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 2022, 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 2022, then you definitely need to check out there anime recommendations.
Best Anime of 2022
Spy X Family
There is no order too big for master spy Twilight.
He uses his numerous skills as a spy to keep the peace between his country and aggressive neighbors, but his recent mission demands he investigate a reclusive politician that only attends school events for his child.
Dictating that he must now have a child and wife of his own to pull off the mission, Twilight manages to recruit a small orphan girl and an office lady to play the roles.
However, what he doesn’t know is that his new daughter is an esper capable of reading minds and his new wife is actually an assassin using him as a cover to maintain a guise of normalcy.
Spy X Family was the little darling of 2022, with its split cour season dominating the charts of two very strong seasons of anime. What makes Spy X Family so beloved? Found family anime are always loved, but never wildly popular. Spy anime has charm, as does glib, energetic action anime.
I think it is more the fact that Spy X Family combines all three things in a unique new way that makes it one of the best anime of 2022. What other anime series can you name about a spy building a pretend family out of an mind-reading orphan, an assassin who is secretly using being a wife as cover, and a dog that can see the future? It sets up for short bursts of fun action and some pretty meme-worthy moments.
Chainsaw Man
After his father’s death left him with a pile of debt, Denji and his pet devil Pochita struggle to pay it off. However, after the yakuza kills him, Pochita fuses himself with Denji’s corpse and he awakens as a Chainsaw Devil.
Found by government devil hunters, Denji is brought in to hunt other devils on an experimental squad where he is finally able to pursue his simple teenage dreams of eating good food and spending time with a cute girl.
If there was one other series to distract from Spy X Family this year, Chainsaw Man was it. However, the popularity of this series is a little easier to quantify.
Chainsaw Man is a shounen action series like no other. First, it follows a main character without the typical shounen protagonist personality and with motivations that any person who has ever been a teenager can related to. It then proceeds to add a fat dollop of absolutely vicious action on top of that, reveling in a spectacle of gore.
While the frequent death and dismemberment make Chainsaw Man more obviously different from other popular shounen action shows, one of the lesser noticed differences is that it doesn’t draw things out.
It tautly paces its arcs so you aren’t watching just an episode full of inner monologue or exposition. Things move along at a great pace so it never allows the show to become stale while waiting for the next interesting moment.
Lycoris Recoil
In order to cut down on crime and terrorism, an organization called Direct Attack was formed. They take orphaned girls and turn them into agents that protect the country in the Lycoris program.
Takina is one gifted agent, but after a hostage situation leads to insubordination, she is transferred out of the main unit to a lower key branch of Lycoris ran out of a cafe.
Despite being paired with a famed, but more easy-going Lycoris prodigy Chisato while there, Takina is determined to get back into DA, but her new partner is determined to prove that there is more to life than just taking lives.
The strange thing about Lycoris Recoil is that it take awhile before you even realize what the plot of the series is. That is usually a bad thing for an anime series, but Lycoris Recoil has this way of enchanting – and distracting – you with the cute dynamic between the main characters.
They are just fun to watch and compliment each other in interesting ways.
My Dress-Up Darling
Living with his grandfather who makes beautiful Hina Dolls, Wakana Gojo has loved them since he was a child. He aspires to one day make Hina Dolls as good as his grandfather, but his dedication has made him a bit of a loner in school after a girl in his childhood said that boys shouldn’t like dolls.
After a run in with the beautiful and popular Marin Kitagawa, he discovers that she wants to cosplay a character from an eroge game.
However, her sewing skills leave something to be desired, and after seeing her passion, Gojo agrees to help her make her costume.
Who knew you could make an anime about cosplaying characters from fiction that only exists in the world of the show interesting?
While My Dress-Up Darling provides an interesting look at cosplay as a hobby, the charm is more the message. The series really highlights that it is okay to like what you like regardless of what people think.
