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 2024, 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 2024, then you definitely need to check out there anime recommendations.
Best Anime of 2024
The Apothecary Diaries
Learning to be an apothecary from her father, Maomao honed her skills in the brothels of her town. However, one day she is kidnapped and forced to work as a servant in the rear section of the Imperial Palace that houses the emperor’s consorts.
While trying to stay under the radar until her contract was up, Maomao catches the attention of the emperor’s favorite consort when her skills as an apothecary end up saving the life of the consorts’ baby daughter.
This act leads to her being taken on as the consort’s lady-in-waiting and food taster due to Maomao’s prolific knowledge of both medicine and poisons.
At a glance, The Apothecary Diaries looks like it would be a romance drama not unlike The Story of Saiunkoku about some random girl who finds herself entangled in the lives and loves of important imperial palace officials.
The Apothecary is that, but instead of dense, ham-fisted imperial drama about beautiful men with problems, it focuses itself on the intriguing mysteries and keeps romance to a sort of smoldering bait in the background. The Apothecary Diaries keeps you intrigued with its several small mysteries that are all interestingly building into larger intrigue—all told through a heroine with no interest in simpering romance thanks to being raised in a whorehouse.
Dandadan
Sulking after breaking up with her boyfriend, Momo Ayase stumbles upon a bullied boy and sticks up for him. After her random act of kindness, the alien-obsessed boy tries to talk to her about the extraterrestrial interest that he thinks they share. However, while Momo says she doesn’t believe in aliens, she does believe in ghosts thanks to her grandmother who works as a psychic.
In a bet to determine which is actually real, they agree to visit different locations – one known for extraterrestrial sightings and one known to be haunted. As it turns out, neither was wrong as their life gets thrown into chaos by alien abductions and ghost possession.
Dandadan is a hard anime to sell to people because it takes key story elements for so many different genres and melds them together into what becomes the most enjoyable bizarre anime you will ever watch.
Essentially, you are watching a shoujo romance masquerading in the wrapper of a shounen action anime. You get to see those sweet, sweet relationship-progressing moments, but instead of boring slice of life elements in between that, you watch a series of bizarre alien and ghost attacks on the main characters subvert expectations at every corner.
Be ready to laugh, cry, and—at times—wonder what the hell you are even watching.
Makeine – Too Many Losing Heroines!
Nukumizu Kazuhiko is a high school boy that is content with just blending in with the crowd. One day, he watched a popular classmate, Yanami Anna, get dumped by her childhood friend that she had confessed to.
Feeling like he should comfort her, Nukumizu ends up increasingly entangled with Yanami as well as several other girls who he witnesses get turned down by their unrequited loves.
If you watch enough harem anime, you come to be familiar with certain tropes that makes who “wins” the romance never a surprise. The childhood friend is going to lose. The shy bookish girl? Nope, she’s out. Athlete? Aw, hell no. Never going to happen, beautiful muscle lady.
If she’s a trope, she’s a losing heroine.
So here we are, at Makeine, an anime fully centered around a main character uninterested in being a harem king who is slowly amassing a harem of losing harem archetypes around him. A subversion is often a great way to stand out, but Makeine goes the extra mile to really endear you to all these adorable losers.
The Elusive Samurai
In the year 1333, the Kamakura shogunate government is toppled after the betrayal of Ashikaga Takauji, a once-trusted retainer who was responsible for slaughtering the entire Hojo clan.
However, in the chaos at Kamakura, the rightful heir to the shogunate, Hojo Tokiyuki does what he does best – flees.
After escaping the massacre with the help of Shinto priest Suwa Yorishige, Tokiyuki takes refuge in another province. While on the run to stay alive, Yorishige convinces Tokiyuki to turn his talent at running and hiding into a battle strategy to raise an army and reclaim his birthright.
In truth, the story of The Elusive Samurai is not really the draw of this series. It details the lesser known historical event about the betrayal of the Hojo clan by their retainer, Ashikaga Takauji, who usurped them. It follows the young son of a shogun who uses his special skill—running away—to flee and eventually start a rebellion to take back his family’s crown.
The Elusive Samurai plays a little fast and loose with historical accuracy to create an interesting shounen action anime, but the real charm of this series is its art and cinematography. There are a few visual feasts in the shounen action genre, and The Elusive Samurai is very much one of them now.
Girls Band Cry
After growing up in a small rural town with strict parents, Nina Iseri leaves it all behind to start over in the city. With her time in the city off to a rough start, she ends up going to a street concert for Momoka Kawaragi, a small musician whose song inspired Nina to move to the city in the first place.
Getting to know Momoko, and discovering that both of them are at odds with the disappointing, dream-crushing nature of the world, she talks Nina into forming a band with her as a way to vent their frustrations.
