The Anime Series That I Actually Enjoy | Extra Punctuation 

Extra punctuation is honestly the best thing to have happened to this channel since Zero Punctuation. All of these are great. Thank you Yahtze, and especially thank you Matt

Matt including "Well I wasn't going to let him trash Castlevania now was I" is the best possible defense of that mistake.

"well I wasn't going to let him trash Castlevania now was I" I knew nothing of Matt the editor before this video and I know he is a man of impeccable taste

The theory that Yahtzee was bitten by a wereweeb is making more and more sense

Had no idea EP's visuals were done by someone else, and I feel like that's a demonstration of talent right there. Well done Matt!

By mentioning Gankutsuou, you've attracted the twelve people who make up it's fandom.

I don't know if Yahtzee is saying "Animes" on purpose to fright the weeaboos or on accident from genuine lack of awareness, but either way it's hilarious and I approve.

"Cromartie High School" is a certified classic, unironically funny, and even has a strong English dub to boot. Can't think of anyone I wouldn't recommend it to.

Yes. I kinda figured out you didn't edit the videos when, in the Horizon Forbidden West EP, you mentioned how Garett was a well-written protagonist in Thief and the accompanying visuals were from Thief 2014. Although admittedly, my immediate theory was "oh god he finally snapped". EDIT : Also, as a french person, the amount of joy to hear "Gerard Depardieu" pronounced by Yathzee was way higher than even I would have expected.

"When someone simultaneously loses their mind and runs out of their animation budget" - The perfect way to summarise Evangelion. Major kudos for the Gankutsuou and Planetes appreciation.

Cromartie felt so very personally tailored to me and my tastes that sometimes it feels like I hallucinated it. Thank you for the validation

Love to editor Matt. Cheers, bud!

respect for Gankutsuou, that is a little known one, surreal and pretty creative with ideas

Digging the writer's point of view on the strengths of Cowboy Bebop. It's nice to hear a more sober appreciation of the show. The fact that the Cowboy Bebop movie is one of my Mom's favorite movies, is a sign of the show's universal appeal.

Sometimes Yahtzee really puts his talents as a writer on display. He creates an entire video that gives insight into his interests and thought processes, and highlights clarifies and reiterates the problems with repetative boring and/or problematic features within the anime subgenre... all so he can tell pedantic fans to not @ him about small mistakes or complaints about the visuals of his videos XD

Yahtzee is like: "I'm not a weeb. I hate weebs. I only ever enjoyed a small number of anime in my life. In fact I hate anime more than most people" Honestly that sounds like every anime-fan I've ever met.

Gotta love Matt for keeping Yahtzee's indiscriminate yet unintentional stabs away from Castlevania. What a show.

No wonder Yahtzee likes Yakuza. Yakuza is just Cromartie Highschool post graduation.

I was a little surprised at the mention of One Punch Man. Speaking of, I wonder if Mob Psycho 100 would be to Yahtzee's taste.

I could go for more "things Yahtzee likes" in all honesty. I value his opinion on games since in the past they often mirrored my own. And I'm now very curious about anime number 2.

For someone who claims to dislike anime, I have to say, you have good taste Yahtzee.

Good luck with the "no recommendations please" thing, Yahtz. I throw that out there right away when engaging in conversation with friends/coworkers but they will always do it anyway, like their body will be found twisted and mangled in seven days if they don't.

I love how already there are multiple comments saying "I know he said no recommendations, *but* ..."

As someone that has done his best to move past his full "weeb" phase that got me a Black Belt, a language, and a lifting PR that passed 1500lb in my prime, I can say that I fully appreciate Yahtzee's transparency with anime. There are very few series that catch my eye anymore and most of them are the wholesome type that have token fan service, if any.

It’s nice to see Yahtzee talking about things he likes. I get that his whole persona is angry foul-mouthed hater of most things, which works and is funny, not to mention, negative things get more clicks, but it can get depressing eventually. It makes the positive episodes stand out all the more and they always feel like a treat.

Onscreen arguments between writers and editors is my favourite part of RU-vid.

