I just finished Assassin's Pride, and my word was it bland. It had such potential at the start - an interesting world (visually fascinating as well), political and social struggles, a strong personal motivation for the female lead, an unknown motivation for the male that could be explored, a rather expansive magic system of 'classes' which have a social hierarchy to them, some strong core relationships for conflict and character development... And then it forgot every one of its strengths in order to do what it thought made anime popular. So, lots of perversion, a female lead whose motivation largely switches to 'precocious crush' that could have been adorable if it had not gone somewhere, a male lead whose personal motivations are never explained in order to keep him as cardboard cut-out 'cool' as possible, a world that is largely ignored or rushed through in order to tell as much of the story as they could cram into twelve episodes, no tension building or foreshadowing due to the same, a magic system that is just left as 'they say weird words and then stuff happens', and then to top it all off, they apparently did not have any animation budget left for half of the major fights, leaving them clunky and boring (and, on one occasion, skipped - going straight from the start of the fight to its end in a completely different location). Not good.
Before that, I watched a few western animation series for a change. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power was excellent, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts was exceptional and Glitch Techs was adequate.