It is also unique to have an anime series where an unpopular person and a popular person become friends with hints at something more, yet have no drama about it.
Blue Lock
It was the split decision to pass the ball instead of selfishly take the shot that lost the Nationals-qualifying soccer game for Yoichi Isagi and his team.
When he returns home, the striker receives an invitation from the Japan Football Union that invited three hundred strikers to participate in a controversial project called Blue Lock.
In the Blue Lock compound, the strikers are honed into diamonds via a series of competitions that encourage egoism and selfish play in hopes to train a star striker for the Japanese World Cup team.
Although unsure at first, Isagi becomes compelled to crush the dreams of the other 299 strikers in Blue Lock to be at the top.
It has been said that Blue Lock is the sports anime for people normally not into sports anime. I am of the mind that while it might draw in the sports anime-curious, it is still very much a sports anime.
You still watch them play the game at times, but instead of soccer on a field, it is soccer in a gambling anime wrapper. It is intense and encourages selfishness which brings out a more intense and even lightly psychotic nature of characters better than your standard sports anime plots.
Summertime Render
After his parents died, Shinpei went to live with the Kofune family on Hitogashima Island. After leaving for school in Tokyo he has not been back since, but after receiving word that one of the two Kofune daughters, Ushio, drown tragically, he returns for the funeral.
However, with bruises on her neck, there is some doubt if Ushio’s accident was truly an accident.
As he considers her death, strange things begin to take place on this island that forces Mio, Ushio’s sister, to recall an old tale about how seeing a person that looks just like yourself foretells your own death.
The greatest tragedy of Summertime Render is Disney+ acquired it and has continued to hold it hostage from Western audiences throughout the year. It’s a very solid way to encourage fansubbing and illegal anime streaming, I suppose.
That aside, the series creates a great small town mystery and uses time looping in a non-confusing way unlike some of its close horror anime peers. This aspect allows it to pack in brutality and build multi-layered mystery to the plot.
Deaimon
It has been ten years since Nagomu Irino left home to pursue his dream of music. While his dream is failing, he receives a letter hearing saying father has been hospitalized, so he returns home to help run his family’s traditional Kyoto sweets shop.
Once there, he finds his father is fine, but they have picked up an abandoned 10-year-old girl named Itsuka Yukihira, and his father has chosen her as successor.
It isn’t long before Nagomu bonds with Itsuka, viewing himself as a father-like figure to her.
Found family anime typically has a pretty standard pattern. You have a broken adult and a broken child who bond over the support they can provide each other that they aren’t getting elsewhere.
Deaimon breaks the mold by having a relatively well adjusted male lead whose presence helps repair the child that is living with his parents after being abandoned.
Taking place in a traditional Japanese sweet shop, they all bond together as one large family and it allows a number of character stories to be explored.
Tomodachi Game
Although he suffers from financial hardship, Yuuichi Katagiri has always been kept positive by his friends. They even inspired him to furiously work in order to get the funds to go on the school trip with them.
However, when the gathered money goes missing, his friends are blamed.
Days later, the friends all get mysterious letters that end up with them being force to join a Tomodachi Game where each game they win together lowers a debt.
However, when betrayal and secrets start pouring out, these simple games become a malicious test of trust.
Part survival game anime and part gambling anime, in Tomodachi Game you watch the secrets pour out as a friend group collapses in on each other. Although, it does want for a second season badly as the first season only gives you a taste of the depths.
Call of the Night
After rejecting a confession from a girl at school because he doesn’t understand love, Kou stops going to school and starts wandering the night with insomnia.
One night he encounters a mysterious girl who believes people that stay awake at night are dissatisfied with the way they spent their days. Following her into the night, she brings him back to her place and suddenly starts to suck his blood.
Discovering her true nature, Kou now seeks to be a vampire, but to become one, you need to make a vampire fall in love with you.
