Anime - Best/Average/Worst #1: Fantasy Genre

Greetings, Anime-niacs! No, I'm not trying to get sued by Warner Bros. for using the name of one of their most popular 90's cartoons as an anime-derived replacement for Ticketholders when I address you guys. I changed a letter and added a hyphen, so it's okay! Besides, I don't do this for the money anyway.
Speaking of, anyway, welcome one and all to Best/Average/Worst (which is either the best, most average, or worst title I could have concocted at two past the witching hour), a column wherein I try to quickly review three anime I have seen in a particular genre so far, which each also fall into a Best (perfect or nearly so), Average (in need of minor resolution or some other element that might elevate it to special), or Worst (annoying, superficial, or otherwise hateworthy) category. Today, as you might have guessed from the title, we're looking at entries from the fantasy genre. Now, when it comes to anime (of which I have watched a ton lately), just about everything is fantasy (that is, not based in reality). But as selections from an anime genre, today's series are those set in fictionalized past worlds and feature some sort of magical or mystical element to their stories.

Best: Spice & Wolf (II) - A traveling merchant named Craft Lawrence (or Lawrence Craft, maybe? Japanese naming conventions...) travels a fictional, medieval countryside, making business deals as he goes. He literally stumbles upon an unlikely traveling companion in Holo, a lonely and polarizing pagan harvest goddess who can turn into a giant wolf. Sounds boring (except for the giant wolf part), and could have potentially gone there many times thanks to the deal-making jargon, but each of Lawrence's plans are just plausibly convoluted enough that their exposition doesn't come off as heavy-handed. Holo's giant wolf form is awesome, and used just sparingly enough for plot resolution that it remains special. The series also deals with real-world issues like religious persecution (keeping Holo's identity a secret so she is not killed by the church is a common theme), economic depression (every one of Lawrence's schemes stumbles over this in some way), compulsive gambling (ditto), and the fickle nature of celebrity and societal PROGRESS (aware of her own fading status as a necessary and widely worshipped harvest goddess, Holo wishes to return to her home in the north before her "death") to further engage and connect to the audience. At the heart of it all is a likewise compelling relationship drama that could have devolved into harem shenanigans at any moment if it weren't firmly established almost from the jump, and wraps up with the old "the journey is more important than the destination" moral. The awful Engrish closing song is the series' only real, glaring flaw, but that's what skip buttons are for. All in all, I laughed, I cried, I grabbed the edge of my seat when necessary, and though Spice and Wolf didn't end how I expected, it did end on a satisfying, heartfelt, and profound note that led me to think of it as one of the best anime I have ever seen.

Average: Death March In the Parallel World Rhapsody - This one falls into the isekai, or "waking up in another world" genre. That is, it's an anime where the main character (usually a boring young man with a short, dark, spiky haircut) falls asleep, gets knocked unconscious, dies, blinks, or stumbles through a portal into some kind of magic- or video game-based world where he becomes an impossibly overpowered hero who must save his new world from some kind of evil in order to get back to his reality. The protagonist here is an MMO programmer who falls asleep while working on his latest batch of projects and wakes up in a composite fantasy world made up of the games he was working on. He immediately glitches himself to the highest possible experience level by destroying half the countryside with an item he didn't know how to use properly, and so now has enough in-game resources to master any skill he might need at any given moment by leveling it up via a user interface that only he and the audience can see. Unlike Spice & Wolf, Death March does quickly devolve into a harem (protagonist with numerous companions who admire or are in love with them) series. This excess companionship proves alternately beneficial and detrimental to the plot (which borrows Spice & Wolf's traveling merchant schtick as a cover identity for the hero, and even culminates in him enacting an inferior version of one of Lawrence's commerce-based ass-saving schemes). The UI overlay that the protagonist uses is often difficult to keep up with, such that I frequently found myself pausing an episode in the middle of important dialogue to read what achievement, title, skill, or item the hero acquired or improved. I hate the heavily commercial and immersively obsessive-compulsive nature of modern RPGs, but there were enough decent characters and plot mysteries in Death March that I want to see another season of it for some kind of resolution.

Worst: Yona Of the Dawn - If you like this anime, I apologize for my opinion. But not for having it. You have yours, I have mine, and the other thing that everyone has is where we'll keep them. If you watched the whole series and have a greater appreciation for Yona than I do because of it, then great. Personally, it bored me so much that I have not made it past the first episode. Why, you ask? Well, if you've seen Bleach before (at least as far as the Rescue arc), the female protagonist of Yona Of the Dawn is basically Momo Hinamori from Bleach, and the first episode is basically a note for note retread of the whole Momo/Aizen relationship. I could see Yona's first episode cliffhanger coming as soon as Yona and Soo-won were first put on screen at the same time. So, maybe I'll go back to it and see if my opinion changes. But with such a predictable introduction as my only reference point, I don't think I'll be feeling the itch any time soon.

In the next Best/Average/Worst, I will make some selections from the harem genre (explained above), but until then, stay tuned for another TicketVerse Trade.