Recommendation List
- By Irohma
- Category: Blog
- 2 comments
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Alright, let’s say you are new to anime, let’s say you have a friend who knows nothing about the industry. What should you watch? Where should they start from? Recommending anime is a tough task, perhaps even tougher than reviewing one. The reason is simple: not everything is made for everyone.
The detour there is to first understand what type of show you may end up liking. However… Japan is a weird place and anime is a weird media, there are pieces of work that are so bizarre or out of western standards they have entire genres dedicated to them. This complicates things even more.
My mission here is pinpoint good entry-level shows, works that are not overly otaku, not absurd, but also not dumb or boring. Maybe this is an impossible mission, but I’ll give it a try. The first thing I must do is create some sort of division. The first idea was to divide into genres, but that really doesn’t cut it. Many shows, and I mean MANY shows, fit the shoes of two or more genres quite easily. So my strategy here is to create a few type of watchers and recommend shows for them (I’ll keep the list updated).
Thriller Seeker
You want something to pick you up and never ever let you go until the very end. You want an action experience or something filled with tension and cliffhangers. You may not pay that much attention to complex history or characters, but require a bit of them to make sense and be grounded.
- Code Geass: A great twist on politics, mechas, and bizarre powers as a former prince rebels against an Empire that took over half the planet while using a power that allows him to give uncontested order to anyone.
- Death Note: A diligent boy finds a notebook with which he can kill anyone whose name he writes in it, starting his series of “rightful” cleaning while defying justice and hiding from the authorities.
- Kiseijuu: Sei no Kakuritsu: A bizarre story about a parasite who takes the place of a boy’s right hand and collaborates to fight against others of his kind who are replacing humans around the world.
Superpower Fan
You enjoy super heroes, fights of grand scale, a group of heroes overcoming classical villains and exploring new or known worlds in search for power or greater good. You want your shows to be more about a good deal of charismatic characters with exquisite superpowers than convoluted backdrops and serious stuff.
- One Piece: A charming tale of a young man, who wants to be King of Pirates, exploring the seas and recruiting members as he fights off government and multiple other foes.
- My Hero Academia: In a world where most of the population is born with some kind of special quirk, a quirkless boy struggles to become a hero and ends up inheriting greater power.
- Hunter x Hunter: A young boy goes out on an adventure to join the hunter society, explore and protect the land, and ultimately meet with his father.
Serious Heroes
You like superpowers, but you also enjoy a more grounded, serious, and dangerous kind of tale. Your favorite shows are more about heroes surviving against more powerful foes, using a decent amount of realism to an otherwise incredible setting.
- Fate/Zero: A dark show-off between mages and their summoned heroes for a magical device capable of granting any wish.
- Attack on Titan: Terrifying human-eating giants have cornered humanity and are about to make a new strike. A young group of heroes line up to fight them and uncover the mysteries behind their origins.
Military Mecha
You are fan of warfare, political conflicts, and a good deal of complex storytelling, but you seek something more than just tanks and guns. Mecha shows are some of the most traditional and popular in the industry, and they revel in being smartly realistic even with those human-shaped tanks with massive firepower around.
- Gundam Seed: Warfare between natural-born and genetically modified humans dragging two old friends to fight each other.
- Fullmetal Panic!: A tale about a military organization protecting a school girl who hides secret information from terrorists.
Fantasy Mecha
You like big robots, you like super powers, but you don’t want any of the complicated politics and boring dialogues. You want a machine that blasts aliens away, fight off magical entities, solve mysteries of supernatural origins, and defy the laws of physics.
- Eureka Seven: A world bustling with exquisite energy and bizarre coral-like entities has much to be uncovered by the people of the Gekkostate group.
- Tenkuu no Escaflowne: A regular school girl is thrown into a world where she gains clairvoyance and becomes a central piece in a war against a massive empire.
Star Traveler
You want to travel across the galaxy. You want tales about the distant future, about spaceships, galactic empires, and aliens. You wish for a show that is complex, developing itself over concepts that are just dreams today but may come to fruition somewhere along the road, or maybe only in your dreams.
- Terra e…: The quest of a group of mutants fleeing a computer-ruled society and searching for a long abandoned Earth.
- Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu: An epic scale tale of warfare narrating the rise of two geniuses commanders on the Galatic Empire and the Alliance.
- Uchuu Senkan Yamato 2199: An epic tale of a crew traveling to unknown space in order to meet those who may be able to save a devastated Earth from an alien foe.
The Pervert
You want sexual innuendo in your shows, some boobs, clever camera angles, gorgeous girls, some nude scenes, and sexual jokes. You are not looking for adult material though. This is one of the most common type of audience in Japan and maybe even in the west, so don’t be ashamed.
- Great Teacher Onizuka: The tale of a former street gang leader who decides to become a teacher so he could see more cute girls in skirts but ends up with a class worse than he is.
