Every anime argument eventually splits into the same two camps. One side ranks by craft: what is the most beautifully made, most tightly written, most perfectly finished thing the medium has produced? The other ranks by impact: what actually mattered, what changed people, what a hundred million people grew up inside?
Those two lists barely overlap. The most beloved anime in the world is a pirate adventure that has been running since 1999 and has no ending in sight. The most acclaimed is a 26-episode jazz noir that was cancelled partway through its original broadcast.
Here are the twenty series that matter most, grouped by what they actually are, with what each one does better than anything else.
The Perfect Runs
These are the series that started, said what they had to say, and stopped. In a medium built on indefinite serialisation, finishing well is the rarest achievement there is.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Studio: Bones · Year: 2009 · Episodes: 64
The most common answer to "what's the greatest anime" in large audience polls, and the reason is structural. Most long anime adapt an unfinished manga and eventually invent their own ending, which is why so many great series collapse in their final act. Brotherhood waited until Hiromu Arakawa's manga was nearly complete and adapted the whole thing.
The result is a 64-episode series where every early throwaway detail pays off, the antagonists have coherent motives, the political worldbuilding holds together, and the ending resolves rather than dissolves. It is also genuinely funny, which almost no epic manages. If you want the single best argument that anime can do long-form storytelling better than most prestige television, this is the exhibit.
Cowboy Bebop
Studio: Sunrise · Year: 1998 · Episodes: 26
Twenty-six episodes of jazz, space westerns, film noir and existential loneliness, and not one wasted frame. Shinichirō Watanabe built each episode as a self-contained genre exercise — a blues episode, a horror episode, a slapstick episode — while the real story about four people who cannot outrun their pasts accumulates almost invisibly underneath.
Yoko Kanno's score, performed by the Seatbelts, does as much narrative work as the writing. Bebop was also the gateway drug for an entire generation of Western viewers who found it on late-night television and discovered that animation was allowed to be for adults. Its influence on everything that followed is difficult to overstate.
Steins;Gate
Studio: White Fox · Year: 2011 · Episodes: 24
The best time travel story in any medium, animated or otherwise. It begins as an aimless comedy about a self-styled mad scientist in Akihabara messing about with a microwave, spends eleven episodes making you comfortable, and then detonates.
What makes it work is that its time travel rules are strict and consistently applied, so the tragedy is mechanical rather than arbitrary — you can see the trap closing before the characters can. The middle stretch is the most emotionally punishing sequence of episodes on this list.
Death Note
Studio: Madhouse · Year: 2006 · Episodes: 37
A high school student finds a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it, and the world's greatest detective sets out to catch him. What follows is not an action series but a procedural — two brilliant people trying to out-deduce each other, where the weapons are inference, misdirection and public perception.
Death Note is the most successful anime ever made at convincing people who "don't watch anime" to watch anime. It also contains the medium's most famous scene about eating a potato chip, which tells you something about how much tension it can wring from nothing.
Violet Evergarden
Studio: Kyoto Animation · Year: 2018 · Episodes: 13
A former child soldier takes a job ghost-writing letters for other people and slowly learns what feelings are by putting other people's into words. The premise sounds saccharine; the execution is disciplined and frequently devastating.
Kyoto Animation is the industry's benchmark for character animation — the tiny movements of hands, eyes and posture that carry emotion without dialogue — and Violet Evergarden is the studio's most complete demonstration of it. Several episodes function perfectly as standalone short films.
The Titans
Enormous, unfinished or barely finished, and culturally larger than everything above. These are the series that turned anime from a subculture into a global default.
One Piece
Studio: Toei Animation · Year: 1999 · Episodes: 1,100+
The most popular ongoing story on earth. Eiichiro Oda began the manga in 1997 and the anime in 1999, and both are still going. It is a pirate adventure about found family, freedom and an increasingly serious critique of institutional power, wrapped in some of the most creative visual design in any medium.
The barrier is obvious — over a thousand episodes, with a notorious slow patch in the middle — but nothing else on this list has sustained this level of invention for this long. The Marineford and Wano arcs are the emotional payoffs that its readers spent decades earning.
Naruto / Naruto Shippuden
Studio: Pierrot · Year: 2002 · Episodes: 720
For an entire generation, this was the first anime. A loud orphan nobody believes in trains his way toward being taken seriously — a premise so foundational to shonen that it now reads as the template rather than an entry.
Naruto's real achievement is its antagonists. Almost every villain gets a backstory that makes their position comprehensible, and the series repeatedly argues that cycles of revenge are the actual enemy. It is also notoriously padded with filler, which is the price of an anime overtaking its manga.
Dragon Ball Z
Studio: Toei Animation · Year: 1989 · Episodes: 291
The series that exported anime to the world. Dragon Ball Z's vocabulary — power levels, transformations, the multi-episode charge-up, the tournament arc — became the grammar that action anime has been speaking ever since, and its influence reaches well past Japan into Western cartoons, comics and video games.
It is not the most sophisticated show on this list. It is arguably the most important one.
Bleach
Studio: Pierrot · Year: 2004 · Episodes: 366+
The third of the "Big Three" alongside One Piece and Naruto, and the one with the strongest sense of style. Tite Kubo's designs, the enormous cast of soul reapers with distinct weapons and aesthetics, and a colour sense closer to fashion illustration than action comics.