I feel like you can make the same point on how it's easy for an outsider to think all anime is the same with videogames. If someone just looks at the medium as a whole that person will probably think it's unimaginative and the same all the time, but a person that actually plays a lot of games can tell you about great titles that are completely outside those norms.

Cromartie High School and Excel Saga were totally unexpected. Nice.

If there's one thing that takes me right out of an anime, its the 'fan service' trope. It feels a little patronizing if I'm honest, because I'm perfectly willing to watch a compelling anime without, as Yahtzee puts it, sexually assaulting the women with the camera.

No Matt, you weren't going to let him trash Castlevania, and for that we thank you

"Excel Saga" Alright, absolutely no doubt any more, Yahtzee just has impeccable taste and knows true culture.

Actually, this puts me through an epiphany. Yahtzee didn't really cover alot of Japanese games but that seemed to change with Yakuza 4, which also fits the same bill as Cromartie High School, a seed that ultimately lead Yahtzee to covering more Japanese games that ultimately led to his current obsession with Persona 5 and his further appreciation for the Yakuza series. I never realized he was already a weeb back then, I can't believe it.

I was not expecting number 3 and Yahtzee has immediately shot up in my estimation. 😱 I'm sure he'll sleep better at night knowing that a weeb approves of his life choices. 🙃

I have a similar liking for Cowboy Bebop, a visual style in stories that take place on spaceships that I've always liked is what I've heard called the "Used Future", where everything is really blocky and a bit shitty and secondhand looking and gives the impression of being lived-in, like how the interior of Serenity is very cramped and brown-looking, or all the ships in the Star Wars OT are very blocky and not very sleek, Iit makes settings feel more immersive IMO.

Also - unfortunately for you, Yahtzee, we must now have more Matt and you must write him into more scripts. More Matt please. Thank you.

"Bums in space" is a great category, explains my love of the anime Planetes *Edit, lol didn't realize he mentions it at the end

Excel Saga. I could not have seen that coming for a mile, hell yes! It’s a surprise but a well deserved one. Gotta love how much of the show’s humor is from lovingly mocking otaku and anime’s own history.

Bless you Matt for spawning this video. As a "Complete fucking weeb" (let's just say I have perpetual pre-orders in place for English volumes of my favorite manga) I fully understand where you're coming from. The more "Non-contextual" fan service an anime or manga (especially one with a younger main cast) has the more likely I am to drop it or at least lower my rating. I specify non-contextual because there are times when it *can* make sense, especially if it's something like a male character getting caught ogling a swimsuit ad by his GF, this serves more to prove that the male teenager is in fact a male teenager than anything. Fortunately there seems to be a shift in the industry that means that either: 1. More shows that have less fan-service are being made 2. More shows with less fan-service are actually making it to the states. Or most likely: a combination of the above. I do appreciate you taking the time to clarify and expand upon your personal anime preferences. Gankutsuou has been on my "I need to watch this" list for a while and I think it just bumped itself up.

“One punch man before S2.” I’m with ya, Yahtz

Did you know that Star Trek started with the idea of making a western in space? Specifically the type of 'Caravan trek' western, exploring the frontier and meeting new peoples

There are so many anime that have an elephant in the room problem. They can be a spectacular visual medium but there is typically at least one hold up that if you are not on board with it can jettison someone from any desire to keep watching. Where it be the sexualization like in kill la kill, problematic creators like with kenshin, or just the language barrier changing the experience depending on how you choose to experience it. It's unfortunate and awkward, especially if you grow accustom to it and forget that "oh it's just anime stuff" can really blind side someone not as used to the tropes and tendencies.

Well, this video was adorable.i thank Yahtzee for letting us know a bit more about himself and I thank Matt for all his hard work.

The fact that Yhatzee knows about Garth Marenghis Dark place warms my cold cold heart

Anime is such a weird thing to me these days. When I was younger, if it was Japanese, I was all for it - figurines and statues, wall scrolls, box sets, conventions, you name it (except body pillows. they're just not my thing). It wasn't until I got older and my likes and dislikes became more refined that I realized I'm in a similar boat: many series and games tend to rely on specific tropes and themes that I'm just not a fan of. I don't give a fuck about Senran Kagura's Yumi trying to be "the perfect housewife". Let's explore the Crimson Squad being a bunch of broke ass ninjas getting into wacky hijinks while trying to make ends meet!

