All this talk and no mention of Case Closed? I loved that show. It was great. No matter how much you think you got it figured out, it just fucking blindsided you with some crazy twist. I also grew up on DBZ. Me and my friends always reenacted it on the playground and we would all argue about who got to be Trunks. I've recently been on a binge of Japanese culture in general, so I guess I'll check out some of the Anime you guys are mentioning. Fist of the North Star and Ninja Scroll sound awesome, maybe that's where I'll start.

Not saying you are particularly at fault here, but seeing people say "all this talk and no mention of [specific whatever] here?" is pretty annoying in these extremely general threads. There's about a billion animes out there, and there are literally hundreds of huge, extremely well known animes that haven't been mentioned in the mere 40 or so posts thus far made.

aside from hentai, I don't watch anime
but I do like "mahjong legend akagi", I doubt anyone here saw it...
that's only because I'm a die-hard gambler...

That's awesome dude, I also love the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game, I have a macro-monarch deck. It's actually really good as its anti-meta and the comic shop I play in have people that rely too much on the graveyard, suckers lol. And yea dark hole is legal, for now at least.

I don't want too much anime, I'd rather read manga. My favorite ANIME of all time is FLCL, what a bizzare show. Trigun is also great. If anyone knows anything on the same level of humor/bizzarenes as FLCL, I'd be glad to know1

Really??? REALLY???
I mean WTF. Well I guess it's like saying thrash metal is MUCH BETTER than death metal... It's about what each one likes...

I haven't seen Captain Tsubasa mentioned... How come??? Even though I'm not a fan of soccer it was also one of my first animes, and the alternative ending it's just... Well, way better than the original...

Ok I'm not gonna state my fav animes (you can check it out in the last link I posted in this thread), but I will say that I'm watching Gantz right now.


Slow... SLLLLLLLLLLLOooooooooooooooooowwww

Slow like the fucking first season of Initial D god damn this show is slow. Analyze every god damn thing from someone running to a long drawn out scene where all that happens is the character gets scared. Still fun if only for the characters (the lead guy is hilarious). I remember seeing the first four episodes 2 years ago in AIT when another soldier introduced it to me, but only now am I seeing the entire show. Think I'm on episode 12 right now, and I got way more time on my hands to sit through every one of these drawn out, multiple arch episodes.

Tits, a horny lead character, and a bunch of situations with some realistic reactions and a whole lot of retarded ones (countless times something could be avoided by merely shooting the fucking monsters).

Gantz is a case where I've ALWAYS heard the manga is about 3000 times better.

Not to mention going into the show, you should know right off the bat it's probably not going to be conclusive at all, barely covering much from the manga.

Claymore was the same, except they changed shit so horribly towards the end derailing from the manga, that they've pretty much made it impossible to adapt more of the manga to make more seasons. Haha, wonderful.

I forgot about the mighty Record of Lodoss War. The original series was one of my favorites as a kid.

Never got in to Manga, preferred Comics, but the Berserk manga was pretty good. Just went on for way too long. Anime was great too.

I liked the concept definitely, it was highly appealing to the 15-year old RPG-nerd that I was. However, the anime seemed very childish compared to the York Shin ark, for example, and not in the same way as the early TV series either but rather in the DBZ kind of annoying way. Surely it was better and much more complex than DBZ, but many things I found annoying. Hisoka was turned into an annoying idiot, a wimp even, and Bisuke is still probably the most annoying character in the series.

I recently finished Air Gear if anyone has seen that, I thought it was pretty good. Also, trigun is badass. I think i've seen every gundam episode they ever made, and actually collected the gundam models. unfortunatley you have to go into mall stores like Too Cool, and i simply cannot go in there by meself. If i did, i'd throw on a Legend of Zelda hat and steal an Asian. Plus the model in there are expensive as hell.

Yeah, you should read the manga. It's made clear in the manga that Hisoka is intentionally playing dumb, and for that matter so is Bisuke, though she does so habitually. She especially cultivates the "cute helpless little girl" image to catch opponents off-guard, when really she's a fucking scary musclebound giant in her 40s. The problem with the anime adaptation is that it's got to show you things that the wordy manga just flat-out tells you through narration or dialog/monologue, and a lot gets lost in translation.


Oh god yes, Gantz is notorious for this. The manga is pretty good, though it gets really weird a lot of the time and not always in a good way, especially lately with the full-scale alien invasion of Earth.

Also if we're going to talk manga, Junji Ito demands mention, hands-down the best horror manga author I've read. Uzumaki is really fucking disturbing, pretty much Lovecraft meets Japanese body horror. They made a live-action movie of it apparently, and it's supposedly decent, but in no way captures the full effect of the manga.