- Kill la Kill: A crazy and bizarre tale where people are oppressed by uniforms and clothing, within which a young girl go against the system to avenge her father’s death.
- Love Hina: A young man wishing to enter Japan’s most prestigious university ends up inheriting a dormitory full of girls, where one of them may be a childhood friend whom he promised to go together to university.
Lonely Dreamer
You wish for a romance, you want to share in the tale of a hero or heroine finding her soulmate. You like the drama involving relationships, you are prone to shed tears in moments of tenderness, and you may even look forward to a few tragedies to spicy things up.
- Planetes: The struggles of a crew of space debris collectors in a world starting space exploration.
- Golden Time: The tale of a boy with amnesia trying his new life at university, where he meets his new love but unknowingly runs into his former love as well.
- Ore Monogatari!!: The love-dovey tale between a huge, clumsy, and airhead boy with an overly cute and charming girl.
Heart Breaker
You are not satisfied by simple mundane drawbacks, you want more. More tragedy. More tears. More devastating events in the lives of the characters of a show. You may want to cry constantly, or maybe you need something truly powerful to make you shed a single tear.
- Ano Hana: The sad tale of a group of friends reunited by a ghost of one their former members to finish unsolved issues between them.
- Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso: The tale of a traumatized genius pianist brought back to action by a charming violinist full of energy and secrets.
- Grave of the Fireflies: The tale of two orphans during the late part of World War II as they struggle to survive in a world that hates them.
Casual Comedy
You wish to laugh, but you are not exactly looking for sexual jokes or nonsense. You want it to be natural, warming, and refreshing. You may even want a good deal of cuteness or drama to spice things up, or at least something to make the funny characters more enticing and charismatic.
- Gin no Saji: A smart daily life comedy of a city boy who enrolls to a farming school as a way to run away from his demanding dad.
- Servant x Service: A parody about the daily life of public servants of the Welfare Section ward in Japan.
- Hinamatsuri: A young psychic girl of tremendous power and questionable intelligence ends up living with a rising yakuza thug.
Sports
You enjoy the thrill of competitions, watching people test their skills against each other and rise in the ranks of a sport or world. You may also enjoy sports in general, looking forward to see a team of friends defeating opponents of scaling power and skill.
- Haikyuu!!: A short energetic boy joins the volleyball club of his new school to pursue his dream of becoming a great volleyball player.
- Chihayafuru: A young girl hones her skill in the traditional card game of karuta as she pursues her childhood friend and aims to be number one.
- Baby Steps: A nerdy boy starts out playing tennis and is involved in a world of professional tennis and the dreams of young players.
RPG Gamer
You lived in the times where tabletop RPG ruled and want something similar to it. Something with magic, swords, knights, and clashing kingdoms. You want the formula of Dungeons & Dragons to remain solid, not just a random comic attempt at it.
- Berserk (Original): A dark fantasy epic of a rising warrior and his best friend commanding a mercenary band amidst the war between two nations.
- Claymore: A dark tale of special women tasked with slaying powerful demons under the command of a mysterious organization.
Fantasy Explorer
You love fantasy. You want a tale about a fantastic land with mysterious creatures, exquisite leaders, and courageous heroes. You enjoy great characters and their development, but you pay more attention to the world and how it is detailed with each and every episode.
- Seirei no Moribito: The thrilling run of a lone bodyguard spearmaster and a prince who is said to bring doom to the nation if he is to remain breathing.
- Kemono no Souja Erin: The coming of age tale of a young genius girl as she befriends a powerful beast and becomes a threat to leaders of the land.
- Juuni Kokuki: The tale of a regular school girl taken to a world ruled by mystical kirins, where she is expected to become the queen of a nation.
Dark Crazy
You like shows that are dark, twisted, bizarre. They can make no sense whatsoever, or perhaps be so deep and convoluted it becomes your challenge to understand it in some way.
- Ergo Proxy: A tale about a distant and bleak future where automatons built to help humanity survive start to act on their own.
- Shinsekai Yori: In a distant future where society has crumbled after mankind developed psychic powers, a group of teenagers try to find their place in this new order, discovering secrets of the past and how the world went crazy.
The Courageous
You want to see something that only the japanese animation industry can offer. You are not intimidated by the weirdness and sometimes questionable things occurring in Japan and are up to try your luck into something unlike anything you’ve seen.
- Food Wars: In the world of cooking a young boy tries to follow his father’s footsteps and enters the most elite culinary school of Japan, where almost everything is decide by a cooking duel.
- Keijo!!!!!!!!: A young girl wishes to become rich by playing keijo, a sports where women try to knock one another from floating platforms in a pool, but only using their butts and breasts.
- Non Non Biyori: After moving to the countryside, a girl learns that her new school is compromised of only one classroom, where she befriends three other girls from different grades and start enjoying the peaceful life in the mountains.
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Oho boy! Now I have a list of anime to start watching…
I was wondering if most of this animes are on Crunchyroll.