I had a feeling that the visuals were done by someone else. Yahtzee makes sprites of video game characters instead of using an actual image of the character. Sometimes he doesn't, his review of silent hill 4 is one example.

"Matt could be doing anything to me right now."

You earned bonus points for Excel Saga's mention. The opening theme got randomly stuck in my head the other day, first time in like ten years.

Mentioning Cromartie Highschool makes me think of what would happen if Yahtzee decided to jump down the Gintama rabbithole. While it gets heavy into shonen anime bullshit later in the series, the bulk of it is a similar kind of surreal contrast humor

I hope Matt becomes a recurring part of Extra Punctuation humorously giving his two cents on some of Yahtzee’s hotter takes.

My all time favourite anime is Serial Experiments Lain. It's one of those anime that you can't really explain without giving more insight to the story itself, so I'll just give these vague remarks: It's more Persona than the Persona anime adaptions, and its end solution is basically the main character calling someone out for having "dude trust me" as their source. I will not give any further elaboration than that.

I've always liked you, Yahtzee, but my esteem for you has greatly increased after your mention of Lexx. It's a bit of a time and place show, and probably doesn't hold up as well to more modern stuff, but man it was something to behold when it came out.

I feel like half the tropes from the bingo sheet are, 'We need to give our protagonist Permission to do the thing this series is about,' instead of exploring, 'Here's how that might actually happen.' Fighting monsters in an isekai is pedestrian; fighting monsters in a 7-11 is so discordant _it actually matters again._ Falling down and accidentally touching your love interest is all plausible deniability, so they don't have to write a story about people _who actually agree to touch each other._ I too prefer _grounded_ anime that's not about high schoolers, but I feel like that's become harder to find since the mid-2000s or so.

I thought I had recently found out that he didn't do the visuals for Zero Punctuation either, and it really changed my perspective on how much the visual elements enhance the comedy. It's nice to find out I was wrong. Not even sure where I got that impression now

Never thought of myself as an “evangelical”, but it is strangely fitting.

I agree with Yahtzee on his favorites. It’s all very good taste. I will say that I think a lot of anime has gone downhill or it’s just incredibly harder to find shows made by inspired artists that don’t just devolve into skirt peeking or boob bouncing or even the “uh oh I accidentally transformed into something inconvenient” trope. I recently found the japanese director Masaki Yuasa to be a really good one and his work seems to come from a place of passion. The Tatami Galaxy, Mindgame, and even the recent Inu-Oh are all fascinating and so different. It’s been hard for me to not recommend him to others tired of the usual anime genres.

Woah, Excel Saga, it was a little too out there and hectic for me, but that's interesting Yahtzee likes it I don't remember Outlaw Star having a ton of moments where they put the girls in those kinds of situations and I felt like what there is in Samurai Chsmploo was in actual brothels, a context that makes sense.

"So the end result looked like a fucking proboscus monkey." Pretty sure that's the first time this sentence has ever been said.

A shadow-clad figure is sitting in front of a table in a dark office. A phone rings. The man has been waiting for this call for a long time. "How is The Process going?", his boss asks without a greeting. The man smiles. "My lord, the results are outstanding. I have never felt this free and powerful! Your teachings have opened doors that I never knew existed! My weebification is almost complete!" Tha man leans forward, his face now illuminated by moonlight, revealing him to be Yahtzee Croshaw wearing a Naruto headband.

I named my first pug Menchi from Excel Saga. I always loved the joke of my dog being my emergency food supply.

This is probably your best Extra Punctuation yet, well done you (and Matt). I was jumping when you mentioned Gankutsuou. That said its star trekky but you might like Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

One of my favorite anime that's basically unrecognizable as an anime would be The Tatami Galaxy. I only wish I was better at internalizing the core message lmao.

All three are among my favorites. If he'd mentioned baccano and trigun I'd have felt targeted

Wow did not expect a shoutout to Excel Saga, kudos for good taste.

