Been away from anime for awhile? We understand. You go out and have your life, anime will always be waiting for you when you come back. They always come back. If you are finally coming back and stopped watching sometime in or before 2010, here are all the best anime series that you missed and definitely should go back and watch.
If you are looking to watch the best anime of 2010, then you definitely need to check out there anime recommendations.
Best Anime of 2010
Shiki
The fifteen-year-old Megumi Shimizu dreamed of leaving her small country town behind for the big city, but those dreams died when she did.
It was her murder that kicked off a summer of blood and terror in this small town where a city boy and a country doctor try to stop the epidemic of death happening around them.
Shiki presents itself as an intriguing supernatural mystery with just the right amount of blood spatter to hook you. Interestingly enough, the supernatural threat is not immediately apparent to either the characters or even the audience, something that sort of hooks you with intrigue alone if you simply weren’t in it for the gore.
Angel Beats
One evening, Otonashi wakes up in a strange place and a strange girl with a gun tells him he is dead.
Trying to recruit him to her organization that rebels against God, Otonashi decides to talk to her enemy, a mysterious girl named Angel. After she kills him for being too literal, he finds himself siding with the SSS Battlefront and the oddballs within.
Angel Beats is one of those rare emotional dramas that has you shaking with laughter one episode, and shaking with tears the next. You could say that the juxtaposition of the two is a weird tone shift, but in actuality, the comedy endearing the characters to you makes the sad backstories and emotional moments hit all the harder.
While Angel Beats is the anime you go to when you want to feel something, you are are pleasantly surprised when that “something” is joy, even if it is wielding those happy school moments like a weapon later.
Bakuman
As a child, Moritaka Mashiro wanted to be a manga artist like his uncle. However, after certain events transpired, he refocused his efforts towards studying in middle school.
One day, aspiring writer Akito Takagi notices some detailed drawings in Moritaka’s notebook and approaches him to propose they become a mangaka duo together.
Realizing that he might be able to get his crush to notice him if they make an anime adaption of it with her as the voice actor, Moritaka agrees, and thus, the mangaka Muto Ashirogi is born.
As anime fans are often big weebs, anime about making anime, or in this case, making manga are always well-received. However, what Bakuman did is it turned making manga into a shounen-esque story.
It’s not over-the-top shounen (food) battled like Food Wars, but instead, making manga is still treated like just as intense a battleground.
The World God Only Knows
Keima Katsuragi is known as the “God of Conquest,” a man that can conquer any girl’s heart, at least in his dating sim games.
However, when Keima arrogantly accepts an offer to prove his dating sim supremacy, he finds himself at the mercy of a demon that forces him to woo over real life girls.
The World God Only Knows provides a comical look at how one thinks their knowledge of dating sims can transfer to real dating. Obviously, it works out often pretty well for the main character, but in all honesty, if they weren’t anime girls – it wouldn’t.
Regardless, The World God Only Knows is a lengthy and surprisingly in-depth harem experience for the harem anime fan.
Rainbow: The Seven from Compound Two, Cell Six
In 1955 Japan, delinquency is on the rise. For Mario Minakami and six other teenagers, they are not alone when they are sent to Shounan Special Reform School on criminal charges.
Once in their cell, they meet the older inmate Rokurouta Sakuragi, a former boxer, who teaches them how to survive in their new harsh prison environment.
A look at post-war Japan in anime is rarity, and a look inside a prison is even rarer.
Rainbow documents the struggles of the generation after World War II, a sort of adrift generation of youth in a rapidly changing country. Of course many turned to crime, and they are kept in a wholly brutal environment for it. The only reformative action this prison is offering is using its miserable circumstances to bind seven young men together.
Rainbow, despite the name, is a mature and occasionally graphic experience. However, it is perhaps one of the most touching tales of fraternity in anime.
SYD
Ousai Private Academy used to be an all-girls school, but Takatoshi Tsuda is among one of the first male students. However, on his way to class, he is stopped by the student council president who needs a male’s point of view in order to better accommodate new male students.
As such, she ends up making him the vice president of the student council. However, this seemingly upstanding institution is not quite what it seems. The student council seems to be staffed by perverts even if they are women.
A lot of anime that like dirty jokes are ecchi. SYD takes a unique approach by being a dirty comedy anime, but not really being that ecchi. It is better to instead call it a degenerate comedy, since that’s what every character is in some way.
Amagami SS
After being stood up on a Christmas Eve date, Junichi has a hard time opening himself up to romance, even two years later.
However, upon a chance meeting with several girls he becomes romantically interested in, he has hope that this year he can spend Christmas Eve with someone he truly loves.
While omnibus-style romance anime often sacrifices depth of plot and character development for multiple romantic conclusions, there are many who view it as the ultimate compromise for visual novel adaptations and harem anime in general. In these anime where the romantic relationship with every girl is shown and time resets, every girl can truly be best girl.
