Otaking's Top 10 Anime (2024)

Back to Catalog

10. Un-Go

A Detective Story in a slightly futuristic post-war Japan. The protagonist is a detective who wants to reveal the truth no matter what and the villain is the CEO of a big tech company which works with the government at censoring the media for the sake of the public good and keeping the peace. Pretty prescient stuff. Came out in 2011. The protagonist has a shota and a crazy loli which turns into a big titted monster at times if that interests you. Watch the prequel OVA/movie only after you have watched the main series, which is like only 13 episodes each being 20-mins.

9. My Youth Romantic Comedy is Wrong as I Expected

This show on the surface has got the set up of a high school romantic comedy, with the protagonist, Hikigaya Hachiman in a club room with two cute girls but the protagonist is a cynical loser with interesting observations and entertaining methods. If you like some of his observations then read the novels too, it is full of those.

Only the first season is good but it stands on its own. The reason the second and the third seasons suck is because the girls suddenly start liking the MC, and it turns into shit-tier rabu triangle with beta orbiter waifus fawning over the MC and his mad skillz at like solving high school dorama in the edgiest way possible. The main girl, goes from a cool ice queen to a boring girl in love.

8. The Irresponsible Captain Tylor

It is basically a parody of Legend Of Galactic Heroes although I do not know whether it was meant to be. It’s a nice space-comedy about a happy-go-lucky idiot who is so lucky it looks like he is actually a tactical genius. It’s only like 26 episodes and I have rewatched it many times. Watch the dub, it is better than the Japanese version.

There is a sequel but it is shit, which you will notice is a trend. All of a sudden the humour is gone and everything is so serious in the second season. There is also film which ends on a cliff-hanger. The light novels have not being translated because these are some old novels, so I will never know what happened unless I learn Japanese which isn’t going to happen.

7. Great Teacher Onizuka

A totally wacky unrealistic comedy where a perverted 22 year old virgin ex-bike-gang leader violently teaches life lessons to his students. While totally unrealistic it is fun seeing him win over the students of his class one after the other. I don’t often say this, but read the manga cause the anime has not adapted all the story and instead ended it early with an original ending. At least the anime had the decency of providing an ending at all, original or not. Modern anime just adapts the first part of a story and then just stops with no proper ending even if there is no chance of a second season – basically asking you to go buy the source material.

6. Super Dimensional Fortress (SDF) Macross

Macross has fallen by concentrating on the idol culture rather than what made it good. The original series, also known as Robotech Season 1 (Robotech, a mentally less-intensive censored bootleg Anime Music Video version of SDF Macross for American audiences, with star wars tier “Force” stand in called ‘Proto-culture’ and made by an hyper-jew who won’t allow Macross merch to be sold in the Jewnited States of Murica).

5. Gunbuster

It has got cute sexy girls piloting giant robots, what more could one ask for?

The setting is basically a Japanese supremacist, globalist, Imperial, Star-Trek wank-fantasy. This was made in the 80s during the economic boom+bubble when Japanese nationalists didn’t have to deal out copium pills about why Japan was the best in the world.

The protagonist is this bra-less high-school girl who gets picked by her brain-cancer suffering coach to pilot a giant robot to avenge her dead dad who was an admiral in the Imperial Japanese Space Navy (talk about copium for having lost the war – also according to the lore ww2 happened because America attacked the Japanese port of Pearl Harbour and then lost the sensou (TL: Sensou means war)). It’s only like 4 or six episodes. The last two episodes are in black and white for “cinematic effect” at extra cost to the Studio Gainax. Did it work? I don’t but it is also one of the best endings evar. Gurren Lagaan, that anime about muh drill and muh dick, is an inferior bloated copy of Gunbuster by the same studio after all the talented people had left the studio.