3:01 As someone who has only ever watched 1 anime, I felt this. I got quite into Initial D after it was recommended to me. When the protagonist pulled out a special driving trick out of their ass and said that their father taught them that years ago, I was ready to punt it out of a window. As a child, I often watched a bit of Totally Spies. Years later I learned that some visuals in that show were similar to anime. My first thought was "so that's why I hated those bits!"

Every time Yatzhee talks about anime it just attracts more weebs, it’s almost like he’s doing it on purpose. Maybe he’s a Tsundere, and when he tells us he doesn’t want us to recommend him anime he actually means he does! Watch Gintama the humor is really good and deadpan like you like it Yatzh

So wait, people genuinely believed that a list containing Jujutsu Kaisen, Demon Slayer, Attack on Titan and One Piece was a list of shows that don't steer into anime tropes too hard? That is a staggering lack of media literacy on their part.

My main take away from this video is I was pleased I, a person outside of the UK, instantly recognized a picture of Vic and Bob (despite immediately doubting myself because I've never seen a picture of them so young).

> Gankutsuou And thus a mental lock of "this was so long ago and so surreal it probably was a fevor dream" was undone in an instant.

and just when yahtzee said the words "staying up cause channel 4" I knew immedaitely we both started watching anime at the same time. We also hate the Idea of weeb and the mainstream anime life that has invested the world. Probably for different reasons. But that's cool to know.

What got me into anime was being recommended a few different anime that did not reflect typical anime: _One Punch Man,_ _Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood_ and _Violet Evergarden_ were my first three anime. I still mainly watch atypical anime like _Golden Kamuy_ and _Spy x Family._

Matt's visuals are great, but it's the sound effects that really make the videos. My favorite XP moment is, "...which certainly do have broad appeal--lol pun. /*ah*/"

. . . You are forgiven for not mentioning FullMetal Alchemist because you mentioned Planetes. In fact, in my book, you get at least a month's supply of hot-take leeway for mentioning Planetes. Awesome series!

Excel saga. That's a blast of nostalgia. God it's been like 10+ years since I've thought about that old show.

GANKUTSUOUUUUUUUU ONE OF MY FAVES!!!!! I love that beautiful, amazing, fruity anime.

I honestly thought the anime joke of the last video was meant to be ironic. Yahtz was saying how the only anime he likes are the ones that don't really fit the standard anime presentation. Yet the examples were all Shonen anime I.E: Anime that all fit the traditional mould of what many people consider an anime. The quality of all the examples can be debated (all of the examples seem to be very well liked) but the examples are all still the standard of what anime is from an outsider of the medium, I thought this was the joke. Matt The Editor, if you are reading this and this was you intent know that it did get a giggle out of me.

I am surprised Yatzee has not seen nor read Berserk at all since it is basically the Dark Souls universe before Dark Souls was a thing.

I've been singing praises about that Count of Monte Cristo anime adaptation for everyone that was willing to listen for years! No one I know ever heard about it before, so it's rather nice to see some love shown for it by Yahtzee of all people.

I'm not a big anime watcher, I usually watch the big ones that reach higher in the cultural conscious like attack on titan or death note but I was really pleasantly surprised to see I wasn't the only one who saw gankutsuo or cromartie high and liked them lol

I’m glad we can all agree that opm s1 was one of the best of comedy shonen, the downward spiral in s2 made me sad

7:24 those hands make me keel over in laugher every time I see them. I love that meme

understandable opinions. I find myself still drawn to japanese entertainment but when anime fails to bring anything new to the table for a while I start looking at the different media. When anime gets samey, I read manga. When I run out of decent manga I double down and binge some light novel trash. Games and visual novels tend to have better, less samey plots than most stuff, but maybe I just haven't played enough to get sick of them yet.

Was the sponsor for this video just a coincidence?

so Cromartie High School wasn’t just a fever dream I had…

Bro, Gankutsuou the Count of Monte Cristo was so fucking good. Everything about it is just pure beauty. The flawed characters, the realism, the aesthetic , the setting, the complete tear down of aristocracy, how forward thinking it was, to how beautiful everyone was inside and out….even the worst of the worst of them had this sort of beauty to them even if I hated them. Yes, even Danglars and no it wasn’t because of his clothes. It was this darkness that was in all characters. Even Albert.

