Got some anime for the challenge out of the way and wanted to write some short thoughts. Sorry in advance for my half-assed review writing skills.
Challenge 43 - Watch an anime with a main character that is a professional in his field - Mushishi
This anime and its subsequent sequels are an absolute beauty to watch. It is incredible atmospherically and visually it looks terrific. The world building is very well done, and it's a very calming kind of series that has a high amount of intrigue to it. The anime is centered around Mushi, which take many different forms and most of the time end up bringing bad omens for people who end up having to deal with them but can also provide good things for them. For the cases where Mushi serves as a potential benefit, it serves as a way to really show how human nature kicks in, and whether or not the humans will let themselves get carried away. If they do, it usually ends up backfiring on them, creating unforeseen consequences. For the times in which they suffer from the Mushi, how they cope with those situations will illustrate if they will be able to endure the hardships in life or break. The main character, Ginko, is a Mushi-shi meant to discover the mysteries behind Mushi, and he goes around wandering from village to village trying to drive the Mushi's influences away. He cannot solve every case, and sometimes there are times in which the stubbornness of the client gets in the way of his work, something that he can't exactly fix easily. The anime itself does not follow a linear story but rather a number of stories, and it speaks to the strength of the series that I was never bored despite its rather slow and episodic nature. 9/10
Challenge 63 - Watch an anime that was recently reviewed - Yamada-kun to 7-nin no Majo
Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches is a rather interesting anime, where supernatural abilities reside in seven female students who are labeled as witches. It's kinda explained as to why they have these abilities, but not really in great detail. The trademark delinquent MC Yamada ends up being the harem protagonist that gets dragged into a situation where he body-swaps with the model female student, Shiraishi (who is one of the witches), and they figure out that this is activated with a kiss. They and a few other characters end up creating a Supernatural Studies club, and the MC is sent on a literal witch hunt to go and find the other 6 witches. It's a rather silly premise with cliche characters, but I liked it as it ended up leading to a bunch of pretty funny situations. It also has some pretty decent romantic progression, which can't be said for most harem anime *cough* Nisekoi *cough*. However, the pacing for the anime is pretty fast and ends up feeling a bit rushed at times, so it lost its appeal for me after a while due to a lack of fleshing out a number of "witch hunts". There is a final arc after he figures out all of the witches' identities which annoyed me quite a bit at times, but it ends pretty satisfactorily. Better than the average harem, but don't expect something too out of left field. 6/10
Challenge 54 - Watch an anime tagged as Mystery, Psychological and/or Thriller - Zankyou no Terror
I'll be blunt here, I don't like Zankyou no Terror. I have a sense of what the message of the anime is about, but I think it was executed in a rather poor and underwhelming way so by the time it was conveyed, I didn't really care anymore at that point. The anime doesn't explain itself in a clear manner until the final couple of episodes, so for most of the time, it's about a detective trying to solve these riddles the main characters, who are terrorists, so that the police can disarm the bombs. There is a ulterior motive as to why the main characters do this, which links back to their tragic past, and supposedly, they want to have the police put it all together for everyone to see. The characters themselves are lackluster and uninteresting because they aren't fleshed out very well and have personalities that don't stand out in any way. One of the characters, Five, is unlikable and ends up really being irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, trying to mess with the main characters due to her previous history with them and ending up taking a good chunk of plot away. The only positive things I can say are that it had really nice production values and a good OST, but in general, it's not a series I enjoyed. 4/10