In the 100 days of anime questions thing I’m doing, today’s question was favorite anime OP. That really is a tough decision to make as there’s so many amazing OPs out there, but I ended up going with My Dearest from Guilty Crown. I figured I’d write about why I chose My Dearest here.
So to start off the story, in late 2020 I was still in my early weeb phase and something I did was find anime to watch by looking at random clips on youtube. One day I came across this video (below). At the time I was like, “hehe, she said sasageyo like in attack on titan, that funny,” but little did I know that this song would be even better than Sasageyo.
I never really thought much about this anime yet and just thought it was funny that it said Sasageyo. Around this time I was also exploring the anipiano community, and not too long after watching this video (a few days or a week maybe) I discovered Animenz. Naturally it was his unravel that introduced me to him, but I immediately fell in love with his arrangements. I won’t get into detail with my story with animenz in this post, maybe in a future post I will. But anyway, I got to his My Dearest 10th anni ver, and when I heard the intro to the song, immediately I recognized it from that Sasageyo video. After listening to the whole song, I decided I had to watch Guilty Crown at some point, and threw it onto my ptw list.
Fast forward to christmas of 2020. During the evening of that christmas, maybe around 8 or 9pm, I decided I’ll watch guilty crown now, so I did. Immediately, the music and visuals just completely blew me away. From this point on I became a massive fan of Ryo, leader of supercell and Egoist, and Hiroyuki Sawano. It’s really just insane to think about how insane of combination that is, 2 of my favorite composers teaming up and creating the best soundtrack known to man. Even songs like “Egg” by Hiroyuki Sawano are amazing lmao. Anyway, I finished watching Guilty Crown the next day (wish I could watch anime so efficiently nowadays), and do have to say my opinion on it is still the same. The music is my favorite anime soundtrack ever, beautiful art (perfect for AMVs), the story was mid as hell, spoilers starting around when the friend died, the plot really started just falling apart and can’t say I really like it at all, and the ending wasn’t terrible. It’s really a shame that an anime with such amazing music had such a mid plot, but at least I can still enjoy the music.
Anyway, after watching Guilty Crown, I looked up Hiroyuki Sawano and Ryo with supercell and Egoist. Realized Hiroyuki Sawano is absolutely goated when it comes to writing music, I’ll maybe write a post about that in the future, especially his “Unicorn“. As for Ryo, I looked up some of his other songs, and the first thing I got introduced to his “Today Is a Beautiful Day” album with supercell. I won’t talk too much about that right now bc I do plan on actually writing a post about all the songs in that album, it’s one of my favorite albums of all time. But yeah, I listened to song of his other songs like Sayonara Memories and Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari and fell in love with his music, and to this day some of his pieces are some of my favorite songs of all time.
Going back to Animenz for a moment, he really inspired me so much to get better at playing piano and really ignited my love for piano. To this day I think his 10th anni arr of My Dearest is my favorite arrangement by him. I bought the Animenz sheet music books the day they were released during his live stream that was at 5 am for me lmao. In the 2nd book he included his 10th anni arr of My Dearest and ofc I immediately tried to play it. Even now I still can’t play it well and it’s definitely way above my skill level. For a good while Animenz actually considered that arrangement to by his hardest arrangement, even harder than Unravel. Now he has it has his 2nd hardest, which I agree with bc while his My Dearest arr is very difficult both technically and musically, I’d still say Unravel is harder. I’ve played through his My Dearest arr a good amount of times and I think I have a pretty good grasp on the interpretation and musical aspect of it, but the technical part is definitely way more challenging for me, so I gotta find the time to actually sit down and practice some of those harder sections if I want to fully learn it.
Well, that’s basically it for this post. I still love My Dearest and definitely want to learn Animenz’s 10th anni arr of it. Next post will probably (maybe) be the post about supercell’s today is a beautiful day album. Bye