Although a series about vampires, the charm of Call of the Night isn’t in the vampires. They are charming characters, to be sure, but the charm is in the message. Call of the Night encourages the joys of the night time, and shows it off in an unforgettable visual way.
Outside of that, Call of the Night is really more of a lightly romantic slice of life series. The fact that it garnered such a following being just that is proof of how well it was pulled off.
Love After World Domination
Fudo Aikawa dons the mantle of Gelato Red, leader of a group of protectors that stand against an organization bent on world domination. Desumi Magahara is a fierce warrior in the ranks of that organization.
After first meeting, it was love at first sight for Fudo, and they agreed to go out.
However, their relationship must remain a secret, though that doesn’t mean they can’t make special moments for themselves.
There are ten tons of romantic comedies in anime, but few of them have unique twists. Love After World Domination certainly has a unique twist to it.
However, instead of taking the obvious route to romantic drama, it side steps it and just focuses on the couple trying to do the standard couple things without either organization catching on. It keeps things light-hearted.
Sabikui Bisco
A red wind has swept over Japan and withered everything in its wake. Wherever the wind blows, rust grows and consumes all in its path.
With humanity succumbing to this rust, and the world a barren wasteland, mushroom spores bore the blame for it. This has made archer Bisco Akaboshi, who grows mushrooms wherever his arrows land, into a notorious terrorist.
However, he is a mushroom protector who spreads his fungi in order to enrich the land as he searches for the legendary Sabikui, an ancient mushroom that devours rust in all forms.
Who can say why Sabikui Bisco flew so low under the radar this year.
It creates an interesting post-apocalyptic world where Japan is a desert land and people are afflicted by a rust disease that eats their body. The way they counter this is by searching for a legendary mushroom. Of course, mushrooms were demonized for the disease which makes the main character whose arrows grow them effectively a mushroom terrorist.
This series is a great self-contained watch where you can see the story start and end in one season while still getting introduced to creative and interesting characters in a similarly creative and interesting world.
Bocchi the Rock
Having social anxiety but still wishing to make friends, Hitori Gotou started learning the guitar to help lure people into talking to her. Years later, she has amassed great guitar skills, but is in high school with still no friends.
One day, she happens to meet an outgoing girl who just so happens to need a guitarist for her band. Gaining the nickname Bocchi, Hitori is recruited in and puts her heart into improving her stage skills to make the band a success.
Cute anime girls with social anxiety is a popular trope in anime right now, but Bocchi the Rock does it in a way that is both amusing, but also realistic. It is also the first of its kind to juxtapose a character with social anxiety with a character who is just introverted, displaying the clear difference.
The music is great and Bocchi is one of the most relatable anime characters of the year. It makes this series lower key than some more wildly popular entries, but a great watch.
I’m the Villainess, So I’m Taming the Final Boss
Being constantly ill, a girl passed her time in the hospital playing otome games. However, one day she wakes up in the world of the game she was playing. What’s more, she wakes up as Aileen Lauren Dautriche, the villainess of the game.
After childhood friend and crown prince Cedric publicly breaks up with her for the game’s protagonist, Aileen makes moves to avoid the tragic future that results in her death.
She decides to propose to Cedric’s half-brother, Demon King Claude who, if left alone, would transform into a dragon and off-handedly kill her in the game.
So begins her quest to tame him.
This series bears a near-copyright infringing similarity to My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom. However, it has something that My Next Life as a Villainess lacks – romantic progression.
There is no wholesome shenanigans with a big bisexual harem, but rather she focuses all her love intensely at one man. It also doesn’t tend to draw things out, but done perhaps get a bit repetitive in its storytelling. Still, it is a very solid shoujo romance.
Akiba Maid War
Nagomi Wahira has always admired the cute girls who work in maid cafes, and as such, she has decided to move to Akihabara to become a maid!
While she gets a job at the Ton Tokoton maid cafe, she discovers that after one normal day with her more mature and also newly employed co-worker Ranko Mannen that things are not what they seem.
