Thanks to the increasing popularity of light novels, and just in general how the Japanese language can work, anime titles have gotten increasingly long – to an almost ridiculous degree.
When you get fatigued just reading an anime title (much less typing it), you know that things have gotten a little out of hand.
Why Are Anime Titles Occasionally So Long?
The length of an anime title can almost exclusively to blamed on light novels, if not just the industry in general. While bookstores are kind of dusking in popularity these days, the old practice for publishers remains. That practice being describing a novels’ content concisely in a title that fits on the spine of a book.
By having titles like “I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level,” potential buyers know that the protagonist will be overpowered from doing minimal work in what is an isekai situation. It doesn’t convey that it is mostly a CGDCT affair, but that’s what the cover art would convey.
Long titles are just a device to get potential buyers to pick up a book – to grab their attention. Once a book is in someone’s hand, it is one less barrier between that book and the cash register.
One other consideration for long titles in manga and light novels is that the Japanese language is a bit different from Western languages. A Kanji character can repent a singular word, have multiple meanings, or even represents a whole phrase. So while some titles do not seem possible to compactly fit on a book spine, they look a lot more tidy written in Japanese rather than the still-lengthy romanization.
What Is The Longest Anime Title?
I’ve written about obsessively long anime titles to vent my frustrations before in a bit of a meme article, but this time, I am truly on the hunt for what is the longest title. To keep things less complicated, I will only be measuring English translated titles.
Other measuring criteria:
- Shortened versions of these titles (Oreshura, WorldEnd, Shomin Sample, ect) are NOT part of the word count
- Terms that are legitimately part of the title (Trapped in a Dating Sim, The Misfit of Demon King Academy, ect), but are separated by a colon, ARE counted in the word count.
- Contractions are counted as one word
- Punctuation is not counted
Ranking Long Anime Titles
- The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady (12 words)
- Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon? (12 words)
- I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level (12 words)
- Hamefura: I Reincarnated into an Otome Game as a Villainess With Only Destruction Flags (13)
- Yubisu: I Couldn’t Become A Hero, So I Reluctantly Decided to Get a Job (13 words)
- Suppose a Kid From The Last Dungeon Boonies Moved To A Starter Town (13 words)
- Kochikame: This is the Police Station in Front of Kameari Park in Katsushika Ward (13 words)
- Anohana: We Still Don’t Know The Name Of The Flower We Saw That Day (13 words)
- I’m Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness (13 words)
- Watamote: No Matter How I Look At It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular (14 words)
- Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs (14 words)
- WorldEnd: What Do You Do At The End Of The World? Are You Busy? Will You Save Us? (17 words)
- Chronicles of an Aristocrat Reborn in Another World – The Apostle of the Gods Who Know No Self-Restraint (17 words)
- The Misfit of Demon King Academy: History’s Strongest Demon King Reincarnates and Goes to School with His Descendants (18 words)
- Shomin Sample: Story in Which I Was Kidnapped by a Young Lady’s School to be a “Sample of the Common People” (19 words)
I definitely don’t look forward to the day when Shomin Sample is dethroned.
