Have any good adult animes come out these past few years?
There's always been a lot of gross stuff but I'm starting to lose faith in the medium when I see stuff like Mushoku Tensei being praised as wonderful in the mainstream, the latest few seasons have felt like complete garbage.
First of all, I'd slightly push back on the way you've framed your question. I agree there's a ton of crap in the world of anime, but whether a show has been created with care and thoughtfulness doesn't necessarily correlate with whether or not it contains "adult themes" that make it unsuitable for kids. I mean, Evangelion is considered a classic despite being aimed at a teenage audience.
With that caveat, and bearing in mind that preferences are extremely subjective, here are a few recent shows that I'd suggest checking out:
The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl (a surreal interpersonal comedy/drama movie, from the writer and director of The Tatami Galaxy)
SSSS.Gridman (a very loose reboot of a 90's live-action tokusatsu series, with a lot of stylistic homages to Evangelion; has a sequel, SSSS.Dynazenon, which is currently airing)
Girls' Last Tour (a slow, contemplative journey through the ruins of a post-industrial civilization)
Thunderbolt Fantasy (although it's debatable whether this one counts as "anime"; fantasy puppet wuxia, from the writer of Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Psycho-Pass; it's deliberately kind of over-the-top, but with a great command of pacing and characterization)
I'm depressed by the state of anime. It seems the industry has generally taken "adult" to mean violent. I grew up watching the gruesome stuff. But the industry still seems to be in that edgy teen phase 99% of the time (3 decades later) and they have no idea how to handle adult themes without copious amounts of blood.
Stuff like Time of Eve or Planetes are like beacons of light in a sea of shit.
I would say quite a few, but they don't really seem that way.
Shuumatsu Nani Shitemasuka? Isogashii Desuka? Sukutte Moratte Ii Desuka? - might look like another lightweight fantasy harem story but actually has one of the best romantic pairs recently and handles some pretty hard topics.
Actually I would say a Shield Hero is another one. It might look like yet another cookie cutter isekai show, even with some of the heroes being summoned taking it like if it was just a game. But it turns out it's a real and rather brutal feudal world where your actions have real consequences and a lot of people have very insidious evil and inhuman agenda.
Hell, I would actually even call Kemono Friends (series 1) an adult series. What looks like a funny child series with anthropomorphic animals turns out into something much deeper once all the various hints and fragments of information start to fall in place.
Recently? Attack on Titan might be one of the best. It's a little too shounen-ish at times, but the setting is pretty mature and has absolutely no fan service. I've heard Vinland Saga is also great. The Promised Neverland is not about adults, but it's a very serious show and I personally liked it a lot.
Unfortunately, the rest of my backlog is mostly just older shows I've been meaning to watch for a while. Golden Kamuy is probably one of the newest and it's still not that new. Same for Parasyte, which has some of the best body horror I've seen ever. High on my list is also Shin Sekai Yori, which I've heard nothing but praise for.
For a recent anime that's a pretty good nab I'd actually suggest RE: Zero - it also starts out a little bit too shounen-y but gets really interesting in its exploration of both our relationships with others, pain and death. As someone who really enjoyed philosophy in uni it poses some really interesting questions.
I'm also interested but not yet totally committed to Tower of God - there's some really neat stuff there, along with a lot of shounen - but I think it's a pretty solid production all together.
Adult as in serious and less mindless tropes and entertainment to touch on more philosophical topics?
Wonder Egg Priority comes to mind but due to production delays the final episode won't be coming out until a few months so it will leaving you hanging for the conclusion. In this age of gatcha-game, manga or light novel anime adaptations it's a rare anime only series. It follows teenage girls fighting what are essential nightmares with poppy color and well animated scenes but it's a symbolic battle with serious issues such as hikkomori, homosexuality, sexual abuse and suicide.
