Official Shrubbery Waterer
14,659 posts
My two cents, for what it's worth (pun intended!):
Outlaw Star is kind of dumb, and the first dozen episodes or so are complete throw-aways. I remember liking it when they aired it on Adult Swim a decade ago, though.
Baccano! is slow to start, but gets very, very good through the middle and into the end (to the point of being almost transcendental), then abruptly makes a left turn and kind of peters out. It's very much worth checking out though.
Darker Than Black was pretty neat. It has a sort of X-Men aesthetic in that there's whole bunches of dudes with super powers, and each super power is completely unique. I never saw anything past season 2, but enjoyed the episodes that I did watch.
Trigun is actually one of my favorite series, mostly on the strength of the last 10 or so episodes. The series on a whole spends too much time introducing tertiary characters that give the hero(s) a one-episode side-quest to complete, but the pay-off at the end is well worth it.
FLCL was and still is my favorite anime series, mostly because it doesn't spend a dozen episodes "character building" (there are only 6 total episodes to the whole series), but instead barrels along at full speed and trusts you to keep up. Also, like some of the other series mentioned above, including Cowboy Bebop, it has an ending that's meaningful and engaging as opposed to those anime series that trudge along into infinity without any real closure (I'm looking at you, Inuyasha).
I watched the first season and a half of Claymore and found it relatively good. Towards the end of the first season, they introduced some interesting plot elements, but after seeing that they would go completely unresolved until some point likely several seasons down the road, I tuned out.
Finally, if you enjoy things are "so bad it's good" (e.g. the Fast and Furious franchise, action movies with Nic Cage, etc.), give a look at the first season of Aquarion. It has a fairly standard Voltron-esque "giant robots fight giant monsters" plot, but the dialogue is so bad, and it relies so heavily on all of the cliches of that genre that it's actually funnier than an intentional parody ever could be.
____________________________
Jophiel wrote:
I managed to be both retarded and entertaining.