Secret gadgets, hidden messages, intel gathering in the shadows – Spy anime is the most subtle of intrigues. It usually lacks the flashy action that drives anime to wild popularity, but there is no finer place to search for deep storytelling and mysteries to unravel.
Espionage is a finer art that happens in the shadows. A spy doesn’t stand out with flash and sizzle, or at least not if they can help it. Instead, they maintain a guise of normality so banal they could very well be the person behind you in line at the store.
Whether it is intelligence gathering or the more vicious vintage of tactical assassination, these spy anime recommendations have all the intel that anime has to offer on the subject of espionage.
Best Spy Anime
Joker Game
Good spy anime featuring traditional and serious depictions of spies is a rather limited selection. Especially if you want realism and characters that don’t have some super power-like special skill. However, in that super specific criteria fits Joker Game perfectly.
Joker Game follows a fictional spy agency that was founded in Japan prior to World War II. It follows an agent charged with infiltrating various countries to gather economic and military intelligence to help support Japan in their upcoming war.
While intelligence gathering is typically a pretty tedious thing to watch, Joker Game excels at creating tension and suspense in a way that grips you and draws you in.
Princess Principal
If you require your spy anime to have the maximum amount of cute girls, then the deceptively named Princess Principal is an excellent choice.
While it sounds like your standard school moe series, Princess Principal actually features a group of female spies undercover in a prestigious school of an enemy nation using their skills outside of class to destabilize the country.
While “cute girls” may immediately put off some looking for serious spy tales, Princess Principal is surprising with it depth – and darkness – of plot. It treats it plot very seriously and tells a great story with likable and skilled characters.
Spy x Family
Spy X Family follows a master spy who, for his current mission, is required to get a wife and child to successfully infiltrate a school and reach his target.
What Spy x Family does really, unexpectedly well is it balances skilled spy action with wholesome family life. As everyone has a special quirk about themselves that they hide from each other – the father being a spy, the mother being an assassin, and the daughter being an esper – it allows for many missions to go in unexpected, but always fun ways that keep things interesting.
However, while Spy X Family has a lot of high-energy action, it usually sacrifices the more subtle aspects of spy intrigue.
Mission: Yozakura Family
If you developed a taste for spy anime from Spy X Family, like so many have, then Mission: Yozakura Family is your next favorite thing since it captures an eccentric, high-energy, yet surprisingly wholesome spy experience in a very similar way.
Mission Yozakura Family follows a boy who is hesitant to get close to others after the death of his family. However, he still has his childhood friend, even if her older brother tries his best to protect his sister by keeping her apart from him.
When her brother’s siscon impulses finally boil over, the main character learns that these siblings are actually part of a large and eccentric family of spies, and the only way to keep seeing his childhood friend is to marry into the Yozakura family and become a powerful spy himself.
Night Raid 1931
Not unlike Joker Game, Night Raid 1931 features a group of Japanese spies abroad working for their country. This time, they are in Shanghai keeping tabs on things after Japan’s dalliances in warring with China and Russia prior to World War II.
However, instead of having the characters just be extremely skilled spies, they are instead esper-type people who use mind powers to help them on their missions. So while it has a premise that seems steeped in realism at a glance, it does accent the spy activities with super powers. However, it does use those powers to tell an exciting story.
Release the Spyce
Release the Spyce is an anime that comes at espionage with a little more colorful flair and a lot more explosive action.
It follows the daughter of a police officer who was ingrained with a strong sense of justice. While living an ordinary life, she is one day recruited by a secret organization operated by students at her school after witnessing spies at work in her city.
Now, she runs counter-espionage missions with a group of girls who gain unique powers from ingesting certain spices.
009-1
In a world where the Cold War has raged on for 140 years, a cyborg spy under the name 009-1 works for a security company in a world that is split into East and West Blocks. Uneasy peace between the two sides frequently degenerates as the war has turned into a battle over who can create the most advanced technology.
While the alternate history premise of 009-1 is an interesting concept to explore, the series dwells in an episodic mission storytelling that leaves the overall plot feeling a bit fragmented and lackluster.
91 Days
91 Days is not your typical spy anime. It follows a man whose family was killed by the Mafia family his father worked for when he was a child. As an adult, he is given a chance to infiltrate the family and take his bloody revenge from the inside.
While not a typical tale of espionage, 91 Days does feature gritty, mature, and serious intrigue as it follows the main character blending with the organization while also making moves to take them down.
Noir
You could say there are two sides to espionage. Noir leans more towards the other end of espionage – not intelligence gathering, but assassination.
Noir follows two girls, one an assassin-for-hire and the other a mysterious school girl with the skills of an assassin. When their paths insect, they discover that their lives are linked to each other by events, but neither can recall as to why or how they know each other. As they take jobs together, the pair unravel their shared history.