Regarding the “anime trope bingo” section, I can’t believe how nobody’s talking about the use of constant flashbacks, inner monologues and overexplaining actions. I hate it when anime does that, because it signifies a lack of respect towards the audience. To me, it’s only justified when the actions are too complicated to understand offscreen.

I really like it when Yahtzee describes things he likes... honestly I was never here for the "angry man hates everything" part of the show, I really just like hearing the "intellectual vulgarity" he uses to describe things, where he says something so brash in a semi-creative way, betraying the vulgarity of what he said. Kinda like how just saying vulgar things is considered one of the lowest forms of comedy due to its simplistic nature, but instead he makes it complex... it's almost kinda subversive.

Holy shit, you like Excel Saga and Cromartie High? You have no idea how much I love those shows and how hard it is to find people who've actually watched them, that's honestly neat that you do too.

Excel Saga is a very nice runner-up. HAIL IL PALAZZO!

I’ve watched all of Neon Genesis and I’m still unsure how I feel about it. I at the same time find it interesting, engaging at times, but also something about it really pisses me off. I can easily list every reason why I loath Sword Art Online. Every time I try out anime I haven’t seen before it’s a random coin toss of wether or not I can get into it. Because one anime may have a couple tropes I don’t like but I still enjoy it. Or another anime features a lot of things I like but I just cannot get into it. Thank you for reading my college essay. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I did writing it.

Always nice to watch someone gather the courage to come out. Even if it's gradual over the course of however many years ago p5 came out.

I told a guy I liked Akira, Ninja Scroll and Ghost in the Shell. English dubs. He said "You're not a *real* anime fan" I said "Phew." Haven't heard from him since. Win. =D

Ok the honourable mention of excel saga makes me think you are a man of taste.

For anyone out there that enjoyed bebop and kinda like Yahtzee was describing the "bums in space" story give Space Dandy a watch. It's made by the same director as Bebop but is more aimed toward comedy and has more of a disco funk vibe than a jazz one

So cool to see Gankutsuou to get a prime spotlight! I own the series and try to push it on all my anime friends cuz they need to expand their horizons

Love the animated interaction between Matt and Yahtze. Extra Punctuation is my favorite thing on RU-vid at the moment

Cowboy Bebop also had the benefit of being the weird late night cartoon broadcast early in Adult Swim's career, itself a weird late night spinoff of Cartoon Network's other programming. Compared to the current era, in which a lot of anime is very easy to access, it brings me the same mysterious nostalgia that I imagine folks who had to hunt down obscure ways of watching Neogenesis Evangelion feel about that.

I went in reverse: Gankutsuou made me read the "source material", that is the actual The Count of Monte Cristo novel, which is quite good. Sadly, for a long time now the things that get animated are mostly random trash LNs which copy-paste their story from each other endlessly. Chances of getting something on the level of Cowboy Bebop are next to zero.

The series that Matt picked actually would be up your alley for all the reasons you listed for the ones you said you liked. Especially Jujutsu Kaizen, which is vaguely like Cromartie High with supernatural powers.

That whole random foreign stuff late night on Channel 4 is actually how I discovered and got into Godzilla! it's also where I first saw WWF, later WWE! They used to put on some of the big events, not like Wrestlemania or Summer Slam, sadly...

