They may be vastly outnumbered by the number of vocal OPs, but instrumental anime openings have plenty to recommend them. For those viewers who aren’t the biggest fans of J-pop, instrumentals can be far preferable. Their lack of lyrics also means that for viewers without a working knowledge of Japanese, there’s no need to peer at subtitles (assuming they’re there in the first place) while also trying to concentrate on sometimes fast-paced or frenetic visuals. And of course, for any anime viewer, the very fact that the vocal-to-instrumental OP ratio is so unbalanced makes the latter stand out purely by default.

That said, there are still a good number of instrumental anime OPs around, some of them better or more attention-grabbing than others. Based on a combination of the music itself as well as the visuals, I’ve managed to narrow that number down to my top five (plus an honourable mention) – a couple of which will hopefully be new to at least a few readers. Read More

Previously on Otaku Lounge, I wrote a post about my anime Top 5 Foreign Language Anime OPs. However, in order to try and keep the list as diverse as possible, I ended up discounting OPs that were performed in English by English native speakers. This is a companion piece to that post. (Admittedly, the title is something of a misnomer. It should really read something more along the lines of ‘Top 5 English-Language OPs Written and Performed by English Native Speakers’, but I quickly decided that was too much of a mouthful and went for the slightly less accurate version instead.) Read More

For whatever reason, there have been a ton of Favourite Anime OP posts out lately. These are always pretty fun to read, and I had thought of doing my own for quite a while now (in fact, I’ve been putting that off for the last couple of years, if not longer). And while I do intend to get there eventually, I thought it might be good to first write up a few different articles on the topic, each with their own specific theme. First up: my top 5 foreign language OPs. Read More