Speaking of live-action movies, aren't all you guys looking forward to the Cowboy Bebop movie, starring Keanu Reeves (yes, really) as Spike?

See, I heard they were doing that i think about 3 years ago now, i figured it was just a rumor. Where did you hear it? Not that don't beleive you, but after hearing it for so long i want to see it for myself

It's all been officially confirmed. Go look at the Cowboy Bebop page on Wikipedia, that should have links to the official sources. It's such a comically bad decision that I am actually perversely anticipating it, just to see how fucking shitty he is in the movie. Watch him try to play Spike as Neo!

I did. That one, and Kaiji. And I've read quite a few things by Fukumoto (the author of the original Akagi manga). Once you get past the art style and the fact that he basically draws no more than ten different faces in total and reuses them in every manga, he creates good stories with a feeling of "epicness" in the way that the main characters fight to accomplish their goals. Now if only someone properly translated the Akagi manga, or at least the arcs not covered in the anime... And Gambling Emperor Legend Zero needs translations too.



I think I recall there were plans to do a second season that would somehow fix the derailing and adapt some of the events from the manga that take place after the Battle in the North... No idea if it's still gona happen, though.

And on the topic of Keanu as Spike... The guy's supposedly a big fan of the Bebop anime. Not that it means anything, though. But I'm more curious (in the "let's see how bad they can make it suck" sense) about Leonardo DiCaprio being involved in a live action version of Akira.

Hahaha, see i don't even know if i could stand to sit throught that. I can't figure out if it's gonna be so bad its funny, or just me sitting there face-palming over the fact the RUINED this wonderful TV series.
Haha, All-star fantasy cast, Go!
Cillian Murphy as spike, Vin Diesel as Jet. Althought i can't really imagine the two in real life anyway

Just finished the Gantz 26 episode set. God damn, I HATE these anime cliffhanger endings. Berserk was by far the worst when it came to that, but this one just left me wanting MORE. Damnit, and I researched a bit of the manga and it's way more detailed, flesh-out, and involves a whole lot more, which I really would want in an anime since I sometimes get really bored reading mangas (unless they're hentai-oriented ones).

As for the live action CB movie...

Oh, to XnXXeogred, LOGH is... it's tastier than the Rice Krispies and Ferroro Rochiers I'm eating right now.

Finally, I got SOMEONE to watch LOGH on MA. Enjoy it and preach it!

If you don't mind the old you'd maybe dig Votoms too, probably my favorite mecha series. Notorious for being one of the more realistic ones and unlike Gundam where characters stick to 1-2 machines throughout the entire series, the main character in Votoms goes through like 20-30 "AT's", they just get blown up, break down, or he can't bring them along. They're just treated like tanks. The last arc has a lot of crazy Nietzsche influences which I loved! Chirico is basically Rambo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVpTnIsvYSw

I can't get enough of the music either, weird mix of sci-fi synth and jazzy stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GPJ1VAhH9M

This darker stuff just makes me oddly think of Super Metroid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_T8aQrWolU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOG9ahfIzBg

Speaking of live action, Spielberg is supposed to be doing something with GITS, along with James Cameron potentially doing something with Alita ... I fucking hope nothing comes out of both of these.

Just read the damn Berserk manga, too. The anime series for ongoing manga are necessarily going to be cliffhangers, because the mangas haven't ended yet!

Besides, the art in Berserk is phenomenal. Stuff like this and this and this and this simply don't have the same impact in anime.

Supposedly some new Berserk anime is in the works, but no real info on it yet from what I've seen... whether it'll be a reboot, just a movie or OVA, who knows.

It's definitely one I want to read someday. Endless stuff is hard for me to get motivated about though sometimes and I've heard from a friend really into it, the tone of the manga shifts a lot over time. Always sounds like he doesn't like the new direction it's been going lately. Supposedly it's like dark fantasy in the beginning, and then lots of fairy magical ("high fantasy"?) stuff later on? lol. But yeah I'll have to see it someday myself.

Claymore's art is kind of similar... and it's a monthly manga at the least so it's consistently good looking, but yeah Berserk seems to be way above the norm.

Well, the manga had a couple of hiatuses and it's sort of in a lighter-themed part right now, after a bunch of really heavy shit. It's probably the hiatuses and general impatience that has your friend down on the series right now, and I can sympathize with him. Before when I was reading through the series I would easily plow through a whole volume in a day, now that I'm caught up to the current issue I have to wait 2 weeks for each individual issue, plus there were a few multiple-month hiatuses (nothing as bad as HXH, though), not to mention what's going on now isn't very hard-hitting, compared to the previous arc. It's obvious that it's ramping up to some extremely epic confrontations, though, so there's no indication the series has jumped the shark as a whole.

well, I know I loved it, but seems that even people who never heard of mahjong like it too... but I don't get that...
how can someone enjoy the whole story of akagi if he can't follow what the hell is going on???