The sequel, Diebuster, is also garbage solely made to milk the nostalgia of oldfags and loved by redditors the world over. It has nice OP though. Not as good as the orchestral music in Gun Buster though. Basically space travel is nothing that important to Otaku anymore because the millennium has passed over and technology (and so sci-fi) in general no longer feels special. Otaku have abandoned this reality from their dreams and their hopes have moved to a world like video-games now, hence why there are so many stories about dying and being reborn in a video game. Even the high-school comedy battle-harems of the early 2000s are gone because Japanese Otaku are ageing just like the Japanese are in general, as they get older highschool becomes less important but video-games remained a focus throughout.

This is why Otaku have an interest in technologies like Virtual Reality (however shitty it is currently) rather than space travel. I say this because the entire Otaku community came out of the Sci-Fi communities in Japan around stuff like Star Wars. The long-term effects of radiation sickness turned these Sci-Fi fans into Otaku.

On top of ruining 4chan, vidya has also ruined animu, mango, and light noberu (TL: Noberu means Novel). There should have never been a video game board on 4chan.

Anyway since this is supposed to be about Gunbuster, it is the definition of a rule of cool show. Its not too long and it leaves on a cheerful but tragic (when you really think about it) note until greedy fucks dug it up to make a cancerous modern anime about a protagonist without a single redeeming feature. The MC is basically a stand in for the modern anime fan (seriously the protagonist of the sequel is a fan of the of the protagonist of the prequel just like you!).

4. Area 88 (OVA series)

The best jet aircraft dog fights ever animated. It’s a two part OVA. Ignore the 3D CGI eye-cancer, meandering TV series modern remake of it that was made.

The ending of this animu is legendary too. I don’t want to spoil it but I kinda want to. Anyway the protagonist has quite the arc, from being forced to be a merc for an arab dictatorship in a civil war, to finally being able to taste freedom but to find it doesn’t taste that good. You know how a lot of crappy pacifist anime like Gundam and “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind” need to say that war is cruel and bad when the story makes battles look interesting, beautiful and glorious because they are deadly and on a grand scale. On the other hand we have Isekai trash anime like “Gate - Thus the JSDF Fought There!” which make war seem cool but by understating its cruelty it reduces war to basically a sport match rather than deadly battles. Well, Area 88 steps over both of these forms of moral syphilis.

The premise is that our protagonist is forced to be a merc jet fighter pilot for an arab dictatorship in a civil war. If he is able to inflict 100 million dollars of damage on the enemies then they will let him go free but every time his own aircraft gets damaged the cost of the repairs is subtracted from the value of the damage he had caused to the enemy thus making it very hard to reach the 100 million dollars. I am sorry if that makes no sense, I suck at explaining things but it will make sense when you watch the anime.

Also, WELCOME TO PARADISE.

3. Steins; Gate

College student Okabe Rintarou larping as mad scientist Houoin Kyouma does useless /diy/ projects like hooking his phone to his microwave and making the microwave rotate in the opposite direction. He messed with his microwave so much that it caused a rift in the space-time continuum allowing him to send 36-character long emails to the past and turn bananas into tastle-less green jelly shaped like bananas. Okabe uses the Japanese equivalent of 4chan, which is an anonymous text board rather than an image board like 4chan (basically it’s like 4chan but it’s all text and some ascii art, there is a Japanese imageboard called Futaba methinks but apparently it’s less popular than the text board). Okabe tripfags as Houoin Kyouma, the persona he is larping as, and he finds this other tripfag called John Titor. Titor claims that he is an American soldier from the future who has come to find an ancient computer called the IBM 500 so that he can prevent a space-travel war which led to a 1984 style dictatorship run by CERN, the European Union Organization for Nuclear Research.

There was a sequel series, called Steins;Gate 0, of course it was trash. All the 2ch humour was removed and the protagonist was an edgyboy who literally wore black all the time. Okabe was a chad in the first season, he larpedin white lab coat always ready to burst into evil laughter, pretending to have conversations with important people infront of strangers and 3DPG when actually no one is talking to him on the other end of the phonecall and he was just talking to himself, and to roleplay even when all hope is lost and CERN has sent feds, serial killers and terrorists to kill him. In the second season Okabe is a totally different character, a defeated virgin in black clothes who is concerned about getting ahead in life rather than saving his friends. The Okabe from the original series larped at a science conference blatantly disagreeing with the scientist about time travel not being possible even though he had no proof whereas in the second season season when Okabe is at a conference is, he is more concerned with sucking up to the scientist so that he might get work as an academic in a real lab rather than the larpy lab he runs in a room he rents above CRT-tube TV shop.

