After several amazing seasons in a row, I have been fully anticipating a season like this one. A breather season, if you will, where many of the best shows of the season are actually continuing from the previous season like The Apothecary Diaries or Frieren or are second seasons of great series like The Dangers in My Heart.
However, that doesn’t mean this season has been bad. If anything, many of the new premieres have been good, but not amazing. Unfortunately, a “good, but not amazing” mass of media makes it hard to pick out what I’d recommend above all others.
If you are looking for what is worth watching in the Winter 2024 anime to enjoy this spring, these are my picks.
Best Winter 2024 Anime
Solo Leveling
When gates mysteriously started appearing throughout the world, they connected the real world to a fantasy land full of dangerous beasts. At the same moment, some humans developed superhuman abilities and are the only ones capable of entering these gates. This gave rise to the age of Hunters, those who can enter gates and combat the beasts within in return for wealth.
Jin-Woo is one such Hunter. However, a Hunter’s skill rank is fixed from their awakening, meaning as an E-rank, he is known as the “World’s Weakest” among Hunters. After what should have been a manageable dungeon goes horribly wrong, Jin-Woo stays behind as a voluntary sacrifice, but at the moment of his death, he is given a chance to enroll in The System, a mysterious occurrence that gives him a Quest Log and the ability to level up.
Why It Is Worth Watching?
Solo Leveling was the pre-hyped anime of the season for Winter 2024, coming in with an already strong fanbase of those who enjoyed the Korean manhwa it is based on.
While Solo Leveling got the tender care and animation budget it deserved, that still doesn’t change the fact that it does ultimately suffer from “Korean manhwa problems,” which means that, like Tower of God and God of High School, it starts off very good and goes kind of goes off the rails in terms of plot later. Thankfully, with a 12-episode first season, fans of the anime won’t get as much of that right now.
That bit of criticism from a source material reader aside, what Solo Leveling charms people with is its surprisingly rare melding of fantasy dungeon crawling elements with a modern world. It seems like that would be more common in anime, but it really isn’t. The modern-meets-fantasy element creates a sort of addicting adventure like The Irregular at Magic High School or A Certain Magical Index where you get to see people enjoying a normal modern life, but with fantastic powers creating problems in the world.
Delicious in Dungeon
After the Golden Kingdom was sunk a thousand years ago by a magician, the king emerged from the depths and said that anyone who can defeat the mage will get his treasure. The king crumbled to dust and adventurers raced into an expansive underground labyrinth to prob its dangerous depths.
Laios is the leader of one such adventuring party. However, when their battle with a red dragon goes awry, his sister Falin is eaten when sacrificing herself to transport them out.
With no money to buy supplies in order to go rescue his sister, Laios and his two remaining companions, Chilchuck the thief and Marcille the healer, decide to eat the monsters they defeat in order to save money on food and get to Falin before she is digested.
With eating monsters considered a bit taboo not to mention gross, they struggle to prepare them correctly since there is little knowledge on how to do so. However, they stumble across a dwarf named Senshi who has a passion for cooking monster ingredients and just so happens to have always wanted to try eating a red dragon.
Why It Is Worth Watching?
Food anime is always pretty popular for being delicious-looking, but it is difficult to elevate a food anime in a unique way. Delicious in Dungeon elevates its food focus by being a fantasy anime with more world-building than most other non-food-focused fantasy anime has.
Delicious in Dungeon has a simple premise in a deceptively simple world about adventurers delving deep into a singular expansive dungeon. However, while each episode is essentially about eating a new type of monster, it isn’t just stuffed with fantasy stereotypes. Delicious in Dungeon puts a lot of effort into creating ecosystems and original monsters that live there naturally, like bugs that disguise themselves as treasure or clam-like creatures that live in armor, expanding and contracting their muscles to make it move like it were magicked to life.
You may come into Delicious Dungeon for the food, but it is a worthy pick for those that love a well-built fantasy world filled with adventure.
Gushing Over Magical Girls
Hiiragi Utena has always been a fan of magical girls and the Tres Magia magical girl trio that defends her city. With such admiration, it is only natural that she perked up with excitement when a magical being approached her one night, claiming she has dormant magical powers within her.
However, after receiving the magical girl transformation of her dreams, she discovers that she is not a hero, but a villain destined to fight magical girls in the evil organization Enormita.
Not interested in being a villain, she tries to quit when the magical girl trio appear and tries to take her down. However, Utena soon discovers that torturing magical girls has awakened a secret pleasure in her.
Why It Is Worth Watching?
I never thought I’d see the day where I’d be including an unapologetically ecchi anime on a list of my personal recommendations for the season, but good work merits recognition no matter how many new fetishes you learn about from it.
Gushing Over Magical Girls became a sensation, drowning out the obvious darling of Solo Leveling for the season by being about a magical girl villain group exploring their fetishes all over a typical innocent boilerplate magical girl group. It’s ecchi, lewd, and questionable given the ages of everyone involved, but damn – it’s actually enjoyable to watch if you are immune to the shock of degeneracy.
While I’m sure an above average amount of its large audience is there for the titillation, for those who aren’t, Gushing Over Magical Girls becomes exciting to watch just to see where and how far they are going to go next in their exploration of obscure fetishes.
Bang Brave Bang Bravern
Humanity has advanced to the point where mechs called Titatonostriders are used for combat in warfare. In a joint training exercise, soldiers from around the world have gathered on the Hawaiian island of Oahu to put their Titatonostriders to the test in combat exercises. Ao Isami from the Japanese Self-Defense Force and Lewis Smith from the United States Marine Corps are two participants that cross paths during a battle.
However, the training exercise is disrupted when an unknown alien enemy starts decimating the surrounding area. With Titatonostrider weaponry proving majorly ineffective, hope seems lost until a giant robot proclaiming himself as Bravern swoops in and tells Isami that he is to be his pilot.
Why It Is Worth Watching?
Maybe as an older anime fan from the age of giant robots, I actually secretly crave giant robots anime, because there hasn’t been a modern release in the genre that I didn’t enjoy. However, while Bang Brave Bang Bravern wears the skin of a typical giant robot mecha anime, it is the small moments of comedy, eccentricity, and unexpected homoeroticism that set it apart and elevate it.
Bang Brave Bang Bravern has the usual giant robot plot of aliens invading and a giant robot that just sort of shows up to help humanity fight back. However, while having moments that embrace the sheer devastation and death that the aliens cause, the series also breaks that up with a giant robot pilot that didn’t want to be one and a robot whose attachment to him is stuffed full of sexual innuendo in a subtle way.
If nothing else, Bang Brave Bang Bravern feels unique despite not actually deviating from the formula much because of the small moments of dysfunction that are injected in a plot that it still treats seriously.
What were your favorite anime from the Winter 2024 season? Let fans know in the comments section below.