Another old one but I will say this: I was a fan of Anime from around the time Yahtzee watched it, he's a few years younger than me it appears. Originally I got into it because it covered a lot of sci-fi and fantasy themes you would generally only find in novels at the time, and had little visual representation. It should be noted that while there was sci-fi and fantasy programmed, what wasn't for children was the exception rather than the rule. Things like the success of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and say "Hercules: The Legendary Journies" helped pave the way for the current era of geek culture, but for a long time anything not explicitly aimed at kids tended to be an endless parade of "look at this goofy family" sitcoms, spy, detective, and cop shows. What sci-fi and fantasy was breaking the mould was in comics and such when the CCA was abolished and while I admit some creators deserved it the entire industry was being treated like a group of serial dog molesters due tot he perception that such visual themes would destroy the children it had to be exclusively targeted at mentally. I used to trade with students doing fansubs via fidonet to get a lot of my anime, where I'd send them tapes full of American TV shows and stuff, and they would watch them and send me anime they subbed themselves with school equipment to practice their english. I also rented from a few comic shops that did it, and for a while when I had a good job I did indeed pay $30 a pop for subbed, unedited, anime tapes because I could, but around that time I was starting to get out of it. Yahtzee does have some fair points about the Japanese stereotypes, which are just as common and recurring as the American ones. I mostly was able to tolerate that stuff as I knew the age of consent was 13 in Japan (not kidding) which many people did not get, and the simple realization that their high school clique based stereotypes were just as obnoxious as our own, and many were eerily similar. I could deal with the "teen hero" thing as oftentimes it wasn't all that different than what American comics were doing, it's just they could get away with being more explicit with the sex stuff than you could in American comics and teen-hero material because of age of consent differences. To be brutally honest in the 90s pretty much all the X-men were banging each other it seemed, and there were tons of them, and if they could have gotten away with what Anime was doing, they probably would have. I mean they literally had Emma Frost teaching classes dressed like a dominatrix for crying out loud. Unlike Yahtzee I see complaining about anime tropes as basically being the pot calling the kettle black. Eventually I fell out of love with Anime (though I still watch it once in a while even now) because of two major factors: One was simply they stopped focusing on producing stuff I was interested in. The focus turned mostly towards the aspects of it that I increasingly found silly or to get in the way of the overall work. They also saw some of the "forever" series start to appear and they got a lot cheaper, even with the low-budget titles, thinking that if something hit they wanted to be able to grind out the art as cheaply as possible and slap it on everything and have 400+ episodes in a few years. Almost everything doing that failed needless to say, and for good reason. The second was that as it became increasingly mainstream in the US it got too many weirdos involved. I mean understand something I am a massive nerd with brain damage who tends to make other people uncomfortable due to being a little out of it a lot of the time due to you know... brain damage. That said when I was into Anime I was mostly into it with a group of other nerds who were the classic high-IQ types who were also into an array of pop culture stuff, as well as different kinds of computers, Anime was just one aspect of a broad interest in things that generally involved fantasy and science fiction. Some people I actually got interested into it were pretty normal, and it would come up when I was say making their computer work for them and we started talking about say horror movies, and I'd mention J-horror and anime stuff they had never heard of and well... personal networking, and some of those people even thought this stuff was cool. That said between say 2000 and 2010 a weird fringe of anime-exclusive people started to appear, what I'd guess you'd call weebs. We'd say be talking about the uncut version of Escaflowne (which had a massively edited version on Fox) or making "Those Who Hunt Elves" jokes in relation to a D&D campaign, and some dude would sit down and start lecturing us about how people in Japan were amazing, how Tokyo was Nirvana for "nerds like us", and how they would all rather watch anime and read Manga than watch the news on TV or read news papers. Oftentimes doing this loudly so others would hear, making us guilty by association, and they would absolutely refuse to listen to what anyone would tell them otherwise, say if you actually knew real students from Japan online who were trading Anime with you originally and got your information from them, as opposed to some weird place that says stuff like that. The point I'm getting at is basically I thought Anime was cool for a while, but it got away from what I like, and there really wasn't enough there to keep me interested when it started to go too mainstream and on top of it got people like me, an omega-class nerd, sort of ashamed. I mean back in the era I watched this stuff there was a parody about people like that called "Otaku No video" which interspaced an anime story about an interest in fandom destroying some guy's life and driving him insane, with interviews with actors claiming to be "real fans" while hamming everything up to the extreme, being people supposedly hiding on the fringes of Japanese society. When people in America were lionizing that, and actually making those parodies look normal in comparison.... it just got painful, even for D&D playing nerds. Those guys did to Anime for me what The Satanic Panic couldn't do with RPGs.... they hurt me in ways with cringe, that all the bullies and weird religious nuts in the world could not possible muster.