Girls Band Cry was almost the “best anime of 2024 that no one got to see.” Rather, no one outside of Japan, anyway, as none of the official streaming services abroad deigned to pick up this absolute gem until far later.
Girls Band Cry is a music anime following a freshly made band that is slowly fleshed out by a series of dysfunctional young adult women.
That’s not exactly a new premise, though it is refreshing in that the musicians are actually working adults and not high school students as they so often usually are. However, the most charming thing in Girls Band Cry—as should be the most charming thing of any music anime—is the music. It uses a unique new animation style that needs time to grow on you, but it is used to accent the emotions being poured into moments, particularly the musical moments.
Essentially, Girls Band Cry gives you an absolute banger of a music video in every episode, and fills the rest of the time with adult women being relatably dysfunctional.
Kaiju No. 8
For years, grotesque giant monsters have appeared suddenly to attack Japan. To combat the destructive threat, the Defense Corps was established to fight them and the Professional Kaiju Cleaner Corporation was created to clean up the massive remains.
Kafka Hibino is a middle-aged man who works as a sweeper cleaning up remains despite his big childhood dreams of becoming a Defense Corps member with his childhood friend. While his friend thrives as a powerful asset in the Defense Corps, Kafka has failed the recruitment exam numerous times.
After meeting an ambitious new recruit to his sweeper unit named Reno, a kaiju attack leaves them both in the hospital where a small, parasitic kaiju embeds himself in Kafka and turns him into a monster.
With Reno’s help, Kafka is able to flee and eventually transform back into a human, but he is left with the ability to become a kaiju at will and has access to superhuman abilities that he can use to fight kaiju.
Not unlike Attack on Titan and Chainsaw Man, Kaiju No. 8 goes the route of having their protagonist meld with a monster that gives him and awesome powerful transformation to fight other monsters.
However, what sets Kaiju No. 8 apart is its middle-aged protagonist who doesn’t act like a bright-eyed idealist or a firebrand or even a bitter old man crushed by the reality that some people are just better than him.
Instead, you get a goofball with real world experience and a level of maturity that is refreshing to see, especially since he is surrounded by all of those shounen main character stereotypes stated above.
Outside of that, Kaiju No. 8 brings big shounen battles to life beautifully, but does admittedly need another season to get past that initial “setting up the story” point to really start to shine.
Solo Leveling
When gates mysteriously started appearing throughout the world, they connected the real world to a fantasy land full of dangerous beasts. At the same moment, some humans developed superhuman abilities and are the only ones capable of entering these gates. This gave rise to the age of Hunters, those who can enter gates and combat the beasts within in return for wealth.
Jin-Woo is one such Hunter. However, a Hunter’s skill rank is fixed from their awakening, meaning as an E-rank, he is known as the “World’s Weakest” among Hunters. After what should have been a manageable dungeon goes horribly wrong, Jin-Woo stays behind as a voluntary sacrifice, but at the moment of his death, he is given a chance to enroll in The System, a mysterious occurrence that gives him a Quest Log and the ability to level up.
While Solo Leveling came with a sizable, pre-built fanbase that was very excited to see the story animated, which helped rocket it to 2024’s most popular anime, to its credit, that fan base got sizable for good reason.
Solo Leveling doesn’t have much of a compelling story. You watch a weak, but nice guy get brutalized and given a chance to rapidly power scale in both martial prowess and—for some reason—physical attractiveness.
However, what makes the series so alluring is vicious, intense action and the visual flair in which it does it. Since the main character power scales so quickly, the fights get increasingly more grand and flashy, all done in a wonderful fluid animation that makes this series a treat for those who don’t need their anime to have a robust story if the fights are cool.
Delicious in Dungeon
After the Golden Kingdom was sunk a thousand years ago by a magician, the king emerged from the depths and said that anyone who can defeat the mage will get his treasure. The king crumbled to dust and adventurers raced into an expansive underground labyrinth to prob its dangerous depths.
Laios is the leader of one such adventuring party. However, when their battle with a red dragon goes awry, his sister Falin is eaten when sacrificing herself to transport them out.
With no money to buy supplies in order to go rescue his sister, Laios and his two remaining companions, Chilchuck the thief and Marcille the healer, decide to eat the monsters they defeat in order to save money on food and get to Falin before she is digested.
With eating monsters considered a bit taboo not to mention gross, they struggle to prepare them correctly since there is little knowledge on how to do so. However, they stumble across a dwarf named Senshi who has a passion for cooking monster ingredients and just so happens to have always wanted to try eating a red dragon.
While it is billed as a “food anime,” Delicious in Dungeon is an adventure that is built around the concept of everyone needs—and often likes—to eat. In this age of growing D&D interest, Delicious in Dungeon takes familiar concepts from D&D—dungeons, combat classes, races—and builds the adventure around delving deeper to save someone and eating your way through every creature on your way down. It’s fun, it’s charming, and it feels fully original even among the mass of dungeon-delving-focused isekai adventures that are available now.