She and Ranko are sent to run an errand to a rival maid cafe, and it ends up as a complete blood bath as they get caught up in the violent maid wars of Akihabara.
This series is about maid cafes that act like yakuza organizations, violence and all. It is a perfect mix for anime and simply entertaining to watch.
It is a must if you are also a fan of Sega’s Yakuza franchise of games because watching maids beat each other bloody has the same energy as watching Kiryu disco dance in his fine suit while still having blood of some random thug he beat with a traffic cone still dripping down his cheek.
Sasaki and Miyano
Much of his life at his all-boy’s school for Miyano is worrying about how girly his face looks and hiding his secret love of boy’s love manga.
However, after witnessing a fight, he has a clandestine meeting with an older delinquent student named Sasaki.
Afterwards, Sasaki seems to jump at every opportunity to be around Miyano.
I, for one, welcome the new wave of boy’s love anime where the boys act like normal characters instead of aggressively horny animals. Sasaki and Miyano is a great new addition to that movement. It follows the boy relationships developing in an all-boy’s school. At first, it starts as friendship and then hints at more building between them.
Raven of the Inner Palace
Within the imperial palace, the emperor lives with his consorts. One such woman is the Raven Consort, who does not perform night time duties and remains in solitude.
This Raven Consort, a title currently held by the young Liu Shouxue, is charged with handling spiritual matters brought to her – everything from finding lost items to sending on spirits. It is even said that she can perform curses.
After living her days often undisturbed, she is visited by the young emperor Xia Gaojun, whose visits become even more frequent as the pair bond and she assists him in unraveling the spiritual mysteries of the inner palace.
You don’t see a lot of Chinese-inspired imperial palace-set anime, but Raven of the Inner Palace builds out an interesting world filled with lore and mysticism. It details the history of the world through its spiritual mysteries in the palace while also filling the series with a lovable collection of characters.
Aharen-san is Indecipherable
Excited to have a different and more social high school life, Raidou introduces himself to his seat neighbor on the first day.
At first, he thinks this small girl is just ignoring him. However, he discovers that she has a quiet voice and is bad at determining personal space.
From this meeting, an odd friendship blooms.
This series, at a quick glance, looks like the type of show that is amusing little comedy vignettes between a stoic, blunt man and a girl with some unique social issues. However, while it is wonderfully funny, Aharen-san is Indecipherable actually becomes a great romance too.
What’s more, it has more romantic progression than anyone expected. This helped elevate it from fun comedy to great romantic comedy.
Romantic Killer
All high schooler Anzu Hoshino loves is video games, chocolate, and her cat, Momohiko. She has shunned everything else, especially a romantic life.
However, one day a magical creature alters her reality where she can’t have any of those three things that she adores and is told that in order to return to her normal life, she must indulge in the dating sim situations that have been set up around her involving the new troubled transfer student Tsukasa Kazuki, her childhood friend Junta Hayami, and a wealthy sheltered student named Hijiri Koganei.
2022 was actually a pretty good year for shoujo romance. Romantic Killer is essentially about a proud otaku girl forced to play a dating sim in real life. Yet, instead of giving in and falling in love immediately, as is tradition, she simply treats her love interests like people and friends.
This, of course, causes them to fall in love with her, but she remains immune to love sickness throughout the series. It was refreshing, but also still makes for a fun romance series.
The Heike Story
The Taira Clan, also known as the Heike, have developed authority in Japan. When a young girl disrespect a representative of the clan, her father pays the price with his life.
Later, this girl, now adopting the name Biwa after the instrument her father played, approaches Taira no Shigemori, the eldest son of the Taira Clan leader.
To him, she reveals the power of her eye to see the future and portends the downfall of his clan. He reveals to her the power in his eye to see the wandering ghosts of the dead and, after learning of how her father died, offers to take her in in hopes that she can help him steer his clan away from disaster.
