All these people giving recs are doing it wrong. You can determine if an anime is worth your time by merely looking at the title and what the source material is and the following simple system:
Candidates start with 5 points. If they have a positive score after applying the system, they're at least worth checking out (although they will not necessarily be good). If not, you are likely wasting your time.
1) Every word in the title past the third is worth -1 point. This includes particles and abbreviations.
2) Each word in the subtitle is worth -0.5 points.
3) Any of the following words or close synonyms are worth -2 points on top of any other penalties:
Academy, Ability, Cheat, Dungeon, Elf, Game, Goblin, Harem, Hero, Idol, Isekai, Level, Loop, Maou, MMO, Mob, Online, Overlord, Party, Player, Re(used as a prefix), Reincarnation, "The Animation"(verbatim only), Vampire, Villainess, Virtual, VR, VTuber, Wizard
4) Subtract an additional point for every word that implies this is a remake, spinoff, adaptation or sequel, such as "Kai", "Gaiden", "2nd" (3rd, etc.), "New", et cetera.
5) Even though you already subtracted a point for "Isekai" in step 3. If the title contains the word "Isekai", subtract an additional 5 points.
6) Apply the following adjustment based on the source material:
History: +3 (Applying only to direct adaptations of historical events, not merely using historical theming)
Literary Fiction: +2
Original Work: +1
Other: +1
OVA: +0.5
Live Action: +0
Web Animation/Motion Comic/Music Video: +0
Comic: +0
Video Game: -1
Light Novel: -1
Writeup of someone's D&D session: -1
CCG: -2
Web Novel: -5
Mobile Game: -10
"Multimedia Project" (This is just a mobile game that doesn't exist yet): -10
Social Media Post: -100
So basically you're steering us away from all the series based on mangas based in turn on "light novels" based on fans writing on the website
Shōsetsuka ni Narō, "Let's Become a Novelist":
Fair enough, I guess, they're silly and unabashedly cliched and are not Miyazaki. But I watched a few and kind of liked them: How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom, I'm in Love with the Villainess, My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, Parallel World Pharmacy. (That's four different titles, to be clear.)
I could comfortably watch another right now, I'm tempted by Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon. But I would not like to watch GITS, which exists in my mind as a vague painful memory of a self-important plot about cyborgs and a lot of characters jumping around on rooftops and shooting at each other. It's a "neo-noir cyberpunk action thriller", as Wikipedia puts it, or in my terms "not any fun". But I guess it was seminal and genuinely important at the time.
Ha. Stuff like this is entertaining but it is not what I would call good. It’s like the reality tv of anime. Cheap wish fulfillment fan service.
There have been some legit good series recently that play with these fantasy genres, have solid writing and animation.
* Friern: Beyond Journey’s End - an extremely sentimental coming of age tale that explorers children raising parents, loyalty, and platonic love.
* Delicious in Dungeon - a really silly story that subverts the dungeon crawling genre by crossing over with the food/cooking genre and playing with all kinds of genre/tropes.
* Pluto - a classic scifi morality tale on what it means to be human. This series tried really hard to be a modern Ghost in the Shell. It was successful in some ways and fell flat in others. Definitely worth watching though.
There are lots of entertaining anime out now, but so little of it is well made or written. Maybe that’s ok though. I still watch lots of the low quality stuff because it’s like popcorn/candy and is easy to watch.
I’ll echo the titles you recommended, but given what the MC goes through in Re:Zero I’m not sure that it falls into the bucket of wish fulfillment nearly as much as most shows of its genre do. I can’t think of many people who’d want to be the MC.
If you hadn't seen Now and Then, Here and There, or Twelve Kingdoms, or read Red River, then maybe it'd seem fresh and interesting, but I dropped Re:Zero pretty early. Good genre fiction still has something to say about the real world, and Re:Zero felt like it was trying so hard to subvert genre expectations set by other fiction that it forgot that.
Ok, as someone who both loved Now and Then, Here and There and Twelve Kingdoms, I want some recommendations from you :) Those two series were really great.
But I do agree with you, they were great because they actually had something to say about the real world.
There's not a lot else like them in anime, so none of the shows I'm about to list are good for the same reasons that those two were good.
