the second volume first because that was the only one at the bookstore. Whenever I read the second volume of something first, I could follow the story since it was still pretty early on, but I didn’t care that much about the characters or anything that was going on. I used to attribute that to a failing on the manga’s part, but really, it was because manga and anime tend to do a lot of emotional heavy lifting in the early parts of the story, and with that backstory established, while they might allude to it in the future, they usually never again put as much effort into making you really feel it. I made the same mistake with Pita-Ten, where it just happened to be less fatal because the backstory was more drawn out.

“Anemone” was the first ending theme, and “Kuuchuu Meiro” was the second. I love both of them and consistently put them on the first playlist I load onto any new device. “Anemone” was sung by Mai Nakahara, who voiced Karin in the anime, but there was also a version by Marble. Both are amazing; the Marble version has the trademark Marble sound and feel to it, while the Mai Nakahara version is more innocent and sweet. “Kuuchuu Meiro” was done by Marble in the show. As much as I like it, it now comes off as a bit too slow and belabored. I listened to a sped-up nightcore version on Youtube that made the song almost perfect.

“Rainbow”, “Euphoria”, “Natsumachi”, and “Kin no Nami, Sen no Nami” from the Aria saga

Aria is still a very good series despite having some flaws, and its music is the one aspect I find beyond reproach.

The four songs are very similar, but “Rainbow” is cuter and bubblier while “Kin no Nami, Sen no Nami” is more transcendent, with its church bells and slightly hushed vocals. But “Natsumachi” is my favorite; I’ve more than once thought that “Natsumachi” might be my favorite anime song ever. Both “Rainbow” and “Natsumachi” were done by Round Table feat. Nino, another fake anime-world band that I love despite their tenuous claim to even being a real band, probably best known for their work on Chobits. “Euphoria” is sung by Yui Makino, who does all the Aria openings and also voiced Misaki in Welcome to the NHK! and Sakura in Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. “Kin no Nami, Sen no Nami” is sung by Akino Arai, who, contrary to most anime musicians, has had a pretty long career; she’s apparently been working since 1986 and happens to have sung both endings to Outlaw Star, which was one of the first anime I ever saw.

So what about the other Aria songs? All of them are good, but these four are the ones I’ll always put on a new playlist. “Undine” is a bit too slow and not as compelling for me as “Euphoria”, and “Spirale” is very similar to “Undine”. “Smile Again” is a cute song, but it doesn’t feel uniquely Ariadic to me; it would fit just as well as the ending to something like Masshiro-iro Symphony.

“Suisai Candy”, Masshiro-iro Symphony

Speaking of Masshiro-iro Symphony, its actual ending song, “Suisai Candy”, is another great song by Marble. Soon you will come to understand Marble as I do, and their total domination of this list will become clear. Or not. Maybe they’re just not for you. That’s fine too.

Either way, “Suisai Candy” is a great song: fun, sweet, and all things a Marble song should be, though it’s a little too electronic in sound to reach top-tier Marble for me. Masshiro-iro Symphony is a show I watched about six episodes of. It was adapted from a visual novel if I’m not mistaken. It wasn’t terrible, but like a lot of anime, it failed to capitalize on its concept, which was that a failing coed school was absorbed by an elite girls academy, which meant there would now be boys there, and some of the girls are very opposed to this, including the ostensible main heroine. (I seem to remember that when I stopped watching it was starting to pull a weird diversion into one of the side girls’s route.) But she gives in way too quickly, and it stops being a real problem or source of any conflict. Also, I seem to remember Ange, the maid, was a poor orphan or something like that who was forced to work as a maid for the other students to pay her way into the school, and no one sees anything wrong with this, which isn’t something I was on board with even at the time.

“Masshiro World”, Mikakunin de Shinkoukei

And speaking of things that start with masshiro, this is another song that I love for how fun and bouncy it is. I only watched the first episode of Mikakunin de Shinkoukei and I was not won over, however. The show is a shounen love comedy about a guy who finds out his grandfather made a marriage arrangement with a girl he’s never met when she moves in with him one day to figure out what’s the deal with this guy she’s engaged to but has never met. (Or maybe it was the other way around, the guy moving in with the girl; I can’t recall as I watched the episode over three years ago.)

