I am abjectly terrible at fighting games. This didn't stop me from seeking out arcades in Japan to hamfistedly fondle the seductive BlazBlue machines, or importing the US version when it was released, or venturing online to be emasculated in short order. I may appreciate their focus and purity but a lack of innate talent and free time means I'll never be as good as I desire. Talent is not in question, but is my ineptitude really an issue of time?
waiting for a time when I've run out of series to review and ideas to explore
Certainly a nine to five job blocks out close to ten hours of the day, but leaving a modest six hours for sleep that still leaves eight hours for hobbies and the minutiae of life. Pondering the issue more, I could only conclude it is still fundamentally a time issue, but it would be more apt to brand it as a lack of dedication. When that invisible plateau is reached where the time to become better encroaches on the ability to enjoy other games and anime, that dastardly analytical part of my brain takes over.
Even when I'm waist deep in Noel's story and practically giddy from her soundset when facing Litchi, a mental flag pops up. There's new anime to be watched! New games to be played! Things to do. Sometimes very good games can override this, dragging me under for weeks at a time, however all it takes one slow section to send me gasping back to the shoreline. This sounded like a good enough reason: essentially a free time defence mechanism; and it certainly fit with my habits, but it doesn't explain why the balance between video games and anime I used to maintain had been broken, marginalising former in favour of the latter.
Ten years of anime. Somewhat fitting to pick the ten shows that personally rank as the best. This is a case of comparing apples to oranges, but some releases transcend their genre and, most of all, this is opinion rather than edict. One cannot of course have seen all that is released within the decade, some will slip through the cracks or just be ignored due to indifference, cynicism or underappreciation.
In the lead up to the new decade a ten article series, in descending numerical order and ranked wholly arbitrarily, will be posted at 20:00 GMT (15:00 EST, 12:00 PST) every day, culminating in the pick of the decade on the 31st December 2009.
Below is a short list harvested from the brilliant AniDB which, if you tweak the search settings correctly, you can peruse as well. To make the list the series, movie or OVA must have been released or started on or after January 1st 2000 and must have completed by 31st December 2009. This is why series such as Bleach and Book of Bantorra are not present.
