What good anime are there to watch

Light Yagami wants to be a god. Right away, he begins to scribble the names of criminals in order to create a utopia without evil. Kusou Saiki just wants to live a quiet, ordinary life without standing out. Saiki does everything he can to keep his abilities hidden and direct attention away from himself, which often requires excessive mental gymnastics in order to appear average.

The Disastrous Life of Saiki K. Everything about Dorohedoro is bizarre. After a sorcerer cast a spell on Caiman, he wakes up with his human face replaced by a lizard head and his memories gone.

In order to undo the spell, Caiman embarks on a journey to find and kill the sorcerer who cursed him. Violent and gory but packed with humor, Dorohedoro is a revenge tale meets black comedy in the best way. Its greatest charm is creating an ensemble of deadly but quirky villains who are just as endearing as—if not more than—Caiman and his equally odd crew. His confusion—and distress—only grows when, after finding his mother dead in his apartment, he is transported 18 years into the past.

The stakes are high in both timelines, which only adds to the suspense of this murder mystery. But more than the whodunnit and time travel elements, Erased draws the viewer in with its depiction of a character who is initially closed off in life but slowly finds purpose through friendship and family. After eating any dish, the characters have sudden erotic responses that often include bursting free from their clothes for no reason.

Unfazed, Soma sets out to become the top of the school. Ask anyone well-versed in anime for a recommendation, and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood will likely be one of their first suggestions. Lucky for us, all 64 episodes of this adventure classic are on Netflix. The story follows brothers Edward and Alphonse Elric, who trained in alchemy starting from a young age with the goal of bringing their mother back to life. Together, the brothers set out on a journey to restore themselves to their original human forms.

In addition to its suspenseful plot and elaborate world-building, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood excels in creating a large cast of characters who each play a significant role in their emotional quest. Japanese con artist Makoto Edamura was quite confident in his swindling skills—that is, until he met Laurent Thierry.

With a striking attention to detail while illustrating the cities Edamura traverses—from Los Angeles to Singapore to London— Great Pretender boasts stunning aesthetics along with its twisty plot.

By juxtaposing the deeds of the scammers and the scammed, the series also prompts the viewer to consider if either party is on a higher moral ground. The last thing he expected when he entered the gym on his first day of high school was to find Kageyama, who enrolled at the same institution and is now his teammate.

But what immerses the viewer are the bonds that form with Hinata and Kageyama at the center, as each of the lead characters gradually lays down his pride and ego to become a better teammate and, more importantly, friend. Long silences fill the opening episode of March Comes in Like a Lion , aptly reflecting the emptiness inside of Rei Kiriyama.

Rei became a professional player of the game shogi, known as Japanese chess, in middle school. Now 17, he lives alone and has no friends at school. His mentor, Reigen, has no psychic powers but is an inveterate fraud and constant comic relief. Mob Psycho manages to be surprising at every turn, smarter and more thoughtful than any of its contemporaries.

And better-animated, too. The creator cut his teeth with the parody series One Punch Man, which is great. Mob is better. First aired: Episodes: 11 Where to watch it: Funimation. Most sports anime are comfortable, trope-y hang-out shows with a fun cast of characters that are content to trundle along for a couple hundred episodes. Ping Pong the Animation, despite telling a conventional story about a pair of friends trying to become champion ping pong players, is nothing like that.

And it probably looks like no anime you've ever seen. At first it may even come off as ugly, but stick with it to see the animation blossom in expressive, surreal ping pong matches that reflect the psychology of the characters as much as the real action of the sport. It has style to spare, but it's ultimately the relationship of friends Smile and Peco that makes Ping Pong an all-timer. First aired: Episodes: 26 Where to watch it: Hulu , Funimation.

The quintessential anime gateway drug. Cowboy Bebop is an ensemble series about a crew of misfit bounty hunters, scraping by as they meander around our solar system. The genre is as eclectic as the cast: generally it fits somewhere into the realm of a space western think Firefly , but one episode it may veer off into treasure hunting, then the next into horror and the next yakuza drama.