I don’t really care about whether the time travel shenanigans made sense. What made this animu top ten worthy to me is that it has some of that old otaku spirit. Like the whole series is set in Akihabara, and yes he is a self-insert whatever the fuck that means. The good in it is seeing a bunch of otaku dicking around and slowly stumbling across some conspiracy straight out of /x/ then to somehow by the skin of their teeth and sheer perseverance defeat the globalist technocrat kabal and their terrorist, fed, glowie underlings.

2. Neon Genesis Evangelion Plus The End of Eva

Directed by the Prophet Anno, peace be upon his name. A gospel for a new millennia blah blah blah. Rei-fags should go fuck a corpse. Asuka is best girl (Misato, Kaworu, Ritsuko etc… are just head-canon nonsense anyway). I have heard moot was an asuka-fag, if so that’s one more reason to like him (the other being that he copied a Japanese site (was it 2/5ch? Futaba? Who cares?) to create 4chan, nothing much else).

The End of Evangelion should be watched after the series, not before like I did (I watched death and rebirth first when I was 12 or something, which is the first half of the movie. Anyway once you are done watching both then watch a video which will explain wtf you watched. It’s nothing “2deep4u” (read: which doesn’t make any fucking sense) but obviously Anno et Gainax just retconned the explanation proper after they finished the series. Anyway the exact events in the series are not that important, because it’s mostly some kind Jewish Kabal sort of deal trying to destroy the human individual or something who cares.

Why does Eva matter? Because it showed that you could show Go Nagai tier sexual, perverted edgy stuff on Japanese television and get away with it. Previously you could only do this on OVAs (direct to video, anime sold as DVDs/video cassettes never to be aired on TV). Of course 80s OVAs are more violent and sexual (i.e. better) than TV anime is but you have to understand that by this point OVAs were dead because the Japanese economic bubble had burst and studio SUNRISE made like a thousand low-effort mecha series aimed at little boys whereas those who wanted to make something with some actual effort put in it just couldn’t get the money. For example Gainax ran out of money when making Nadia which made Anno suicidal and a better anime director. You have to understand that those otaku at Gainax and elsewhere had seen anime productions go so high with stuff like Megazone23 and DYRL Macross (which granted are just eye-candy).

A few shitty anime like RahXePonce tried to copy Eva and failed but stuff like Rumiko Takahashi (Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1/2) and others (e.g. Tenchi Muyo) actually had more impact on the future of anime than Eva. The only thing Eva achieved as I said is to show that you could get away with “adult” (read: prawn and violence) and Japanese TV. Of course NGE itself had its funding cut and its hour re-allocated for an off-screen sex scene (like you can’t see Kaji and Misato having sex but you can see her feet or something idk) but the show was popular and the official censors let it pass. Even the mass-produced Rei Ayanami clones in anime like Angel Beats are no longer that common.

In fact Evangelion was like the last new kind of mecha anime, after Eva mecha stagnated. Don’t give me that Gurren Lagaan reddit Naruto episode thread tier anime with Fairy Tail like battle scenes and messages less deep than those of motivational posters. As for Nadeshiko, that was just “subversion” (read: doing the opposite of the norm for its own sake), just like with TI Captain Tylor, it is hard for the parody to be greater than the thing it parodies.

Otaku stopped looking at the stars hoping for a star treck like future where their interests in Sci-Fi crap would lend them social status, and instead Otaku now have just become passive gamers – consuming the products produced by others rather than creating anything. Even the obsession that Otaku had about certain anime is dead, everyone just watches and forgets seasonal crap anime that have no real dedicated fandoms. Part of this other than modern anime being shit, is that they are just 12 episode promotional material for the source material (manga, or light novel or whatever). Basically any fan who is serious about a series has no choice but to abandon the anime and instead follow the source material… Most anime fans don’t even read the source material of course and only watch the shit-flavour of the month anime so they can post about it for Twitter followers and reddit karma.