“Motto Motto Radical Fight”, Dennou Sentai Voogie’s Angel

This is a blast from the past: the opening to a little-known OVA that came out in 1997. Like almost every 90’s anime I can think of, Dennou Sentai Voogie’s Angel is about a team of scantily clad cyborg women fighting an alien menace in the future. I never watched this show, but I discovered its opening theme thanks to a site called AnimeArt that used to exist in the early 2000s, and hosted grainy videos of the opening and ending for almost every anime out at the time, which you could watch in RealPlayer after they buffered for an hour and a half. The tune stuck with me enough that many, many years later, I found myself humming it one day and decided to go hunt down the full song. I cannot recall what little-seen corner of the internet I finally found it in, but in the end I found it.

It’s still a good song, even though it’s quite obviously from a 90’s anime and the title is the sort of half-English pseudorandom quasi-nonsense that was even more common in anime music in the 90’s. It’s sung by the main voice cast of the show, which includes some of the most beloved voice actresses of all time, such as Kikuko Inoue (of Oh My Goddess and Ranma 1/2), Sakura Tange (of Card Captor Sakura), Aya Hisakawa (also of Oh My Goddess and Card Captor Sakura as well as Azumanga Daioh), and Kotono Mitsuishi (of Sailor Moon and Evangelion).

“Apron Dake wa Toranaide!” and “Love Song Kamo Shirenai”, Koharubiyori

Koharubiyori is a terrible show and utter trash overflowing with smut, but at the time I watched it (sometime in 2010 I want to say), I had fun with it. It’s beautiful and very smoothly animated trash, at least. It was pretty much the seven thousandth robot maid anime to come out in 2007 and it was quite obvious that, after the first half of Episode 1, in which the main character goes shopping for his new robot maid friend Yui, they just took Mahoromatic, chucked out all the story, and weaved together the nudie shots with over the top wacky comedy.

When I think back on this now, it’s quite clear that Yui is going to become the leader of a robot rebellion in the near future. Kuon’s story did get to me a little, though. In a better show, they could have gone somewhere with that. But at the time it was still a fun ecchi comedy that I laughed at quite a few times despite how shameless, sleazy, smutty, and terrible it is.

“Apron Dake wa Toranaide!” is another fun, bouncy song that gets in some little elegant touches, like the ringing bells it uses to punctuate the ends of some lines. The lyrics are about the main character trying to strip Yui and dress her up in clothes she doesn’t like and she’s yelling back “Don’t take away my apron!”, so it’s not exactly nice, but it’s in Japanese so I can ignore it. “Love Song Kamo Shirenai” is a sweet pop love song (the title means “It might be a Love Song”, and yes, title, it is a love song) that has nothing to do with any feelings which are felt in the actual show. Both songs have vocals by Eri Kitamura, who voices Yui, alongside Satomi Akesaka, who voices some character that I cannot for the life of me remember being in the show even after looking her up for “Love Song Kamo Shirenai”.

“Afurete Yuku no wa Kono Kimochi”, Amaenaideyo!

Known in the US as Oh My Buddha, Amaenaideyo! is a formulaic harem anime in which all the girls are low-level clergy for various religions. I only remember a miko and a Buddhist nun, but there was probably a Catholic nun in there somewhere, given anime’s affection for them. I watched the first three or so episodes on DVD back when Netflix sent people DVDs. (Actually they still do that if you really want them to.) It was not good. “Afurete Yuku no wa Kono Kimochi”, on the other hand, is an adorable, relaxing, peaceful song that I’ve been listening to since before I even knew it was from a show called Amaenaideyo!, and have continued listening to long after I’ve forgotten the names of every single character in the show.