Shinsekai Yori was great, and a rare case of high-effort worldbuilding that actually delivers on its premise. Highly spoilable.
If Akiba Maid Sensou is not my anime-of-the-decade for this decade, I will be very surprised, but it assumes you understand both yakuza culture and maid cafe culture and I'm not sure what someone who doesn't would get out of it.
Hana to Alice, Satsujin Jiken might not even be anime, since it relies extremely heavily on 1:1 rotoscoping, but it is short and doesn't really look like anything else.
Gankutsuou also gets a ton of points for being visually distinctive, and (at least at the time of release, maybe that's not true anymore) being the most faithful adaptation of Dumas' original to video despite casting a blue-skinned space vampire as the Count.
Princess Tutu is a fantastic use of popular ballet as a framing device that was doing the whole 'meta-narrative' thing long before it was cool.
Mononoke (not the Ghibli film Mononoke-hime) is a good-looking take on the classic supernatural detective genre.
Id:Invaded is also a supernatural detective story, which manages to be entertainingly audacious without ever really feeling like it was just going for cheap shock value.
I'm not into anime, but I would like to see some recent series. But! I want an anime with adult MC, no power levels, no schools, not about magic, no mechas, no overtly sexual (inuendos, jokes). No exaggerated facial gestures. Something like the overall tone of Legend of the Galactic Heroes but more recent.
Give Vinland Saga a go, for some gripping historical drama.
Or Bartender: Glass of God (the ongoing 2024 series), for stories in a real-world setting.
For something more fantastical, To Your Eternity, an adventure that makes you feel and hurt. Frieren: Beyond Journey's End for an adventure that's both young and grown-up - it only came out recently, but has instantly been acclaimed as a modern classic.
For something more childlike yet endlessly creative, Delicious in Dungeon or even Ranking of Kings.
For proper literary sci-fi (despite featuring young protagonists), From the New World (Shinsekai Yori).
For true artistic cinema despite a Japanese high-school setting, Ping Pong The Animation.
Other gems mentioned that I second: ODDTAXI (a tightly written mystery-drama despite its art) and Pluto (serious thinking sci-fi with gravitas).
There are always a few upper-tier shows coming out each year that retain an artistic, mature bent. Not very many but at least they're there.
More seriously, no, you can't "determine if an anime is worth your time by merely looking at the title and what the source material is". Especially if you don't have anything to watch, and all the false positives (plenty!) have infinite negative value.
I have not. I have a completely different set of criteria for choosing manga because their production process is so different than for anime. I have a tendency to only buy physical copies, so if something never catches my eye in a book shop, or never makes it into a book shop, I will probably never even know it exists if it's not by an author I already know.
Candidates start with 5 points. If they have a positive score after applying the system, they're at least worth checking out (although they will not necessarily be good). If not, you are likely wasting your time.
1) Every word in the title past the third is worth -1 point. This includes particles and abbreviations.
2) Each word in the subtitle is worth -0.5 points.
3) Any of the following words or close synonyms are worth -2 points on top of any other penalties: Academy, Ability, Cheat, Dungeon, Elf, Game, Goblin, Harem, Hero, Idol, Isekai, Level, Loop, Maou, MMO, Mob, Online, Overlord, Party, Player, Re(used as a prefix), Reincarnation, "The Animation"(verbatim only), Vampire, Villainess, Virtual, VR, VTuber, Wizard
4) Subtract an additional point for every word that implies this is a remake, spinoff, adaptation or sequel, such as "Kai", "Gaiden", "2nd" (3rd, etc.), "New", et cetera.
5) Even though you already subtracted a point for "Isekai" in step 3. If the title contains the word "Isekai", subtract an additional 5 points.
6) Apply the following adjustment based on the source material: History: +3 (Applying only to direct adaptations of historical events, not merely using historical theming) Literary Fiction: +2 Original Work: +1 Other: +1 OVA: +0.5 Live Action: +0 Web Animation/Motion Comic/Music Video: +0 Comic: +0 Video Game: -1 Light Novel: -1 Writeup of someone's D&D session: -1 CCG: -2 Web Novel: -5 Mobile Game: -10 "Multimedia Project" (This is just a mobile game that doesn't exist yet): -10 Social Media Post: -100