I haven't watched Haibane Renmei yet, but in the mean time, I did watch Yu-gi-oh ARC-V because I was hankering for some Yugioh action since the last time I watched Yugioh was back in the 5D's era. Reason for catching up with Yu-gi-oh is simple: I want to check out the hitherto new Pendulum Summon, which is basically a summoning method that allows the player to summon several monster simultaneously. There are a few things I have learned, namely that 1) The Levels have to be in between so a Scale of 1 and 8 means Level 2 to 7 monsters can be summoned, and 2) Pendulum Monsters go to the Extra Deck when removed from the field.
Before I watched ARC-V, I heard that the ending is seen as unsatisfactory by some people, though I didn't know why, which is why I am a bit more selective with what to watch by the time I almost finished covering the second season, while checking out the summaries for the rest of the episodes. I like that (many of) the characters since they are generally memorable and their deck themes are very good, and was surprised to see some older ones like Gem-Knight and X-Saber. I particularly liked Superheavy Samurai because of their focus on defence, and Performapals because they are very amusing and rather useful to boot.
The duels are also great due to the fact that it's also somewhat more action-oriented compared to past series since the main type of duel is an Action Duel, which is a duel that also uses the field as an advantage, so certain cards can appear to be used to the user's advantage. I feel the potential is not fully realised since many times the types of cards are helpful, and the unhelpful ones are only activated by the main character Yuya.
The show also featured five returning prominent characters (excluding minor ones), and of the five I feel that the two characters from 5D's are handled the best. I can't say much about the one from ZeXal since I didn't watch that one, but I wonder why they changed the characterisation of one of the GX ones, which was strange (though his archetype getting extra support is pretty cool).
I think I might catch up with the episodes that contained duels, since I mainly watched the episodes for the duels anyway.
Thank you for reading.