“Zutto Be With You” and “Yotte S.O.S.”, Haiyore! Nyaruko-san

Haiyore! Nyaruko-san is a pretty weird show, and if you told me it didn’t really exist and was just a parody of moe anime at the peak of the moe boom when it came out in 2012, I would probably believe you. Except that I’ve seen it; I watched about eight episodes of the first season on Crunchyroll in probably 2013 or so.

Even though I laughed at a lot of the references to the Cthulhu Mythos, the show makes the weird choice of reinterpreting all the horrifying creatures as members of pretty standard alien species that exist in some galactic alliance. (And then of course reinterprets them as cute anime girls and one cute anime boy who end up living with a hapless Earthling teenager.) That was a big mistake in my opinion. I actually think the concept of Lovecraftian monsters as moe girls had a lot of potential to be a weird, risky, hilarious show, full of black humor, bizarre situations, and clever references to Lovecraft’s stories. There’s a ton of dark humor to be had with the Lovecraftian idea that human existence is insignificant and inconsequential to the creatures, for instance. What if another girl has a crush on Mahiro, and instead of trying to defeat her in a pie-baking contest or some other harem anime nonsense, Nyaruko just transforms into some sort of inconceivable horror and drives the other girl mad, and a running joke has this other girl wandering through the background of scenes in a daze with drool all over her face? Or if they were willing to get risque, what about inverting the usual tentacle scenario and having Nyaruko or Hastur go after Mahiro with slimy space suckers? Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid was a harem show that derived black comedy from its characters being powerful creatures with a certain disregard for human life, and it worked, so the right writers could have done the same with Nyaruko-san.

Instead it’s mostly weaksauce otaku-oriented parody of the kind that was just barely groundbreaking in 2004 when Genshiken was coming out, layered over weaksauce sci-fi of the kind that was just barely groundbreaking in 1969 when the original Star Trek came out, layered over a few references to the Cthulhu mythos. At least a few good songs came out of it. Both “Zutto Be With You” and “Yotte S.O.S.” are sweet, bubbly pop songs sung by the main cast of the show, which included Kana Asumi as Nyaruko, Miyu Matsuki as Cthuko, and Rie Kugimiya as Hasuta.

“Ice Cream”, Narue no Sekai

_Narue no Sekai is another one for which I only read the manga. Side note, the rise in manga publishing in the US in the early 2000’s was huge for me as a fan. Anime used to be insanely expensive. When I first got into it in the late 90’s, the only way to watch Evangelion was to buy the VHS tapes. Each one had two episodes and cost about $30, and you had to choose between subtitled or dubbed. That means to get the entire series would run you about $390. You also had to hunt up a Suncoast location that had them in stock at all. You could usually find the second and third entries from any given series, but the first one was always sold out and it was a total crapshoot whether they even carried the later ones. Also I was a kid and had no money, so I had to do enough chores around the house to get $30, then convince my parents to drive me to Suncoast. That meant I didn’t get a lot of anime. The only other way to watch anime at the time was on TV, so it was always dubbed, always edited for content by whatever arbitrary standards the network had, often localized to some extent, and even though the selection back then was actually broader in some ways than it later became (I can’t see modern Cartoon Network broadcasting anything like Tenchi Muyo, for instance), it was still a far cry from the full broadness of anime.

Manga in the 90’s was usually published by US comic publishers—Dark Horse did a lot of them—and they were always flipped to read left to right, and the selection of titles was very limited. When manga publishing got big under Tokyopop in the early 2000’s, it was a huge deal. I could take my $30 to Barnes and Noble and buy three volumes of manga for the price of one DVD. (By this time they had DVDs, which were still $30 each, but at least they had four or five episodes and both the sub and dub.) That meant I could cast a much wider net, and try a lot more manga than I would have been able to do with anime. As a consequence, I read some weird, bad stuff. Barnes and Noble was also much better at stocking manga and keeping them in stock than Suncoast was with DVDs and VHS tapes. You’d still sometimes come in and find the first volume was sold out, but it was less common, and you could usually come back in a few weeks and find it, and Barnes and Noble always had the entire series and would get new volumes as soon as they released.