In the end EVA didn’t achieve much other than making Hideaki Anno very rich, happy and a much worse anime director. Gainax itself died because the Shekel-hungry Japanese government busted them for not giving away their rightfully earned in taxes so the Japanese government could build bridges over every water stream in Japan and Tarmac to roads that go nowhere (out of control infrastructure building hoping to bring Japan back to growth or something).

1. Legend Of Galactic Heroes

One of the best space-operas out there managing to explore the themes of war, and democracy vs dictatorship. It’s not like Star/Gay Wars where the empire is unquestionably evil or Star-Talk/Trek where the federation is undoubtedly good. Also it is nice to watch an anime with men rather than female characters, less romantic teasing to eat up airtime. (inb4 manime is gay/was never a thing, kys moe-nigger-faggot-kike, you are the cancer killing animu, lol /a/ is already dead(i.e./a/ is basically r/anime cross-shit-posters).

Although some (retards) have said that they find it boring and like a documentary, this is just because of their modern attention span, there are plenty of gripping space battles between the fleets of the Free Planets Alliance and the Galactic Empire. The use of classical music during these is very classy and good. Almost every modern anime is turned into a retarded mess which is made so that subhumans on twitter will clip and share gifs of them. The climax in every modern anime is some cheaply earned emotional moment that will keep /a/utists talking like retards about “the feels in my feels.” It doesn’t help that modern anime is shorter (but not so short that the animators can do something creative with their budgets). Yes, this anime is 110 episodes. The longest OVA (Direct to video, i.e. not modern /tv/ anime trash but sold directly to otaku as dvds and video cassetes). Anyway unless you are some sub-human redditor (((ironic))) weeb then you ought to watch this anime. Too many new anime fans not having watched the classics has turned anime discussion forums into shit.

There used to be a list of anime that you needed to have watched to be part of the conversations. Now, everyone just talks about the flavour of the month shit-anime which is forgotten as soon as the new season comes. The cancer of TV anime is killing anime. There are way too many episodic series, and series which have no proper ending but exist only as advertisement for the source material. CG (Computer Graphics) eye cancer from the west is slowly creeping into anime. Digitally drawn anime looks so fucking soulless, undetailed, and hollow sometimes that the only reason a lot of modern anime is better than modern cartoons is because modern cartoons have declined as anyone with any seriousness about children’s entertainment has moved to video games, leaving cartoons to mentally unhinged politically motivated unartistic calart hacks. Anyway, the point is if you want to see how it is done then watch The Legend of The Galactic Heroes and gas all of the waifus you are not even loyal to in the least bit.

BONUS ROUND: Megazone 23

Watch just the first movie/OVA of Megazone 23. It’s a cool 80s sci-fi anime. Each of the four movies is by a different director and the first two are good. The first one in particular is good both in story and the eye-candy that will make all sakugafags coom. The virtual idol’s pop music is also pretty great. Japanese idols were better in the 80s than now.

BONUS ROUND 2: Welcome to the NHK

t’s about a NEET college drop-out getting sucked into otaku culture, online games [an mmorpg], visual novels, finally trying to make a game – failing at that miserably and in the end being forced to get a job at a construction site in order not to starve to death.

Otaking's Top 10 Anime (2024)
Top Articles
Latest Posts
Recommended Articles
Article information

Author: Carlyn Walter

Last Updated:

Views: 6002

Rating: 5 / 5 (50 voted)

Reviews: 89% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Carlyn Walter

Birthday: 1996-01-03

Address: Suite 452 40815 Denyse Extensions, Sengermouth, OR 42374

Phone: +8501809515404

Job: Manufacturing Technician

Hobby: Table tennis, Archery, Vacation, Metal detecting, Yo-yoing, Crocheting, Creative writing

Introduction: My name is Carlyn Walter, I am a lively, glamorous, healthy, clean, powerful, calm, combative person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.