Anime March Madness Overview

Adding madness to the challenge title was a good call. Watching 31 anime in 31 days was quite the task to take on. I had not really planned for it and decided to do this challenge literally two days before the start of March, 27 February 2021. The goal of completing 31 anime was to clear a lot of anime off of my to watch list. However, I just ended up adding even more anime to the list from the recommendations of people and seeing the anime that others were taking on.

So with a half-baked plan and a clear goal I dived straight in. You would think that I would know to better plan these things before taking them on. Overall, I managed to complete a total 27 anime excluding all of the daily anime releases.

Completing the anime in this challenge means the entirety of the title that is available. So if it has multiple seasons, OVA’s or movies, the entirety of the title needed to be completed.

I did an episode by episode thread on Twitter to provide the proof of me actually watching the anime.

Anime March Madness Day 1 AllAnimeMag Balance Unlimited

The anime I started and completed for this challenge:

My anime March madness challenge experience:

The fact that I am only 4 short of my goal for 31 anime boggles my mind. Watching title after title was a lot to take in. I quickly realised after watching the Aoi Bungaku Series, I would be excluding any other titles that got you thinking. Those types of anime I like to take my time to watch and process and really think about once they are complete. This styled challenge, does not allow for that. I made sure to watch a wide range of genre and switched up what I was watching to fit my mood of the day.

I did not want this challenge to burn me out and I did not want this challenge to be a forced undertaking. I enjoy watching anime and this challenge allowed me the chance to get back into watching ‘older’ titles, rediscover genres that I had neglected and explore multiple art styles and animation.

My daily routine basically meant that most days of March I could only start watching my challenge anime at 8pm. Thus, my choice in anime were limited basically to those with 12 episodes or less. I did try to watch a few with more episodes as my original anime list for the month had quite a number of titles with over 20 episodes but less than 30.

I did end up watching some anime that I feel were cheat anime. Although with the confines I set for this challenge, they are valid and technically not cheating.

My cheat anime titles:

Puparia is an anime with one episode that is 3 minutes long.
Gakuen Handsome, although having 12 episodes, it only took 45 minutes to watch them all.
‘Hinako‘ is a trilogy of single episode OVA’s. To watch all 3 takes 1 hour and 20 minutes…
Wu Shan Wu Xing only has 3 episodes and only took 1 hour to watch.

I had completed the first season for Terra Formars but had not watched season two, thus I can not include it on my list. If I properly cheated, then I would have completed 28 anime and only be 3 short of my goal. Oh well.

Overall, this has challenge has cleared quite a few anime of my list and has left my fingers itching to write. This has also proved that I do have the ability to get through anime like I did years back and that if I manage my time well, I can have the best of the real world and the digital world. I just need to balance. I do plan to do this challenge again, perhaps in July or August, but I will be doing this again next year March.

Next time I’ll be more prepared and actually provide actual guidelines with time to prepare. I hope to have others join me again in the next undertaking of a mass anime viewing challenge.