Anyway, I went on that side trip because I don’t have a lot to say about Narue no Sekai. It was an achingly generic magical girlfriend story about a generic high school boy whose name starts with k, like they all do for some reason, and his bland girlfriend whose father is an alien but that still doesn’t make her interesting. It was inoffensive, but also completely unmemorable. I’m sure it would have evaporated from my mind if not for this song, which I’ve loved since well before I read the manga. The song is also pretty generic for the genre and time period, but at least it’s cute. The opening, “Nagareboshi” by CooRie, was also pretty good.

“Houseki”, Umi Monogatari

You might be asking why I only listed this song and not “Renai Circulation” or “Staple Stable” or any of those. Well, that’s because Umi Monogatari is not part of the Monogatari series, its title just happens to share the same pattern. All those songs from that other series that ends in “Monogatari” will have their time.

“Houseki” is the ending to the OVA sequel to the original Umi Monogatari, and it’s another victory for Marble on this list. As for the show itself, I’ve never seen it, but it sounds like a mermaid story, though the characters don’t actually have mermaid tails. It’s also a bit like Nagi no Asu Kara. Nozomi released it in the US recently and I believe it’s on Crunchyroll.

“Nijiiro Sentimental” and “Kokoro Niji wo Kakete”, Gift: Eternal Rainbow

Gift: Eternal Rainbow is another show adapted from a visual novel. Coming out in 2006, it fell into that time period where nobody in the West was interested in visual novel adaptations because they usually didn’t have heavy enough harem elements to fit in with what was popular at the time. It was definitely an age of wacky harem comedies. Since it never came out stateside, I never watched it, but I’ve consistently enjoyed both its opening, “Nijiiro Sentimental”, and its ending, “Kokoro Niji wo Kakete”, even though they both sound almost like the blueprint for songs in anime based on romance visual novels that came out between 2005 and 2015. The show itself also sounds like a blueprint for anime based on romance visual novels, so I don’t know if I would ever watch it even if it did come out.

“Mebae Drive”, “Sakura Sakura Saku”, “Ryuusei Record”, and “Atarashii Sekai”, Hidamari Sketch series

Marble has already appeared on this list several times, but this is the mother lode of Marble, where all the stuff I consider S-rank and top tier comes in. If you forced me to order them, I would probably say “Ryuusei Record” is the best, then “Atarashii Sekai”, “Sakura Sakura Saku”, and then “Mebae Drive” as the bottom of S-rank, but these represent not only my favorite of the vast body of Hidamari Sketch-related music, but also some of my favorite anime songs of all time, so that ranking is really just unnecessary nitpicking.

Hidamari Sketch for some reason has a ton of music linked to it. Not only were there openings and endings for all four seasons of the anime (Hidamari Sketch, Hidamari Sketch x 365, Hidamari Sketch x Hoshimittsu, and Hidamari Sketch x Honeycomb), there were also songs for OVA specials, multiple image songs for each character, and Marble did at least two compilation CDs that I could find, Hidamarble and Hidamarble x Hoshimittsu, where they covered the image songs and did remixes of some of the openings and endings. While the openings and character songs sung by the anime voice actresses are decent, the Marble stuff is where all the real gems are to be found in my opinion. The ending songs they did are all brilliant. The B-sides from the singles, like “Rin” from the Mebae Drive single, “Humming Bird” from the Ryuusei Record one, and “Dorari” from the Sakura Sakura Saku single, are all great. The extra character songs they did on the Hidamarble albums are also amazing. I especially like “Happy Eating Fight” and “Yurufuwa” from Hidamarble x Hoshimittsu. More than once, I’ve started a new playlist by seeding it with just Hidamari Sketch and Monogatari series-related music, because I get a long list of almost nothing but great songs without having to sift much.