I used to watch a lot of it when I was younger, and now I've recently gotten back into it due to my fiance. Some of the more recent series I've gotten into are Chrono Crusade and some of the CLAMP stuff which sucks, but some of my favorite series are: Outlaw Star, Silent Mobius, Akira, Tenchi Universe, GTO, Cowboy Bebop, Dragonball, Crest of the stars, and the original Gundam series along with some spinoffs during the One Year war saga. Gundam's latter series G Gundam and Gundam wing really sucked.

Most of the anime I've watched has been what airs on Cartoon Network/Adult Swim. Most of that has been crap though except for Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, both Fullmetal Alchemists, Paranoia Agent, FLCL, Code Geass, Neon Genesis: Evangelion, Eureka Seven and the first 20 or so episodes of Bleach and Naruto. I also used to be obsessed with Dragonball as a kid and have seen every episode of all three series with the only one not butchered by censors on CN being DBGT though now can't stand any of them.

Off of Cartoon Network I've only seen a few series. Those being Witchblade, Beserk, Noein, Elfin Lied, both Hellsings, Iria: Zeiram the Animation, the Slayers and Speed Grapher.

I also enjoyed the movies Tokyo Godfathers, Grave of the Fireflies, Paprika, Perfect Blue, Princess Mononoke, Howls Moving Castle, Steamboy, Castle in the Sky, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Vampire Hunter D and Akira.

I really need to hunt down the DVDs of some of these since its been years since I've seen most of them.

Mahjong-illiterate fellows (like me, BTW) probably watched a fansubbed version with a bazillion translator notes explaining what "riichi", "tsumo" and [insert long-ass hand name here] mean. It's probably more enjoyable if you already know that stuff, however.
And then there's those guys that watched a version that didn't have any explanations and still liked it. That I really can't understand. Maybe it's enough for them that Akagi is badass and awesome (which trascends mahjong, they make it so obvious that even if you don't get what he did, you know Akagi just did something badass and awesome).

Haven't really watched much anime to be honest, however I did watch Elfen Lied not that long ago and I thought it was actually really good.

Been meaning to watch a couple of suggestions made by my friend such as Evangelion, so I might get around to it these holidays.

I also want to watch all the episodes of Gantz after watching the hilarious abridged series on youtube, which my friend also showed me.

Oh christ, why not go all the way and take Arnold? That would've at least been amusing. Fuck, I wonder who's going to be Jet. Bruce Willis?

Vin Diesel actually. I don't know if it was officially confirmed, but that's what the rumours said, IIRC.

Like I posted above, it's a mixed series (go for the manga instead). Unclear finale, really slow episodes drawn out over 4-5 episode fights, and pretty stupid characters (when it comes to taking actions fast). At the same time, it has pretty good characters (namely the horny lead character that has the most development), it's pretty funny up until the 3rd battle (~ episode 17 iirc) when it really becomes a dark show, and lots of gore and nudity, which is a good thing.

(Spoiler)However, one of the best moments is when the lead character is stuck in a hallway of an abandoned house during the second battle and he ends up being surrounded by the enemy. Then he sees the boss of the battle - this big, scary ass looking bird - and seeing him try to get out of that situation is just hilarious as hell(Spoiler)

Considering my tastes in Anime below, anyone care to recommend something? I haven't watched any new Anime in a long time.

Loved:

All Studio Ghibli/Miyazaki films, especially: Nausicäa, Castle in the Sky, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke
Tokyo Godfathers
Cowboy Bebop
Death Note (first half)

Liked:

Death Note (second half... yeah it goes a bit downhill, but still good)
Full Metal Alchemist
Kenshin: Samurai X (OVA)
Visions of Escaflowne (series, not the movie)

Didn't really hate per se, but didn't get into:

Witchhunter Robin
Paranoia Agent
Berserk
Legend of the Galactic Heroes

Hated:

All kiddy stuff like DBZ, Pokémon, Naruto, etc.
Trigun
Kenshin
Elfen Lied
Lain
Ninja Scroll
Vampire Hunter D (both old and new)
Lodoss War
Ghost in the Shell

Hated with a purple fucking passion because it's really fucking terrible in every way:

Evangelion

Man, Hellblazer must love you.

Try Black Lagoon, though you've probably heard of it.


