Here's my top 10 anime for this year. This doesn't include ongoing shows of which two are contenders: Parasyte and Akatsuki no Yona.
10. Haikyuu: This is probably the most focussed sports show I've ever seen. If they weren't playing matches, they were training. All character development occurred strictly in the context of volleyball. It's the sort of show I normally don't like, but for some reason I found myself looking forward to the show. The show had a certain energetic charm, had characters that were easy to tell apart, and the matches were really suspenseful. Good fun.
9. Break Blade: I've never seen the previous shows, but I quite liked the show. Great fight scenes, stylish characters, and a decent plot. I'd watch a second season.
8. Tonari no Seki kun: A brilliant show about not paying attention in class. The titular character never says a word, while the girl next to him provides us with a torrent of interior monologue. For me, 2014 was a great year for comedy, as this top 10 will demonstrate.
7. Majimoji Rurumo San: Fairly typical moe romcom with a side-dish of ecchi, but it's got the sort of sentimentality that appeals to me.
6. Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun: This comedy lives on the character dynamics. It's a series of very familiar misunderstandings, but it's delivered with a good sense of timing and much style.
5. Sekai Seifuku: Bouryaku no Zvezda: It's a sweet little nonsense show about people trying to take over the world. Episode 3 is, for me, the standout episode, with our troupe being non-smoking fascists, while the opposing troupe being cynical powergrabbers who accept civil casualties (and it's all wonderfully low-key and tongue in cheak). Most of it isn't on that level, but it's just good fun.
4. Mikakunin de Shinkoukei: It's really just a standard romcom, but it's got a great sense of timing, characterdesign that totally hits my tastes, and a pleasing melancholy subtext over a shiny, cheerful facade. It's the show that makes having a dull and unenergetic male lead a plot point. I'm fond of this show.
3. Gugure Kokkuri San: Irreverant deadpan humour overlays a show full of losses, big and small. The show manages to be touching about people even while they're being very creepy.
3.a Isshukan Friends: Good god, I forgot Isshukan Friends. This is really #3, and Haikyuu gets kicked out. Makes me wonder what else I forgot. Anyway, Isshukan Friends, for me, falls in the sentimental, fun romance series spot, that's totally save but adorable, like, say, Kimi ni Todoke . It's not on that level, a bit less safe, for example, but that's the basic drive. (It's also the last thing I heard from Brain's Base. Since Durarara will be Shuka - Brain's Base spin-off studio - I wonder what will become of that studio?)
2. Houzuki no Reitetsu: Beaurocracy in hell. Combines social satire with Japanese mythology. The humour is smart and - when at its best - actually has bite. (It can be avarage to silly, too, but I don't mind.) Oddly enough, watching Furusato Saisei ~ Nihon no Mukashi Banashi for a while, has really helped me understand some of the humour here. A lot of the references fly over my head, but what I did understand was enough to push the show onto place 2 this year.
1. Ping Pong: It's perhaps the ugliest anime I've seen in a while, but it's just perfect on the character development. No major character ends where he started out. It's one of the few sports shows where winning isn't everything, and for large stretches it's not even the focus. Very good writing and direction. Outstanding sound direction. Best anime of the year for me.
If I count the ongoing shows, Parasyte would probably take the top spot; maybe the second spot - if the shounen fighter elements continue to increase at the current pace. Akatsuki no Yona would be somewhere near the bottom of the list; I'm not that hot on the recent development (and it's humour doesn't work on me). The show might well get better again, who knows?
Comedy is definitely the genre of the year, but sports was pretty good, too. On the whole, it was an okayish year, but then the last few years were probably exceptionally good to me.
Next season doesn't look to hot, for me, with the most likely good shows being second seasons (especially Durarara!!!, though I'm not looking forward to this as much as most of the show's fans) or stuff that continues from this season. For new stuff, there's Yuri Kuma Arashi (the new Ikuhara) and little else that catches my eye.
Well, wait and see.