As for Hidamari Sketch itself, I’ve never seen the anime. I have read a decent amount of the manga, and it’s okay. I’d call it mid-tier cute girls doing cute things; I’ve never found it to have the raw charm and adorability of K-On! or Kiniro Mosaic, and it doesn’t take advantage of its characters being art students the way GA does, nor is it as funny as Yuru Yuri or as shamelessly pandering as Lucky Star. It’s entirely possible that I would enjoy it more if I read it again. It’s also entirely possible that the anime was better; while the K-On! manga was decent, I found the anime version by far more memorable and more fun. The great KyoAni animation and being able to hear the songs made a huge difference. The Hidamari Sketch anime was by Shaft, who always bring something unique to their shows, at least visually. They must have had a good experience making this anime since they would later bring on Hidamari Sketch author Ume Aoki to do character designs for Puella Magi Madoka Magica, making her one of the four Magica Quartet members.

Speaking of Kiniro Mosaic…

“Jumping”, Kiniro Mosaic

Cute girls doing cute things anime have a ton of great music. Lucky Star’s “Motteke! Sailor fuku!” is distinct and instantly recognizable. No show but K-On! would open with the pop-rock-Aki Toyosaki muppet voice stylings of “Cagayake Girls!”, “Go Go Maniac!” or “Utau yo! Miracle”. But there’s only one song that sums up the entire experience of watching a cute girls doing cute things anime into a single track, and that song is “Jumping”, the opening theme of Kiniro Mosaic.

Everything about it is so of the genre. The vocals, with the five main voice actresses singing all together, in pairs, and individually, just like the structure of a cute girls doing cute things anime where we focus on the entire group, on individual girls, and on pairs of girls interacting. The energetic beat of it, like the youthful, fun aura we love to see from a cute girls doing cute things anime. The lyrics, which are all about having fun and enjoying life. Yet unlike some energetic, fun anime songs, it’s not relentless or obnoxious. It doesn’t assault you with nonstop energy; it has its restful moments. It doesn’t meld all the vocals into an amorphous ball of noise; it lets you hear the different qualities of everyone’s voices. A good cute girls doing cute things show also needs to be like this: it needs to be energetic, fun, enjoyable, but also allow moments of rest, and it needs to show off the individual characters of each girl and the way the group and the members get along.

Although I really like the Kiniro Mosaic manga, I almost feel like the song encapsulates what a perfect cute girls doing cute things anime should be more than the manga itself does. The characters are all adorable and lovable, and they all have their quirks, but I’ve never felt like they’re quite as well defined as, say, the characters in K-On!, and there are some pairings among the main characters that haven’t been explored very well. But they’re charming and cute, with a nice rapport among them. Some of the humor even has the tiniest bit of edge to it, like the jokes about the Japanese obsession with blond hair, or Karen’s rich beautiful mother telling her that her best plan for the future is to marry rich.

“Shiawase no Niji”, Gakuen Alice

I was really into shoujo for a while, but surprisingly few of those series lasted in my mind, even ones that I enjoyed a lot at the time. One of the ones that did was Gakuen Alice. I read a bit of the manga first, then later watched the anime, which apparently goes in a much different direction towards the middle and end than the manga did. It starts out as a fun schoolyard story about a girl named Mikan who ends up at a school for children with powers and finds out she also has a power, the power to nullify everyone else’s powers. The early parts of the story have her deal with bullying and the unfair caste system imposed on the students of the academy, as well as getting to know angsty boy Natsume Hyuuga, who has the power to shoot fire. Later on, the anime becomes more of an action-adventure series and starts to go into the dark undercurrent behind the academy (though it was portrayed as a pretty savage place from the beginning).

“Shiawase no Niji” is the peaceful ending song of the anime. The animation shows Mikan and her best friend Hotaru walking through a rainy day in adorable watercolor art style. It’s more low-key than a lot of this list, and it’s not one of those songs I’ll go hunt down in my list to put on, but it’s great for relaxing. The opening, “Pika-Pika no Taiyou”, is also pretty good, but it’s one of those songs that I can listen to about once a year, think “That was better than I remembered”, and then forget about until next year, so it’s not something I usually reach straight for when I’m putting together a playlist.