Cowboy Bebop gets silly and weird on occasion, but is overall more adult than most anime series, and more subtle with its themes than Japanese writers tend to be. There's a good reason it's still beloved enough to get a live action Netflix adaptation more than 20 years after it aired. And if you like jazz, be ready for the best soundtrack ever written for a TV show. First aired: Episodes: 26 Where to watch it: Netflix.

Evangelion is so monumental, so influential in the history of Japanese culture, that it's worth watching no matter what. Even if you don't like mecha shows about giant fighting robots, which is what Eva is at a high level. Even if you can't stand protagonist Shinji Ikari, a depressed teenager who can't deal with his hormones, his daddy issues and the insane save-the-Earth circumstances he finds himself in.

Even if you're disappointed that by the end, Evangelion doesn't really know how to follow through on the mysteries, themes, and characters it's developed along the way. There's just so much in Evangelion: it's dense with biblical imagery and psychoanalysis and what-the-hell moments that have inspired countless games and anime since the '90s.

After watching Evangelion, we guarantee that there's at least one reference in something you've watched or played that will belatedly make you go ohhh, now I get it. The best shonen teen action series currently going. My Hero Academia is the anime take on the X-Men, except most humans, rather than a rare few, develop Quirks, which are strange powers. The series follows a group of high school kids training to become the next wave of heroes, and thanks to a fun cast and brisk pacing, it's a prime candidate for binging.

My Hero Academia is unabashedly earnest, which in the wrong hands could end up trite, but here it just works, and will likely have you pumping your fists when protagonist Midoriya and his classmates fight with all their hearts. Maybe the most surprising thing about My Hero is that it stars an honest-to-god smarter, more nuanced take on Superman than we've ever seen in a movie or TV adaptation of the DC hero.

All Might is a treasure. Don't mind don't mind! Haikyu is a conventional sports anime, but tuned to perfection, with a cast of underdogs bonding over their love for the sport as they compete against increasingly skilled rival schools. The show really works because of the dichotomy of pint-sized, endlessly energetic spiker Hinata and arrogant setter Kageyama, who make an unbeatable pair as they learn to work together.

We promise you don't have to care about volleyball to love this show. They're just such good boys, and they deserve to win. You can't go wrong with either animated version of Fullmetal Alchemist, but the second adaptation of the manga, Brotherhood, is ultimately the better of the two.

It stays faithful to the manga's plot and moves briskly through an imaginative story that weaves together politics, mystery, war, and science or, let's be real, basically magic.

The heroes and villains using alchemy to reshape their bodies and the environment makes for spectacular and clever fights, and you can count on animation studio Bones to always make it look great. Brothers Alphonse and Edward Elric are the anchor, a pair of wunderkinds searching for a mythical philosopher's stone to repair the damage they caused to themselves in a transmutation gone horribly wrong.

What starts as a grand adventure slowly and confidently expands into a deeper story, as concerned with the morality of war and political corruption as it is flashy action scenes. First aired: Episodes: 74 Where to watch: Crunchyroll. Growing up hasn't been easy for Natsume, because he's an orphan, and also because he can see yokai, or spirits, that no one else can.

This makes him a bit of an outcast, but when he inherits a book from his late grandmother, his life suddenly makes a lot more sense. She could see spirits, too, and "bound" many of them to her in the Book of Friends, which is why they now hound poor Natsume. The simple premise of the show is that Natsume seeks out these spirits in order to restore their names to them and unbind them.

It's a show that manages to be melancholy and heartwarming from episode to episode and even moment to moment. It's a slice-of-life series with a touch of the supernatural, but what makes it great is how it uses those supernatural encounters to tell human stories. Getting to watch Natsume grow across many seasons keeps the formula from feeling rote. First aired: Episodes: 26 Where to watch: Hulu , Funimation.