Psycho-Pass. Sci-fi future where everyone's got a psychological profile built & monitored by a computer system, used for all the things you'd expect it to be, including to nab criminals before they crime. Our protagonist is a young, idealistic woman who's become a cop, basically. She'll be leading a squad of people whose profiles are considered dangerously outside the norm, whose job it is to catch other deviants (can't have normal-psych-profile people exposed to that kind of violence, after all, and anyway it takes a deviant to think like a deviant). It goes from there.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica if you're into Anime-deconstructing-Anime. "What if Magical Girl... but actually, when you think about it that's entirely horrifying". There've been a bunch of other attempts at similar things, usually not as successful.
Vinland Saga for heightened, violent historical drama.
Mushishi if very-very-Japanese things aren't a turn-off. Largely episodic series about a guy who deals with dangerous spirits. Which I know reads like it'd be terrible or "oh my god not another one of these shows", but it's not. Slow-paced, brooding, bittersweet.
Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day. Short slice-of-life series about kids, but actually about accepting loss. IDK how "adult" it is, but it's pretty good (I mean actually-good, not anime-good).
Carole and Tuesday. Again, not sure how "adult" it is but it's just charming and heartwarming, while also not being terrible, which is a rare enough combo in any media to be worth a look, I'd say. From the creator of Cowboy Bebop, and also heavily music-focused.
May not look like it from this list, but I don't actually watch that much anime. I know there's a fair amount of really good stuff I haven't seen, plus a huge pile of OK-but-not-great. I keep up with a couple ongoing series I didn't put on this list because they're definitely not aimed at adults (My Hero Academia, for instance). I find it's really hard to find good recommendations for anime unless they're personal recs from a person I know well—but I also find that's true of most other genre-fic sorts of things. Recommendations from Internet randos or "best-of" lists of fantasy are often (IMO) full of garbage, and sci-fi's barely better. Ditto comic books.
I'd recommend Megalobox 2: Nomad as a rare gem, much more so than its first season. It takes a classic underdog story then asks: What happens after the hero wins?
It's an adult story. A story of homelessness, of community; of addiction, of compassion; of parenthood, of adolescence. And there's some boxing.
I've stopped following anime for several years now. The trajectory of one punch man from it's humble doodle-like beginnings to mainstream speak volumes about the state of commercialization these days IMHO.
The isekai genre is definitely overused at this point, just as slice of life got done to death before it.
Lately, I've been having more luck w/ manhwa (Korean manga). If steampunk sci-fi with social commentary plot is your cup of tea, I've been finding Leviathan enjoyable.
> The isekai genre is definitely overused at this point
Yet somehow we can't get enough of it!
I mean, I know I'm a sucker for isekai. Some of it is poorly animated with terrible stereotypes (for anime) and far too much fan service but it's not isekai that's cliche it's the story that's being told inside of it that could be.
I'd argue that isekai is one of the best and truest forms of sci-fi: Instead of just "drama, in space!" or "drama, in the future!" isekais are (normally) answering the question, "what if?"
Like, what if you were reincarnated in another world but you weren't human? What if you were a monster? Or a machine? Or immortal? Overpowered because of nature or overpowered because of nurture (i.e. the ability to carry forward knowledge from this world)? The possibilities are endless!
There's so many great isekai anime that explore these and other questions. Some get quite detailed and realistic (in terms of emotions or the sorts of problems one might run into) while others are more about comedy or relationships (again, "drama, in <another world>!").
Some of the more interesting aspects/concepts of isekai anime that I've watched:
- Main character is not the only one that was brought to another world *but the others who also came are from completely different alternate universes* (Shield Hero).
- An *entire group of people* get sent to another world (Arifureta, So I'm A Spider, So What?, Grimgar)
- The other world is *super early* feudal-ish (so primitive they don't know how to make paper or even crochet... yet) and the main character remembers all the arts & crafts stuff her mother and grandmother taught her (Ascendance of a Bookworm). Hehe: How well do *you* understand the process of making paper (think you could figure it out in that situation? =)
- What if your mom came to the other world with you? (this one is actually so over the top and ridiculous but the question itself is kind of interesting: Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?)
