Last season's top 3

[Ryllharu]

Took me a while to finally finish everything.

Fall 2022

Bocchi the Rock! - Hands down my favorite of the season, but also my anime of the year. It's finally getting a lot of the attention it deserved with relentless memes as everyone else started to catch up, but I also picked it up as a mid-season trial myself. Bocchi the Rock is music anime done right. It's also a slice of life/coming of age type of story, while focusing on a very realistic representation of severe social anxiety in its lead. It's incredibly funny, extraordinarily acted and animated, and a perfect example of an adaptation exceeding the source material. This is what anime can be when the medium is at its best. It's touching, it's funny, and in my complete astonishment, managed to get better with every single episode, each topping the last.

Akuyaku Reijou nanode Last Boss wo Kattemimashita - A beautifully and self-contained three-arc Villainess series. The lead has charisma bursting out of every action and line, the story understands moderation and most-importantly, knows when to end (very rare in what series get adapted these days). The animation is a little plain, but it does what it needs to. The action is surprisingly above-average as villainess series go, and I just really enjoyed this from start to finish.

(tie)
Yes, tie. I couldn't pick.
Koukyuu no Karasu
A series that I honestly didn't know I needed. Chinese Court-era supernatural mystery was like a breath of fresh air in a sea of isekai and overblown edgelord series. The leads are both intelligent and terrifying in their own ways, the mysteries are grounded, painful, and tragic. The female lead is simultaneously prickly and charming, hiding why she keeps everyone at arms-length even though she deeply desires human connections. The male lead is cunning, strategic, but also has doubts he is reluctant to share with only his most trusted companions. In the overall mystery, you never really know what's going on or who can be trusted. It also handles true supernatural power nicely and balanced.
The flaws on this one is that the anime apparently only gets through 2 of 7 volumes of the novel, so it leaves a fair amount hanging. Also has the worst OP in the last decade. The character designs are wonderful and used well, even if the animation isn't that crisp.
On the positive side, this had my favorite ED of the season (full version of the song), possibly the year.

Mobile Suit Gundam - The Witch from Mercury - Contrary to the usual opinions, this is a good Gundam series. We don't get to know everything going on and we're very obviously not intended to. The first cour of this is a very intimate and inexorable run-up into a massive corporate hot-war. Our perspective is limited, the focus on key persons in the political strata the series set up, but they don't get to know everything going on. They get hit with events cold, but they are remarkably not passive players like so many other recent mecha. Yes, some feel like chess-pieces being moved from the true actors in the shadows, but they have their own individual goals and we get the slow-motion tragedy as they are pulled into the inevitable despite their best efforts to evade the political bullshit getting thrown their way.

It's a more emotional and sympathetic viewpoint on a ramp-up to war because it is meant to be one. No, it isn't PMC war-war-war right from the start. It was never meant to be. Gundam is an anti-war franchise, always has been.

The animation is top-tier. The mecha designs are great, they move and feel massive like mecha should when shown at the correct perspective, the character animation has subtle wonderful details, and the voice acting is phenomenal.