Flashbacks are a popular storytelling tool to freely give information and establish characters in visual media like anime as well as traditional television and movies. That said, it is widely regarded as one of the lazier storytelling devices. That doesn’t mean flashbacks shouldn’t be used, but sometimes anime can lean a bit heavily on them. If you are looking for anime recommendations where the large bulk of the story is told through a flashback, then these are for you.
Best Flashback Anime
Terraformars
If someone in Terraformars isn’t fighting, you can be damn sure they are flashing back about something. Sometimes, they are doing both. Terraformars, at least the first season, is notorious for only being fights and flashbacks for characters to explain why they decided to fight. The overall plot of the series doesn’t even start moving until the second season.
Juuni Taisen
While you can make a battle royale-type series and give it an overall plot, usually fans are there to see some people kill other people. Juuni Taisen understands that, and as such, the only stories it explores are the back stories of the participants in its unexplained battle royale event. You also learn quickly that the subject of the flashback backstory in each episode won’t live to see the end of that episode. Usually, anyway.
Gungrave
Gungrave is a bit of a flashback hybrid. It starts in medias res and about the first half of the series is all flashback explaining how the main character got to that point. It builds out his back story as a street tough growing into a mafia hitman, it builds out the villain, and it builds out the world that went from relative rough to completely terrible. Even after that is done, however, there are still a number of small flashbacks when he meets characters from his past to help nail home the moment.
Record of Ragnarok
Think of Record of Ragnarok as Terraformars confined to an arena. The series pits deities from various world mythology against warriors from throughout human history. While that match up seems pretty unfair, they keep the power gap pretty competitive. Anyway, there is an overall story as to why the tournament is happening, but you can be sure that the biggest chunks of story that you get are the back stories of the human fighters.
However, unlike similar “character backstory flashback is the only story” series like Juuni Taisen, their flashbacks don’t necessarily mean those human fighters will lose and die.
Berserk
In a situation almost exactly the same as Gungrave, the original Berserk (1997) anime starts off in medias res, then the rest of that season is a flashback explaining how the world got to that point. It establishes all the characters, their relationships to each other, and shows how the falling out happened and how an otherwise normal non-supernatural medieval world became overrun by demons. In fact, the first season is 99 percent flashback with the story in the present starting in the second season.
Tenchi Universe
Tenchi Universe is an interesting example as the first episode takes place chronologically at the end of the anime. As such, everything after that is a flashback explaining how things got to that point. It is just one more confusing aspect in a franchise that is, overall, very confusing to watch.
Tenjho Tenge
As Tenjho Tenge had the unfortunately fate of being canceled prematurely, the anime series ended up with a large chunk of it being flashback. The flashback arc is used to flesh out some characters and their backstories, but it doesn’t matter since the anime didn’t continue long past it. It make the flashback seem pointless, even though it was necessary to the storytelling. As a somewhat ecchi battler, it is hard to build out characters without flashing back.
Cluster Edge
This widely forgotten about series is an exercise in flashbacks gone wrong. It tells the story of an elite school where the students are under immense pressure to become good leaders once they graduate. It is a standard shounen type mecha fantasy series, but the way it builds out its characters is almost completely through flashbacks. Almost all information is given in that form and it is always very dramatic and heavy topics. Normal flashbacks are easy to overlook while still retaining the information. Unfortunately for this series, it flashbacks so often that it really distracts from everything else.
Do you have more anime series that lean a little too hard on flashbacks as a storytelling device? Let fans know in the comments section below.
