I haven't started much of the current season. Shangrila Frontier and Apothecary Diaries are both continuing from the Fall season. Both of them had banger openings and changed to inferior openings, which chars my grits.
Something in Shangrila Frontier's animation is different with the latest episode. The eyes are all "super cute" for some reason and it's weirding me out. Opening song went from S-tier to B-tier. My thoughts for this show (from Fall) are that it's solid but the pacing feels super slow sometimes. Spending several minutes hearing the rabbit sing wasn't a fun time. Sometimes I get the distinct feeling scenes are being dragged out. This show will come out good for people who skip out on it and then go binge it; but watching it week to week sometimes feels unsatisfying.
Apothecary Diaries quickly improved its own pacing problems about five episodes in. The opening song for this cour went from A-tier to C-tier (and, honestly, E-tier on several of the OP's visuals) and once the music changed, I didn't bother with the closing song at all. The content that matters is still pretty great.
For new stuff, I watched:
A Sign of Affection. Lovestory between guy and deaf girl. My only issue is that nearly every male character in this thing looks fruity as hell. It's super distracting.
The story seems okay so far and the two leads seem really strong in terms of having likeable personalities that may keep me invested. Don't know how much I'll stick with this.
Solo Leveling. This thing is so hyped for whatever reason and this first episode was so stunted. It's not terrible, mind you. But this show is soooo desperate to show you its cool world and cool characters and cool unique world-building and cool female lead and it's, just, STOP. STOP IT. Stop exposition dumping and showing me people who don't fucking matter right now and let the viewer learn about these things organically. The "weak" e-rank male lead meeting up with the group, going into the dungeon, and encountering death is a strong enough hook. I wanted more of that. I wanted a whole episode of this guy going into the dungeon and the result. This part was of the episode was fantastic and immersive and it was so annoying that the show blue-balled me (for lack of better wording, lol) super-hard: see these giant ants? see this important guy in the suit? see these cool s-rank adventurers? see this hot popular chick in the hat stopping a purse-snatching? WHO GIVES A FUCK ABOUT A PURSE SNATCHING WHEN THIS GUY AND HIS FRIENDS ARE GONNA DIE IN THIS DUNGEON? And it's not like this is a special 40-min+ episode. This ended too abruptly, which imo isn't okay for a first episode because it didn't successfully set up its premise. You have this type of cliffhanger later, not now. SAO is garbage but that one set up a fantastic first episode. This show is about this dude "solo-leveling" so show us how its gonna be about that. I have no source material familiarity. As a newb to this world, what the fuck is this all about? In this aspect, this utterly failed as a first episode selling the viewer on a concept. I'm confident this show will be carried by pure fan-wank and it does have good visuals and voice-acting. It also does succeed in making me tune in next week. But I'm still annoyed.
Tales of Wedding Rings went about how I expected it to with the exception that I thought the two leads would have a more solid relationship. I thought they were already romantically involved but it's more "two kids who clearly love each other just friendzoning each other." Which was disappointing since them having a cute relationship was the one aspect I was expecting to like. (And they still have a nice relationship but, no, I don't believe they'd still be "just fwends" this entire time.) The show overall is not super offensive or terrible but something about the world these characters live in (Japan and wherever) feel super non-lived in and bland to me. I can't put my finger on why. Also, girl, put your tits away. At least while you're still in Japan. Her boobs hanging out was killing my immersion.