While assassination is not necessarily intriguing in and of itself, the “character history mystery” in Noir really carries this anime with its slow-building, slowly unfolding intrigue.
Gunslinger Girl
It’s anime. It should be no surprise that there would eventually be a series about small girls who are assassins. In fact, one should be surprised there aren’t more.
Gunsligner Girl follows an organization that takes sickly young girls, augments them with cybernetics, then brainwashes and trains them to be assassins.
It sounds like a tragic and melancholic situation, and is played out like one. Especially when these girls, even with all their enhancements and mind laundering, still maintain the innocence of childhood in an agency that treats them as the disposable killers that they are.
Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom
Phantom brings with it murder and melancholy as a Japanese tourist witnesses an assassination, gets captured, and is brainwashed into being an assassin himself.
Happens to someone everyday. We all know this too-common risk when we travel.
Anyway, much of Phantom follows him looking for a way out of this situation while still having to carry out the grievous taking of life for a shady organization. However, while its face-value story is interesting enough, this rabbit hole goes deeper.
Golgo 13
A man of mystery, Golgo 13 is an individual that goes by many different aliases. He can be whoever he needs to be in order to complete his mission.
While he is not a spy nor an assassin for any singular organization, Golgo 13 takes missions from any major entity – government or otherwise – that wants to make use of his legendary skills.
While the set up of just some guy going and killing people is a bit basic, Golgo 13, to its extreme credit, finds unique ways to make this set up surprising so that the episodic formula never gets stale.
Darker Than Black
What are Contractors if not just spies or assassins like all the rest here?
While Darker Than Black has a big emphasis on super-powered individuals completing jobs for a shady organization, personal safety mandates that these individuals don’t stand out. As such, you will watch the main character maintain his excessively normal guise during the day as he wages shadow war at night – like an excellent spy.
Spy Classroom
In a similar vein to Princess Principal, Spy Classroom follows two fictional nations that were rocked by war in the past and have now turned to espionage to ensure the fragile peace remains.
In Spy Classroom, the world’s greatest spy lost his team on a dangerous mission he was not assigned to. However, he has selected a series of girls who all have eccentric abilities that caused them not to thrive in traditional spy school in order to form a new team with him.
While the girls hope for training from the world’s best spy, it turns out that he is a great spy, but not a great teacher.
While Spy Classroom occasionally gets bogged down by a lack of detailed storytelling and takes a bit to get to the good spy action, it is a series that offers a diverse cast of cute anime girls with unique stories to explore.
Moriarty the Patriot
Similar to 91 Days, Moriarty the Patriot is perhaps less applicable as a spy anime since it is a reverse twist on Sherlock Holmes. However, it has all the earmarks of espionage.
Moriarty maintains the public guise of a low-ranking aristocrat and mathematics professor while in private he is a “crime consultant” that helps others bring down nobility in order to overthrow the strict society hierarchy.
As the whole series is about fooling others with normalcy and a keen intellect, it may be of interest to those looking for espionage-focused anime to enjoy.
Eden of the East
For an anime with such doughy character designs and a comical start with a naked man in front of the White House, Eden of the East sure does bring the intrigue as it goes on.
In fact, the main character may not be a spy in the traditional sense, but really you can’t know that for sure since he doesn’t even know who he is. Regardless, Eden of the East is an expanding web of intrigue surrounding a mysterious organization and terrorist attacks.
R.O.D. – Read or Die the TV
Read or Die starts off as more of a private detective series, but transforms over time. The series follows three sisters with abilities to manipulate paper into various objects who work as detectives in Hong Kong. After being assigned a job to protect a novelist visiting from Japan, they relocate home with her as protection after she is targeted by terrorists for an unknown, but soon explored reason.
Not only does Read or Die offer unique paper-based powers, but it has an intriguing plot that grows above and beyond what it starts off as when it starts to get into the mysterious organization that employs the sisters.
Lycoris Recoil
Who would you entrust the protection of your country to? Highly trained military personnel or female agents undercover as school girls?
Lycoris Recoil focuses on the latter as Japan entrusted its safety to a secret agency that trains and deploys young girls disguised as simple school girls to quietly thwart terror attacks on the country and hide evidence of the thwarted potential threat from the public.
The series follows one serious member of the organization that was willing to risk lives if the job got done. Due to this recklessness, she is sequestered to a more laid-back side agency where a chipper girl – and one of the top agents ever to work in the organization – tries to teach this serious young lady that there is more to life than taking lives.
While Lycoris Recoil charms you with the likable character dynamic, it also doesn’t linger too long in silly shenanigans. Despite how it looks, Lycoris Recoil brings plenty of intrigue and action in all its well-animated splendor.
Do you have more spy anime recommendations that capture the intrigue and mystery of espionage? Let fans know in the comments section below.