“Platinum” and “Fruits Candy”, Card Captor Sakura

Of the songs on this list, few have been with me as long as “Platinum” and “Fruits Candy”. “It’s My Style”, “Motto Motto Radical Fight”, and “Ice Cream” are the closest. When I was waiting an hour for grainy footage of “Motto Motto Radical Fight” to buffer in RealPlayer from AnimeArt, it was probably just after doing the same for “Platinum” or “Fruits Candy”.

By the same token, few anime have been with me as long as Card Captor Sakura. I watched it in the late 90’s when 4Kids hacked it apart and made it into “Card Captors” on the Kids WB network. Later, I watched a few episodes of the unhacked version on DVD when it was released by Geneon. Even later, I rented the Geneon DVDs from Netflix up through about Episode 50, and even later, I read the manga when Dark Horse released it. (There was also a Tokyopop release of the manga, but I only ever caught a few random volumes of that when they showed up in the library.) Most of the other anime that I got into around the same time—Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon, Gundam Wing, Tenchi Muyo—I’ve lost interest in for the most part. Only Evangelion has been with me as long, and although I have more fond memories associated with Evangelion, and although Evangelion has held up extremely well, I can’t say I’m quite as attached to it as I am to Card Captor Sakura. For my money, it’s just about the most perfect magical girl show ever made. Sailor Moon is more classic, and newer shows like Madoka have deeper storytelling, but Card Captor Sakura pulled off a perfect balance: it’s a great magical girl show with fun adventures, cute costumes, and exciting battles, but its sly little twists on the formula help it feel fresh, and its characters are so likeable and gel together so well that even episodes with unpromising premises become enjoyable to watch.

There’s now also a sequel called Card Captor Sakura: Clear Card about the characters in junior high. I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet but I’m hoping it’s about old gritty Sakura in a post-apocalyptic Tokyo after the future apocalypse prophesied in X, returning to capture cards once again after the deaths of Tomoyo, Touya, and Fujitaka force her out of retirement. Just kidding, that would be the worst thing ever. And also Sakura discovers halfway through the series that she died in the apocalypse with her friends but Kero transferred her soul into a Persocom and she’s secretly been a machine this whole time. Okay, that would be the worst thing ever.

These two are my favorite songs among the many, many songs that came out of the series, most of them incredible. (Card Captor Sakura has possibly even more songs than Hidamari Sketch.) “Platinum”, the third opening, has a soaring, spiritual sound with very prominent vocals by Maaya Sakamoto, who has a great voice for stuff like this. “Fruits Candy” was the third ending and is lot more bouncy and fun. I thought for years it was sung by Sakura Tange, the actress who voices Sakura and coincidentally shares her first name, but it’s actually sung by a much more obscure actress named Megumi Kojima.

“Maegami”, “Tadaima”, and “Ready”, Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai

I wrote a retrospective on Ore Imo a while back, but it was quite a while after I watched the show and it was based on memories, so a redo after revisiting the show is probably in order.

Ore Imo had a new ending in every episode, so it’s quite a trick that most of them are as good as they are. Almost all of them were at least listenable, but these three were my favorite. “Maegami” is bouncy and has kind of a big band vibe to it; I enjoy it a lot more than Manami, the character whose perspective it’s written from. “Tadaima” is a slower, lower-key song that ended Episode 12 of the first season, the fake alternate reality “good end” where Kirino decides not to go to America. (It’s called the “good end” because the actual ending was so incredibly stupid that this anticlimax of an ending is good by comparison.) “Ready” was the ending of the first “true end” episode, where Kirino leaves to go to America.

“Help! Heaven Side” and “Hallelujah Study”, MM

For a while, anime was obsessed with sexual fetishes. Tons of raucous ecchi comedies about characters defined by their fetishes came and went. MM was one of these, but the characters were actually sort of defined beyond their fetishes, and actually sort of likeable, so it’s the only one of these shows I’ve actually come back to. It also had pretty great animation and music.