While it is the likably flawed characters that often endear the series to people quickly, one should also take the time to appreciate how much effort went into the worldbuilding of the ecology in that there dungeon too.
Wind Breaker
Due to his unconventional appearance and lacking social skills, Haruka Sakura was an outcast at school. However, his status as an outsider and a target made him into a scrappy fighter that he now takes pride in. As such, he enrolls in Furin High School, a school more known for its tough delinquents than its academic record.
Looking to take the top spot among its tough fighters, Sakura gets caught up in a street brawl on his way to school where he meets a group of his future classmates. He discovers that Furin has united under one man and now the group now calls themselves Bofurin, a group that keeps the town safe from other thugs looking to caught trouble.
While still wanting the top spot, Sakura ends up joining them and finally finding acceptance and camaraderie for the first time in his life.
There is a decent chunk of Wind Breaker that seems like it is just going to be dudes doing one-on-one fights on a stage, but it is that long beginning of Wind Breaker that really sets up the key theme of “fighting as a conversation” that the series employs.
You could put two dudes in a room for a conversation, but it is far more interesting to watch them pour emotions into their fists and batter faces until they understand each other.
Packed with action and surprisingly complex characters, Wind Breaker ended up far more emotional than you would expect from a series about delinquent gang warfare.
Oblivion Battery
In middle school, Haruka Kiyomine and Kei Kaname formed a genius battery that crushed the dreams of anyone that played against them. However, Kaname lost his memory and decided to put playing baseball behind him.
Not wanting to leave his catcher and best friend behind for baseball fame, Kiyomine joined Kaname in entering Kotesashi High School, a public high school that doesn’t even have a baseball team.
However, the duo are not the only middle school baseball stars that chose to hide from the sport there, and they discover that a love for baseball may fade but it never completely goes away.
I’m certain some watch sports anime because they like the sports, but I’ve always felt that it is the character stories that bring in the bulk of the audience since they are often realistic and relatable struggles. Oblivion Battery has characters with struggles, but instead, what makes this baseball charming is the comedy.
Doing both drama and comedy is hard to do well without one undermining the other, but Oblivion Battery does it almost perfectly. You are invested in the main character’s mysterious baseball amnesia because he is such a likable and silly guy about not wanting to play baseball anymore.
Enjoy rolling at bad jokes one minute while getting misty-eyed over beautiful baseball struggles and successes done in stunning Mappa animation the next.
Yatagarasu – The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master
In the world of Yamauchi, the Yatagarasu clan rules over all. The Yatagarasu are those who possess the ability to transform between human and giant crow forms.
Yukiya, a boy serving a minor lord of the Northern House, is chosen to serve the crown prince of the Yatagarasu, a man who is hailed as the Kin’u, a rare-colored Yatagarasu said to hail unprecedented prosperity in the future.
While that crown prince had chased off every other aid, Yukiya and his eccentricity earn his approval. Together, the pair navigate a number of plots put underway in the conspiracy-filled imperial court.
Among the heap of isekai anime all working with similar concepts done just differently enough, it is always a treat when you are served up truly original worldbuilding, made sweeter when it actually comes with a good story.
Yatagarasu was one of the sleeper series of 2024 in that it didn’t look especially flashy or interesting, but told a solid, slowly unfolding story that never let itself become predictable.
While difficult to sell to those that need a fast-paced narrative or interesting action, Yatagarasu does offer you an intriguing mystery story crafted in a world that does feel like the author put just slightly more effort into creating it than most.
Gushing Over Magical Girls
Hiiragi Utena has always been a fan of magical girls and the Tres Magia magical girl trio that defends her city. With such admiration, it is only natural that she perked up with excitement when a magical being approached her one night, claiming she has dormant magical powers within her.
However, after receiving the magical girl transformation of her dreams, she discovers that she is not a hero, but a villain destined to fight magical girls in the evil organization Enormita.
Not interested in being a villain, she tries to quit when the magical girl trio appear and tries to take her down. However, Utena soon discovers that torturing magical girls has awakened a secret pleasure in her.
Starting this site in 2016 and watching anime long before that starting in the 90’s, I sometimes find myself watching new series and being absolutely floored by how graphic and how far some of the modern ecchi anime goes these days.
Gushing Over Magical Girls is one of those gobsmackingly graphic ecchi anime. So much so, that it earned its spot on this list because, yes, it does have a wide array of fetishes graphically displayed and at one point just had a full-on lesbian sex scene to completion, but it also has a surprisingly engaging story too.
There are some brazen ecchi anime out there these days, but it rare that they come with any sort of good story. So, good on this little perverted series for pumping that creamy effort into both ends.
What anime did you enjoy from 2024? Let fans know in the comments section below.