Its original anime run ended unfinished in 2012, which for a decade looked like a permanent tragedy — until the Thousand-Year Blood War adaptation arrived to finish the story with a substantially larger budget.
Attack on Titan
Studio: Wit Studio / MAPPA · Year: 2013 · Episodes: 94
The most successful anime of the 2010s, and the one that most aggressively refused to stay in its genre. It starts as survival horror — humanity in walled cities, giants outside — and gradually reveals itself as a story about nationalism, historical grievance and the machinery by which ordinary people are turned into weapons.
Almost every season recontextualises the one before it. Whether the ending justifies the journey is the single most argued question in modern anime, which is itself a kind of achievement.
Hunter x Hunter (2011)
Studio: Madhouse · Year: 2011 · Episodes: 148
A shonen series that keeps quietly dismantling shonen. Its power system is built on rules and restrictions rather than escalation, its protagonist is charming and genuinely unsettling, and its most celebrated stretch — the Chimera Ant arc — abandons conventional pacing entirely for something closer to a war novel.
The catch is Yoshihiro Togashi's long health-related hiatuses, which means the anime stops mid-story and may never continue. What exists is close to flawless.
Gintama
Studio: Sunrise · Year: 2006 · Episodes: 367
A samurai comedy set in an alternate Edo period invaded by aliens, which spends most of its runtime parodying every other series on this list — and then, roughly once a season, drops a serious arc that outperforms the shows it was mocking.
Gintama is the hardest anime to recommend and the one its fans defend most fiercely. Its comedy is dense, referential and extremely Japanese, and its tonal whiplash is deliberate.
The Reinventions
Series that took an existing form and broke it.
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Studio: Gainax · Year: 1995 · Episodes: 26
Teenagers pilot giant robots to fight monsters, except the robots are horrifying, the organisation running things is not the good guys, and the pilots are children being destroyed by adults who know exactly what they are doing.
Hideaki Anno made a mecha series about depression, and its famously abstract final episodes — produced under severe budget and schedule pressure — turned inward into something closer to a psychological essay than a finale. Whether that was collapse or intent has been argued for thirty years. Either way, nothing in the medium was quite the same afterward.
Code Geass
Studio: Sunrise · Year: 2006 · Episodes: 50
An exiled prince gains the power to make anyone obey a single command, and uses it to run a chess-game rebellion against an empire. Where Evangelion deconstructed the mecha genre emotionally, Code Geass weaponised it — turning giant robots into a delivery system for political thriller plotting and escalating gambits.
Its finale is one of the very few in anime that is almost universally regarded as landing perfectly.
Vinland Saga
Studio: Wit Studio / MAPPA · Year: 2019 · Episodes: 48
A Viking revenge epic that spends its first season building the most compelling revenge story in years, and then spends its second season arguing that revenge is a spiritual dead end and refusing to give the audience the fight it wants.
That is an extraordinarily risky structural choice, and it is the reason the series is on this list. Very few action anime have the nerve to take away the thing they trained you to want.
Mob Psycho 100
Studio: Bones · Year: 2016 · Episodes: 37
The most visually inventive series here — a rotating cast of animators producing sequences in wildly different styles, including full paint-on-glass segments — attached to a story about an overwhelmingly powerful psychic boy who mostly wants to be a slightly better person.
Its core argument is that powers are irrelevant to character, which is close to heresy in this genre, and it makes the case sincerely enough to win.
The New Class
Series from the last few years that are already being argued about as all-timers.
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
Studio: Madhouse · Year: 2023 · Episodes: 28
Begins where a fantasy epic normally ends: the demon king is dead, the party has disbanded, and the elf mage who will live another thousand years starts to understand what her short-lived human companions actually meant to her.
It is a series about grief, memory and time, told with remarkable patience and almost no urgency. Its arrival was the strongest signal in years that mainstream fantasy anime could be quiet and still be enormous.
Jujutsu Kaisen
Studio: MAPPA · Year: 2020 · Episodes: 47+
The current standard-bearer for animated combat. MAPPA's fight choreography — particularly the Shibuya arc — set a new ceiling for what television-budget action can look like, and the series' willingness to kill significant characters gives its battles genuine stakes.
Demon Slayer
Studio: ufotable · Year: 2019 · Episodes: 55+
A relatively conventional story elevated by extraordinary craft. ufotable's blend of digital compositing with traditional animation produced fight sequences that pulled in a mainstream audience far beyond the usual anime viewership, and its film continuation went on to become the highest-grossing release in Japanese box office history.
Chainsaw Man
Studio: MAPPA · Year: 2022 · Episodes: 12+
Filmed like a live-action movie — real camera logic, grounded staging, an ending theme that changes every episode — attached to a story about a desperately poor teenager who merges with a chainsaw devil and mostly wants a normal life.
It is crude, sincere and extremely sad underneath the gore, and it represents the clearest recent argument that anime's visual language still has unexplored territory.
The Data
Every series here — studio, debut year, genre and episode count — is available as a structured, downloadable dataset.
Explore the Anime Series dataset →
Related: Iconic Anime Characters → · Anime Studios → · Shonen Anime Giants → · Anime Movies → · Manga Series →
Settle It
Bebop or Evangelion. Brotherhood or Hunter x Hunter. One Piece or literally anything shorter. These arguments never end in comment sections because comment sections have no arithmetic.