Director Shinichiro Watanabe's follow-up to Cowboy Bebop is very nearly as good. It trades space for samurai-era Japan, and jazz for wonderfully anachronistic hip hop. Samurai Champloo follows the same loose structure as Cowboy Bebop, with a trio of misfits — wild ronin Mugen, quiet and precise ronin Jin, and chipper young girl Fuu — encountering all kinds of oddball situations as they travel across the country.

Most episodes are standalone adventures, but Fuu's central quest to find 'the Samurai who smells of sunflowers' gives it structure, popping up every so often.

The characters all have their own mysteries that slowly unravel over the 26 episodes, and the action scenes are some of the most stylish samurai battles ever animated. As in all Watanabe's shows, the music really sets the tone for the show, and his use of modern hip hop gives Champloo a wholly unique tone.

No show better exemplifies the Japanese theme of fighting spirit better than Gainax's exuberant, over-the-top mecha masterpiece Gurren Lagann. This is the same animation studio that made Evangelion in the '90s, but the two couldn't be more different in how they use giant robots. Gurren Lagann begins with humanity cowering in underground societies, scared of the surface above. It ends with giant and we mean giant robots in space throwing literal solar systems at one another. Every step of the way it's a story about the power of the human spirit, having the strength to never give up, and using that will — plus a giant fucking drill — to pierce the heavens.

The rare show that can make your heart soar with excitement and make you cry within the same episode. Every time you think it can't get more dramatic, more emotional, more over-the-top, it will exceed your expectations. You can enjoy watching of the high-level game of wits.

The young boy Satoshi travels all over the world with various Pokemon like Pikachu to become a Pokemon master. The season 1 started with 25 episodes in , and the newly-edited version is aired from the beginning of The season 2 of Re:Zero was broadcasted with 25 episodes in and The main character Subaru is sent to Isekai another world with no superpower except a certain ability. The story proceeds with the encounter with the heroine Emilia.

The stories focus on the mysterious adventures of the Joestar family. A main character varies by the part, but they all are the Joestar family. Unique characters and intense battle scenes are highlights of the anime. They fight with the enemies called Angels by piloting the giant humanoid robot Evangelions. The three anime movies were released: Evangelion: 1. Additionally, the final title Evangelion: 3. The first volume of the manga was published in , and there are now over 90 volumes sold around the world.

The anime adaption began two years later after the first manga was released, and over episodes have been aired since then. The whole story of One Piece can be divided into about 10 parts, and beginners can enjoy it even if they start anywhere. It proceeds with the adventures of the main character Monkey D. Luffy and his crews in the pirates world. There are Devil Fruits in the world of One Piece, which grant a superpower to those who eat one while the fruits unable them to swim.

Powerful fight scenes between the Devil Fruits eaters including Luffy are stunning. It is adapted into an anime from the novels written by Nisioisin Nishio Ishin. Monogatari means story or tale in English, and various bizarre stories are depicted focusing on unique charachers such as the high school boy Koyomi Araragi and several heroines.

Koyomi Araragi handles with lots of problems arising from apparitions called Kaii in Japanese. The apparitions like supernatural ghost have influence on the characters, and he saves them.

There are mainly 5 seasons of the novel and 3 of them have been adapted into an anime. In an interview, the director Akiyuki Shinbo said that he would like to continue producing the rest of the seasons as long as the original novel is being published. There is no action scene or supernatural event in this anime, but human drama is represented sensitively.

There are two parts in the anime: Clannad in and Clannad After Story in The story follows the daily life of the main character Tomoya and the heroine Nagisa in the high school. It reaches the climax in the second half of the anime, and touching episodes move you. It is totally worth spending the amount of time for 44 main episodes. The setting of Naruto is the fictional world of Shinobi Ninja , and the ineffective boy Naruto is growing by the help of many friends and masters there.

Naruto and other Ninja characters battle with various Ninja techniques using the chakra energy. Many anime fans may pick out Naruto as the top of anime especially for foreign people, and it deserves it. Nevertheless, Naruto yields the top position to a certain new anime being released. The advent of a shockingly quality anime surprised experienced fans all over the world in