Some of those aren't the point of the anime but they're interesting questions/situations nonetheless.
I'll admit that I do like the premises of various isekais - kumo desuga nanika (I'm a spider so what) and honzuki no gekokujo (ascendance of a bookworm) that you mentioned are in fact two of my favorites - but it's worth remembering that these are light novel adaptations. Personally I think there's a bit of loss of "magic" directly attributable to bringing the story out of the text-based medium, particularly in the case of honzuki no gekokujo. I thought there was something very special about how Myne was sickly and could not physically go see how Parue was harvested, and how her family's description of the process was as bewildering to her (as an other-worlder) as it would be to any of us. It's a really clever storytelling device that masterfully helps convey the protagonist's situation.
Another example: the orc arc of moonlight sculptor was an absolutely epic read in text format; I don't think the cartoon format can really do it justice.
The Isekai genre goes deep, very very deep. Anime adaptations only really cover the often good and/or mainstream series.
If you start digging into Isekai manga, there at least one order of magnitude more works to choose from. Then if you look into light novels, there is even more stuff, again with just a fraction getting manga adaptations.
But the real breath of Isekai are web novels - that's where most of the current hit novels started, on websites like "I'll become a novelist" (https://syosetu.com/) where people just type away their fantasies with minimal friction, one chapter at a time and often with lots of direct feedback from the community.
That can result in even more original/crazy ideas being explored, such as:
- What if you were transported to a fantasy world with your solar powered camping vehicle ? (Himekishi to Camping Car)
- What if you became your game character in a fantasy world that has a different gender (female) and is a total glass cannon ? (Alice Tale)
- Whats more fun than raiding dungeons ? Running them! (Lazy Dungeon Master)
- What if there is stable gateway between the other and the modern world and you can go back and forth ? (quite a few series actually, even some mainstream ones like Gate or Isekai Shokudo)
- Fantasy is nice but steampunk and heavy industry is even better! There are quite a few rather non-mainstream series that introduce robots and guns into an Isekai setting. Yet there are others that set out to industrialize the whole thing as including building stuff like railroads.
- What if magic was just a foreign language or alphabet the locals aren't good at but you are, as it's your native language ?
- What if you are the only one who can see the GUI in an Isekai world ? Nothing better than meeting a famous aristocrat with "class: vampire" blinking above his head telling you about mysterious kidnapping cases in the vicinity. Or "goblin shaman [invisible]" floating in the air of dark cave. (Skill Takers World Domination")
- What if due to some mistake no one person gets reincarnated as a son of poor aristocrat but 3 - a high school student, a salaryman and Nobunaga ?
- What if you actually got reincarnated to the buggy mess of an MMO you helped to develop (Death March) ?
- What if a modern Aegis cruiser or even the full Japanese archipelago (including some disputed islands, no less ;-) ) gets transported to an Isekai ?
Really the possibilities are endless. There is definitely a lot of repetition and series that frankly are not any good (especially between web novels, thanks to the same zero entry barriers that enable so much creativity in the first place) but there are many gems to be found if you search a bit. :)
Yes, that's an elf, an Aegis class destroyer and a dragon on the picture. ;-)
I haven't read this series yet but it seems to be doing good with 10 light novel volumes out so far. :)
While I haven't seen that that yet but an Isekai series based around a nuclear submarine would be cool. Being nuclear powered it could be rather independent from the now missing modern infrastructure. They could also include dramatic elements such as the submarine hiding underwater during a nuclear Armageddon only to surface later to find out they have been somehow transported into a world of swords and magic instead of the radioactive wasteland they have expected. Not that it would make it any less dangerous and their adventures any less epic. ;-)
Can we just get away from the otaku-pandering JRPG fantasy world archetype, already? I feel like Konosuba and Re-Zero should have ruined the premise for all time. I know the Japanese love them some Dragon Quest but enough is enough.
As long as pumping out isekai stories continues to be profitable (and the target market which is otaku enjoys them), they will continue to proliferate.
