READ THIS before asking for new anime to watch

Before asking for anime recommendations for the 9000th time, make sure you've experienced the classics. This site maintains lists of the current and previous season, as well as every series you ought to be watching, from the certified masterpieces and award winners to the popular and renowned.

Edit: Just for clarity, you do not have to have watched all of these before you make a thread asking for suggestions. This is just designed to cover most of the suggestions that people would post anyway in a generic thread. If you have more specific queries, that's fine, but just make sure you've looked into the shows in that genre, by that studio etcetera beforehand. This is merely a handy list of things you might like.


Spoilered below are a couple of the images to get you started. There are a few others at that link, but they're very similar and I know how lazy people can be. If you can't see the whole image because resizing is broken again, right click on it and either save it, or click:

Firefox - 'view image'
Chrome - 'open image in new tab'
IE - I think you have to save it to view it, because IE is retarded


General recommendations


By genre



Also, if you haven't signed up to MyAnimeList (MAL), you might want to now. It's partly useful to brag about how much anime you've watched and to share with others, but it's also a great tool for finding new anime yourself, and collates a lot of information like synopses, ratings, reviews and the best sub groups. Fakku's own MAL group for discussion and list checking (independently maintained by Tsurayu) can be found here.


This may have been done before, but you wouldn't have guessed.

Or Just watch everything that you can get your hands on, just like me. lol in result of this I've watched more than 500 animes.

Good or Bad, is a different matter.

XD

I'm with Kaimax. I watch whatever I can find. Too much of something from the same genre, I move to a different one.

I haven't seen people asking for new animes to watch. If I do, it's usually just for the past two seasons.

Oh I agree that you can't just go cherry-picking the best bits and avoiding everything else, but there's quite a lot in there that's 'must-watch' without being unanimously hailed as good.

I have seen a lot of threads for this, whether in IB or requests or random, and someone usually posts one of these pics after a couple of pages, so I just made this for reference.

Props, this should be sticky'd.

How the hell is Aria in "Must See / Infamous"?

I sense bias.

It's not bias, it's a really must see. Most people underestimate it just because it's "Aria", a story of Gondola rowers called Undines and their life around tours and daily life.

[font=Verdana][color=green]It really is a must see. Trust us ;)

Let's add a couple of oldies, but goldies:

Area 88 OVA (1985)



The Count of Monte Cristo crossed with fighter planes and the Dirty Dozen. The protagonist, an up and coming pilot with the fictionary Yamato Airlines, is betrayed by his best friend and made to sign up with a mercenary air force. Serving 3 years, or pay a million dollars for contract forfeiture are the only way to get out... pretty hard in an outfit where even the price bullets are coming out of your salary and most people are shot down (and killed) within a month.

Shin Kazama (voiced by Kaneto Shiozawa) does angst in a way that has gone out of fashion since it was too manly for the silver screen. While his character is on the screen it simply oozes desperation and frustration without having to rely on over the top hysterics or tantrums.

Granted there are breakdowns, but these are sparse and well warranted. Day by day, against his own wishes, he's turning into a hardened killer who can pull the trigger without reservation, so while he's earning his freedom he's also drifting farther and farther away from the life he wants.

Ninja Scroll OVA (1993)



An OVA that could've only been made in the boom of that decade. It's exploitive with explosive violence, with in your face nudity and occassional sexual situations that would never have passed the censors of *any* era. A fresh air from the overdone and ham handed fanservice that has come to dominate the industry twenty years later.

A wandering samurai teams up with a kunoichi from a ninja village after bad an ominous shits starts going down in the area... their opponents range from the horrible to the bizarre, with frequent touches of body horror.

It's the kind of mindless action flick that makes on cry out "Fuck Yeah!" The choreography of the action is superb, the Big-Bads outlandish and brutal and its directed with care and understanding that's not so easy to find nowadays.

What the fuck happened to this genre? This a primogenial example of titles that got a lot of us into anime in the first place. Cartoons with all the forbidden stuff that wasn't meant to be in animated works with explosive action and a splendor ideas and designs that live action simply couldn't duplicate.

Venus Wars (1989)



Your average war story about the stupid, aimless youth caught up in events bigger than them and finding out fame and glory ain't what it's made out to be...

So why bother? Because it's awesome! The characters are a tad on the side of stereotypical punks of the 80' but back then writers could still write good characterization while staying in tropes. A lot of work went into the various mechanical designs of all the war machines and to create a style for the Venusian civilization... something you won't see 'el all nowadays.

Especially tanks! Although outlandish, they're still more realistic than anything else in anime... boy, will you get a fear of crunching tracks and heavy armor after this!

The story itself is good, in a laid back fashion that won't spoon-feed its conclusions to you. Things are portrayed realistically, and finally the kids don't get a magical robot with plot armor to keep them sheltered... this is the big one, and when you buy it, you buy the farm.

Politicians are still scum, citizens are ground up in the big machine of the state apparatus... but at the end of the day, isn't there anything left worth living for? The kids have to find answers of their own and this is their story.

Abenobashi shouldn't be on that list. Episode 1 and two were great, and so was the last episode. Everything in between was just weird.

Dos, would you be okay with removing that must-see/classics part? It seems to be generating quite a bit of controversy that really shouldn't belong in this thread.

And yes, I wish for this to be stickied as well.

I respect whoever created those images. Those are very comprehensive not only of various genres, but also represent at least above-average quality.

Done, for the moment at least. Most of them are covered in the other images anyway, but I would ideally like to keep that image there for the way it breaks them down. I feel like there was always going to be some debate over the definition of what's worth watching with such a varied list.

A less rigid caption than 'must see' might be helpful, along with a disclaimer stating that while opinion is divided, there is some value in all of them. These are suggestions as much as anything; they provide some stimulus for research and debate elsewhere.

Okay so, I spoke with Jacob, and got him to change the title of the stickied suggestion thread. Which I happen to be more in agreement with; it's just an extensive opinionless list containing tons of anime, simply divided by genre. Hopefully now it will pick the attention of folks looking to watch new anime and reduce the ammount of "looking for anime to watch" threads.

To be fair, I had kind of dismissed that list as an endless catalogue of all the anime out there, which I now realise is not the case. However, I still think it would be useful to integrate the images with that thread (I'm not directly petitioning you Kuro, just raising the possibility to discussion). That list is great if you have a fast connection and a whole lot of time, but as someone who didn't start watching anime all that long ago and isn't particularly picky, it still seems nigh-on insurmountable.

These suggestions may be somewhat objectionable but they clearly aren't entirely without merit, and indeed there's another good image on that site which offers a more alternative take on 'best in genre'. Otherwise I foresee people making threads asking which one of 30 action animes they should watch first. They could be stuck at the end under something like 'not sure where to begin?', assuming stickied threads don't still unpin themselves with edits. :p