Artistic anime always flies well under the radar, and yet somehow is always consistently good. The Heike Story, based on a Japanese novel, tells a classic story in Japanese history about the fall of a powerful clan.
The unique thing is that it is set prior to the Warring States era, a point in Japanese history that anime often eschews because it is less exciting.
If you enjoy watching a family both cause and try to prevent their own brutal downfall from grace, this series documents it excellently and with unique visual style.
Kotaro Lives Alone
Unsuccessful manga artist Shin Karino has his daily routine interrupted one day with the introduction to his new neighbor – a four-year-old boy who moved in next door, lives by himself, and talks like a samurai.
While this boy is more put together than most of his neighbors, living alone has its difficulties at any age.
This is another found family series. Things appear cute at first, carried by its very young main character trying his best to seem mature, but being very obviously not. However, because Kotaro does indeed live alone, you begin to catch a bit of melancholy worming its way into things.
He doesn’t live alone by some “suspension of disbelief because anime” set up. In fact, the reason he does is rather sad. You get a lot of sad circumstance in this childish and cheerfully happy looking series, which is what makes it so amazing.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners
Scraping by a living in the rough technologically augmented society of Night City, David’s mother managed to send him to a prestigious school in hopes he could become a Corpo and climb the ladder of the business world.
However, after his mother dies suddenly in a car accident and due to lack of appropriate care, David embraces a cybernetic implant for power and that decision intersects him with a crew of Edgerunners, a group of mercenaries filled with cybernetic implants that do any job and every job to make a living.
Anime isn’t particularly awash with good cyberpunk settings, so Cyberpunk Edgerunners didn’t have a high bar to pass. However, it now sets the bar pretty high.
The series both captures the overall setting of the game without feeling the need to explain it to unfamiliar audiences and tells a pretty brutal story filled with glorious technological augmentation. It is both the high quality storytelling and animation that make this one of the best anime of 2022, even if the game it was based on needed a bit more polish.
Orient
After their descent 150 years ago, the demons demanded reverence from humanity as gods. Standing up against these new overlords were the Bushi, who still battle to this day, but the demons preach that they are enemies.
Hinamoto, freed from Bushi rule many years ago, lives peacefully and reveres demons. The residents mine rocks for the demons to consume, but for Musashi, a miner in training, he craves freedom.
Together with his childhood friend Koujiro, a boy outcasted for being a descendants of a Bushi, they start a fight against the demons for freedom, only to be saved by an actual Bushi band.
Seeing them fight and destroy the demons, the pair decide they will form a Bushi band of their own!
Unpopular compared to other shounen action series or even Magi, with which it shares a creator, I maintain that Orient is a solid entry to the shounen action genre. Even if it wasn’t the best anime of 2022, Orient is still pretty good. Everyone said Black Clover was “generic” and “trope-riddled” when it premiered, and look at it now? I think this is of the same vein.
Orient features an interesting alternative look at Japan with a unique take on swords and a main character whose abilities are yet to be truly shown off. The main trio is indeed pretty generic, but not in a dislikable sort of way.
Admittedly, this one may take some time to get going, but it has a solid foundation for a shounen action show.
Ya Boy Kongming
As a general in China’s Three Kingdoms, Zhuge Liang Kongming had endured countless battles that shaped him into an excellent strategist. However, on his deathbed, his only wish is to be reborn in a more peaceful world.
This results in him being reborn as his younger self in modern day Shibuya, Tokyo. After being dragged around by partiers, Kongming becomes taken with the songs of a struggling singer who ends up sheltering him.
He decides to use his tactical genius to make her into a top star!
It isn’t just the banger of an EDM soundtrack that makes this series lovable, but that certainly helps. It is indeed the titular Kongming that carries things. It is a treat to watch him interact with characters from Tokyo’s music and party scene so naturally while still completely acting like an ancient warlord.
Do you have more anime from 2022 that you enjoyed? Let fans know in the comments section below.
