I haven’t read the manga, which my understanding is what the reboot was following. I watched it now out of curiosity, due to the original anime being one of my main gateways to anime as a whole.

If I hadn’t seen the original multiple times, I probably would have been lost at multiple points in the reboot. Characters seemed to pop up out of nowhere for unknown reasons.

My girlfriend had never seen the original, and she originally wasn’t paying attention as I watched this on my own, but after a few episodes she got pulled into it as well, so it seemed to make enough sense to someone unfamiliar that they’d at least be curious.

I enjoyed it mainly because it got me to think so many new things about one of my early favorite anime universes. It filled in a few gaps I had, such as I liked how we got to spend more time with Project Seeds and learned more about the Plants species and Knives’ overall goals.

It made my list because it exceeded my expectations as I was not looking forward to CGI animation and I was concerned about them “ruining” the story I had in my head, but the animation was beautiful, VA was great, and I think about the universe of the story more than I have in years.

It’s totally subjective what anyone else will take away, but everything else on the list I went into blind, with no expectations. Trigun I came into very biased due to my love for the original, and expected eww to meh, but as a whole, it gave me a great time.