The Summer 2024 anime season had a lot of different stuff being thrown at the wall, and not a lot of it stuck. However, by throwing enough rom-coms out there, it made up for the experimental if just plain bland nature of the rest of the pack.
That said, while there was definitely a lot of shows to sleep on this Summer 2024 anime season, there are a few worth your time too.
Best Summer 2024 Anime
Makeine – Too Many Losing Heroines
Nukumizu Kazuhiko is a high school boy that is content with just blending in with the crowd. One day, he watched a popular classmate, Yanami Anna, get dumped by her childhood friend that she had confessed to.
Feeling like he should comfort her, Nukumizu ends up increasingly entangled with Yanami as well as several other girls who he witnesses get turned down by their unrequited loves.
Why It Is Worth Watching?
While Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feels in Russian stole the season away for reasons ranging from “waifus = cute” and “re-skin of a rom-com formula teen boys love” all the way to “Russian bot-fueled propaganda?,” Makeine, while doing well in its own right on the seasonal charts, is the rom-com that should have been topping the seasonal charts.
Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines features a boy who finds himself in a harem situation with several girls who have all be rejected by their crushes. However, it’s not really a harem situation as each girl, love-lorn and already hurt, makes it clear they just appreciate his friendship and just enjoy bringing chaos to his otherwise normal life.
That said, Makeine is a harem series. It is a romance series. It just moves incredibly slowly with both to the point where you didn’t notice the progression, but you feel it happening in the subtle development of the characters.
It is nice to watch the “harem” actually befriend each other in an emotionally deep way, and it is nice to see a male protagonist be friends with women without the expectation of romance.
Makeine takes a lot of older love triangle and harem romance tropes, collects the female character archetypes that traditionally don’t win the anime romance, and creates what feels like a legitimately new romance story using a lot of old tools.
Pseudo Harem
It is Eiji Kitahara dream when he joins the drama club that he can form a harem in high school like in his favorite manga. It is a dream that has yet to happen.
The next year when Rin Nanakura joins the drama club, she falls hard for Eiji and, unable to confess her feelings openly quite yet, tries to win him over by putting on all the persona that would make up a proper harem story.
However, whether she is acting mature and collected like Cool-chan or devious and flirty like Imp-chan, her real feelings for him continue to grow. Will she ever be able to tell him how she feels as her real persona?
Why It Is Worth Watching?
Pseudo Harem is the harem anime built for for people that can no longer stomach harem anime – and built to be legitimately the cutest watch of the season as well.
Instead of stuffing in a half dozen archetypes to form another boring same-y harem, you get every archetype done by one girl pretending to be the harem of a senpai she has a crush on. Even more clever, they framed it around being in a drama club where acting out a series of archetypes isn’t so insane-sounding.
What is endearing about Pseudo Harem is that her variety personas allow the female lead to brazenly speak her mind. It is a shame that it bounces right off the typical dense male lead, at least right up until real feelings start breaking through the veneer on both sides.
Senpai is an Otokonoko
Despite his mother’s disapproval of his love for cute things and dressing in cute clothes, Makoto Hanaoka secretly dresses like a girl at his high school. While his days are mostly peaceful as he successfully keeps his secret school life from his mother, the lively freshman Saki Aoi throws his world into chaos when she confesses to him, thinking he is a woman.
Even after learning the truth, it seem Saki is still firmly in love with him and wishes to become his first love. While Saki is also met with speculation from Ryuji Taiga, Makoto’s childhood friend, the three form a tight friendship as complicated feelings swirl between them.
Why It Is Worth Watching?
A boy cross-dressing as a girl at school has the chance to be a lot of things. It could be an irreverent comedy. It could be a pleasant slice of life story blissfully ignoring any potential problematic aspects the character may go through. What I didn’t expect was the route it went – drama and romance.
Senpai is an Otokonoko offers a more realistic approach to a boy cross-dressing as a girl at school than I was expecting. You watch him experience problems at home, problems at school, and see him enjoy a safe space built between two supportive friends.
While it started off feeling a little lacking in depth, particularly with a girl who immediately loved the male lead “exactly as he is” romantically without issue, it grew deeper with each passing episode. You explore a lot of different “outside of normal” feelings that come with coming-of-age like the gender-fluid, but not quite trans struggle of the main character, the confusing homosexual feelings of his male best friend, and the asexual leanings of a girl who fell in love because that’s what is “normal.”
While certainly not a flawless depiction of any of those areas, it is always good to see an anime story make the attempt in earnest.
The Elusive Samurai
In the year 1333, the Kamakura shogunate government is toppled after the betrayal of Ashikaga Takauji, a once-trusted retainer who was responsible for slaughtering the entire Hojo clan.
However, in the chaos at Kamakura, the rightful heir to the shogunate, Hojo Tokiyuki does what he does best – flees.
After escaping the massacre with the help of Shinto priest Suwa Yorishige, Tokiyuki takes refuge in another province. While on the run to stay alive, Yorishige convinces Tokiyuki to turn his talent at running and hiding into a battle strategy to raise an army and reclaim his birthright.
Why It Is Worth Watching?
Finally, we have one good non-romance action anime that I could pluck out of a lot of incredibly average action fantasy anime. Well, Wistoria is pretty good too, but its all flashy, well-animated fight scenes and pretty bland plot.
The Elusive Samurai tells a very fictionalized version of the very real tale of Hojo Tokiyuki who swore revenge against Ashikaga Takauji for betraying his family.
While historical dramas only appeal to a small portion of anime watchers, The Elusive Samurai makes it a shounen action adventure by bending history to its whims and adds a further layer of interest by being an absolutely gorgeous feast for the eyes.
High color, high energy, and well animated, The Elusive Samurai is an adventure in every sense with no qualms about being graphically, artfully vicious to its characters.
What did you enjoy from the Summer 2024 season? Let fans know in the comments section below.