The opening, “Help!”, came in two mixes, “Hell Side” and “Heaven Side”. Both are fun, a little intense, and capture the rowdy, raunchy feeling of the show. I slightly prefer “Heaven Side”, but both are good. “Hallelujah Study” is an insert song sung by Ayana Taketatsu, who voices Mio and is one of my favorite anime voice actresses and singers.

“Beautiful” and “Travel in Mind”, .hack//Legend of the Twilight

.hack//Legend of the Twilight was the first sibling incest show I ever watched, several years before Ore Imo came along. I’ve never been a fan of shows about characters playing online games, and I found .hack//Sign painfully boring, but Legend of the Twilight, while not exactly good, was at least more fun—it was cute, it was chibi, it was comedy-focused, and it was nice to look at.

“Beautiful” is an insert song by the previously mentioned Round Table feat. Nino, while “Travel in Mind” is a character song. The opening, “New World”, was also decent.

“Sunny Side Hill”, Uninhabited Planet Survive

Another fun one by Round Table feat. Nino, from a show I’ve never seen and hadn’t heard of until I actually wondered what show this song was from.

“Staple Stable”, “Kaerimichi”, “Ambivalent World”, “Renai Circulation”, “Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari”, “Futakotome”, “Marshmallow Justice”, “Platinum Disco”, “Naisho no Hanashi”, “Chocolate Insomnia”, and “Mousou Express”, Monogatari series

Like Card Captor Sakura and Hidamari Sketch, the Monogatari series has produced tons of music, most of it is excellent, and some I count among my favorite anime songs ever. The first song from any Monogatari show that I didn’t instantly love was “Kieru Daydream” from Nekomonogatari Black, and it was a huge disappointment when it came.

Each story arc in the series has its own opening, sung by the main heroine of the arc’s voice actress with backing by fake anime band meg/rock. Each heroine’s opening is great as a standalone song; I was listening to “Staple Stable” and “Renai Circulation”, as well as “Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari”, years before I watched the show. But each one captures its heroine so perfectly that they become better after you watch the show, after you understand what in the heroine’s personality or character arc the lyrics are referring to. And each opening reflects the changes the heroine goes through during the story arc it opens—Tsubasa is mentally fractured and desperate when “Sugar Sweet Nightmare” opens her arc, but when she breaks through, acknowledges her feelings, and decides how to move forward, her opening, “Chocolate Insomnia”, reflects it. When Nadeko is an innocent girl nursing an unrequited crush, her arc opens with the innocently yearning “Renai Circulation”; but when she succumbs to negative feelings, her arc opens with the darker “Mousou Express”. The songs all stand out from each other and have distinct, recognizable melodies; they’ve been covered and remixed and nightcored and converted to eight-bit and sixteen-bit and jazz and classical strings over and over on Youtube. The heroines’ voices are also easily distinguishable and matched well to the rest of the instrumentation.

As for the show itself, not many anime have influenced me as deeply as the Monogatari series—Card Captor Sakura and Aria are some of the few others. The series not only changed my view on what anime could be, it also influenced the way I look at other media, and even my views on storytelling itself. It’s a weird, unique corner of the anime world, held back from the greater recognition it deserves by some unfortunate pedophilia jokes that mean I’ll never recommend it to someone who isn’t already deep into the strange world of “anime that you don’t admit you watch to anyone except other arch-otaku, and probably not even them except in the abyssal depths of anonymous online forums”.

Even if not for that, even if I could recommend this series more widely, I’d still recommend it with caution. The Monogatari series is weird, and gets weirder as it progresses. Not everyone can see the value in a series that’s mostly pun-laden dialogue with cute girls whose personal issues are being exacerbated by supernatural creatures. But in my opinion, it deserves to be considered a masterpiece, and its music doesn’t let it down. I consistently choose its songs to start my playlists, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.