Amagami SS, while sometimes weirdly fetishistic, is one of the best anime of 2010 because it does the omnibus-style romance in a way where every relationship is actually interesting to watch. The thing you realize about romance in the omnibus format is that falling in love can be repetitive, but this series hides it well with very unique girls.
The Tatami Galaxy
At a mysterious back alley ramen stand, a lonely college student in his final year accidentally bumps into a man that calls himself the God of Matrimony. There, he pours his soul out to the god about all the regrets he has about his college life, which he spent bitterly trying to break up couples.
However, soon he finds himself back at the very start of his college career. Can he change the past or will he just repeat past mistakes?
The Tatami Galaxy is what certain crowds would call “a thinker.” It is the sort of ponderous anime that is so complex and fast-moving that it requires more than one watch to fully grasp everything, even something what the plot was trying to convey.
That said, its complexity is created in no small part by the sheer amount of dialogue in this narrative-dense anime. Get ready to sharpen that reading comprehension, because you’re going to need it!
Ookami-san and Her Seven Companions
Ookami and her best friend Ringo are part of the Otogi Bank, a club that assists students with problems in return for assistance later on. In order to ensure these loans, the Otogi Bank members go all out, but their members are all females.
Knowing some problems require a male touch. Ookami seeks to recruit Morino Ryoushi, a boy with a fear of being looked at and who just confessed to Ookami.
Ookami-san and Her Seven Companions actually looks a lot like a harem anime, but it isn’t. In fact, it is just a romantic comedy with no actual harem elements.
What this anime about a club that helps people, often through violence, hides within is a pretty emotionally touching romance about helping the main tsundere overcome her past trauma. Every hard shell protects a soft gooey center that doesn’t want to be hurt again, after all.
Katanagatari
In Edo era Japan, Shichika Yasuri practices one of the most unique sword styles among a culture of unique sword styles, a technique that uses his own body as a blade. As the seventh head of the style’s school, he lives in exile with his sister Nanami until the ambitious Togame barges into his life.
Togame tries to recruit him on her mission to collect the twelve unique swords known as the Deviant Blades for the shogunate. Interested by the girl more so than her mission, Yasuri accepts, only to later find the challenge in collecting these swords is defeating the legendary swordsmen that wield them.
With its unique art style and wonderfully fluid animation, Katanagatari breathes fresh life into what is actually a pretty basic story. However, while the plot can be summed up as simply as “they collect the swords,” it keeps you entertained with the unique warriors that wield them. Furthermore, the intrigue and complexity of the series grows as it goes on.
High School of the Dead
It happened suddenly. The dead rose and threw Japan into chaos.
In the high school of Takashi Kimuro, the situation forced him to kill his bitten best friend and protect the man’s girlfriend, Rei.
As they narrowly escape the school with a few others, they find the real survival just beginning.
While High School of the Dead tells a pretty standard zombie apocalypse story, it decided that such a long-beloved setting in every media but anime needed a little jazzing up. The way High School of the Dead “jazzes things up” is by inserting a lot of ecchi.
Boobs, butts, and panty shots rule the day in this series. While that ruins a perfectly fine zombie apocalypse story, it is actually quite fun in how audacious it is.
Arakawa Under the Bridge
Kou Ichinomiya, as the son of a wealthy businessman, has vowed never to become indebted to anyone.
However,when he falls in the river under Arakawa Bridge, someone dives in to save him, thus he owes his life to this person. She is a homeless girl named Nino who wants only one thing – to fall in love.
In order to pay her back, he accepts her offer to be her boyfriend, thus moving out of his home and starting a new life under the bridge.
Arakawa Under The Bridge will always be remembered for its wide array of weird characters – like the Kappa mayor, or the star-headed rockstar, or the big muscled guy in a nun outfit. However, while Arakawa Under The Bridge is mostly an eccentric comedy, it does posses some nuanced social commentary and grows a rather nice love story over time as well.
In my opinion, “weird comedy” comedy anime that possess more depth than just surface-level jokes are an achievement, and in this case, it made Arakawa Under The Bridge one of the best anime of 2010.
B Gata H Kei
Yamada is beautiful and just entering high school, but she has one strange goal – to have casual sex with 100 men. The problem is that she is afraid of being teased for being a virgin.
Upon happenstance, she stumbles upon a solution to her problem, the soft-spoken (also virgin) Kosuda. The problem is, he knows nothing about sex and is a shy gentleman about it.
Now, now – I know it is always a shock to people that teenage women are just as horny as teenage men, but B Gata H Kei features perhaps the horniest of all the teenage women.
While B Gata H Kei draws you in with it wide array of sex jokes, it actually turns into a pretty touching, but never not horny, romantic comedy.
What did you think was the best anime of 2010? Let fans know in the comments section below.