Watching Darker than Black right now (something I told myself I'd do in the last anime thread) and it's... underwhelming. Kind of a shitty concept, and all the main characters are completely deadpan. None of them have any real emotion at all, which I guess is supposed to be in character, but c'mon. The throwaway characters of each 2-episode arc has more memorability. Fight scenes are also short and underwhelming, which is crap, and the animation is smooth but pretty bare. Thought this was going to be more eventful but apparently not. I'm on the Private Investigator episodes (7-8) and well, it's still a decent show because they'll throw some comic relief your way.

After I'm done with this series, I'm going full on in LOGH. Don't think I'll really be engrossed in it though because there is so much shit to think about.

Have you seen Grave of the fire flies by Miyazakior Akira? Along with the Cowboy movie, there were plans for an Akira movie starring Leonardo Dicaprio sometime next year.

Seconding the recommendation. And regarding Darker than Black, I'll be a bro and give you some advice: the four OVA episodes that go between seasons 1 and 2 are still kinda good, but the second season is worse than the first and the end is pure trolling. I could also speak about the end of the first season, but since you're already watching the show it's better if you actually experience it. It'll probably remind you of something.

Monster, only read the manga myself, but the anime is said to contain minimal filler and to be quite good as well. Its quite like Death Note, but far less faux intellectualism and contains more realism...

Morrigan, have you tried anything by Naoki Urasawa? Monster and 20th Century Boys are both A+++ manga titles in my book, and though I haven't seen the animes, they're generally acclaimed by fans of the manga (and fans of anime in general). Urasawa's a master of mystery, keeping you guessing pretty much the whole time. Each revelation tends to raise as many questions as it answers. He's also great at creating very human and likable characters, both heroes and villains and in-between, a lot like Miyazaki. Monster involves the solving of a series of gruesome murders, while 20th Century Boys focuses on a group of childhood friends who went separate ways as adults, and the protagonist has reason to believe one of them is now doing some rather heinous things, though he doesn't know who specifically. I'd really avoid looking up any information on either series, as it would be very easy to spoil them for yourself.

EDIT: Ha, someone beat me to Monster.

It's nearly shameful to call oneself an anime fan these days, however I would call myself such. I am tired of many of the popular tropes and prevalence of moe/fanservice, but there are still many great series out there. Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, and Monster are all top-notch, and can be appreciated by anyone, anime-fan or not. Other favorites of mine are Akira, anything from Studio Ghibli, and Berserk.

Further about the "shameful" thing- it's not that liking it itself is shameful, it's just that identifying yourself as one draws the wrong crowd and puts you in a group with a very poor public face. I would never seek out other "anime fans", as most that describe themselves as such are exactly the kind of "anime club" japanophiles that make everyone roll their eyes.

I'd be curious to have a little more detail here, because originally I hated GITS too after just seeing the first movie (several times throughout the years, kept "wanting" to like it I guess) but after watching Stand Alone Complex I had a completely new outlook on the whole franchise. I'm not the biggest fan of director Mamoru Oshii, whom did the GITS films (and Patlabor movies seem to be popular), with his stuff you can pretty much expect 0% out of the characters which brings that stuff down a lot for me. But SAC was totally different, I mean even in the manga Motoko is a sex craved bisexual ditz, which you don't see at all in the movies, and she was a little sassier in the SAC series so she was cooler. Simply put I thought SAC actually had character, then I appreciated the movies a little more afterwards.

Blah, I'll stop there in case you've already seen SAC and hated it.

You should definitely consider Monster. Death Note as much as I enjoyed it myself for the sheer over the top hilarity, is child's play compared to Monster. Still need to read 20th Century Boys myself which all my friends seem to say (somehow) outdoes Monster... but I'm hearing an anime might be made eventually, so hopefully that happens.

Boogiepop Phantom is pretty cool, one of the only legitimately good mystery/horrors I've seen.

Gungrave shares a lot of staff from Trigun, but I liked it a lot more. It's a little more serious, but if you want something that's just pure fucking grim and gruesome, Texhnolze is awesome. Fans of that seem to like Ergo Proxy too, which was okay in my book. Kind of slow at times and left way too open sadly.

And for everyone I would highly recommend checking out some old Leiji Matsumoto movies that I think outdoes some of Miyazaki's stuff, Galaxy Express 999, Arcadia of My Youth, and Queen Millennia (which was like a crazy sci-fi take on the book of Revelations). All his stuff is pretty weird sci-fantasy if you want to call it that. He's the creator of Yamato if that says anything. And all this old stuff of his has amazing music!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGwF2VEgSS0 (this whole OST reminds me a little of FFVI at times, lol).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjzOfmQ9d6Q - prelude to the end of the world!

I believe in fascism only because in enacts the right to have an opinion like this.

Why would you hate Trigun?, tons of laughs in the first half, then a nice serious and dark second half, i thought it was fucking great