I have heard a lot of debate about favorite anime’s here recently, but this is not what this is for, I genuinely want to know why a certain anime is someones favorite. Take mine for example, my favorite anime is Akame Ga Kill. I know that it’s not everyone’s favorite and everyone has a different opinion about it, and that is totally OK, I would love to know your point’s of view on it. My why for liking this anime though is because I felt like I connected with some of the characters and the story line really drew me in. Again if you disagree with my opinion that is perfectly fine and i’d like to hear why. I just thought that this would be a fun little discussion to have.
My favorite anime is Dragon Ball Z, mostly because I grew up with it. Also a big fan of Macross, for the same reason. I have fond memories of Mazinger Z and Speed Racer also, but I was too young to care much at that point. The only current animes I’m familiar with are My Hero Academia, which I dig simply because it reminds me of Dragon Ball. And Spy X Family, which is just a cute sitcom disguised as an anime.
Freiren is rated #1 on MAL for a reason. It is nearly perfect.
It has a Middle-Earth feel. It is well paced, funny, great characters and just works great.
Konosuba runs on comedy and yet is a great Isekai at the same time. Kazuma, Megamin, Aqua and Darkness are a great adventuring party. The dozen or so side characters are awesome. About as funny as Futurama at its best.
Spy x Family and its 60s cold war spy vibe and humor is high on my list also.
@Darren_Garrison is an anime fan, I’ll page him. Also @ParallelLines.
Anything from the Ghost in the Shell series. Why? I’m not entirely certain, but I think it has a believable but totally alien future world that’s pretty well populated with great characters.
I know nothing about anime as a genre except I’m inexplicably hooked on some of it. I’m surprised and pleased to find that what I thought was my guilty pleasure of an utterly ridiculous but immersive romp in Spy x Family is approved by more knowledgeable fans. (Is anybody going to make me similarly feel better for somehow craving the hyper-emo teen soap The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity?)
The Summer Hikaru Died is the favorite I’d mention to any critic I feared would laugh at me for liking sillier ones. But I’ll never really go back on my first loves The Way of the Househusband and Thermae Romae. Oh, and pretty much anything Studio Ghibli, which got me into this fine mess in the first place.
(And hi @lilybug0309, welcome to the Straight Dope!)
For what it’s worth Spy X Family is rated very high, #184 in fact.
BTW: Freiren season 2 is scheduled to premiere on January 16, 2026.
My favorite is Sword Art Online, particularly the very first season.
I think that the quality and entertainment declined a bit afterward, in the following seasons and spin-off films, but I still have watched and enjoyed them.
I like the series because I’ve been a fan of MMORPGs since, well, since they first started, and I even played MUDs before MMORPGs existed. I found the initial premise very enjoyable, where you are trapped in a fully-immersive VR game and can’t leave until it’s conquered. The way they explored what it would actually be like to actually be in a game, and literally live or die by its rules, I loved it. I also think the dubbed voice acting was top notch.
Oh you little… I just finished making myself answer the “Top 3 novels” thread, and now I have to manage this?!? 
[ looks at the dozen+ series on the shelf that he cares enough to own ]
Note - I’m going to leave out a LOT of series I love, but where I read the translated web novel or light novel first, because the inevitable cuts for time greatly diminish my pleasure, so an otherwise favorite like The Irregular at Magic High School got dumped.
[ ponders for twenty minutes going back and forth ]
Okay, for today, and probably a top 3 contender for all time is the original release of the the Berserk story. Thankfully, in this case I saw the anime before I started buying/reading the English translations, so I only later enjoyed how well they boiled it down (with very few cuts in fact) rather than as a stripped down version of something better.
I already have a great fondness for stories set in crap-sack worlds, failed heroes, and anti heroes, as well as characters that just refuse to surrender. Berserk (and not just Guts) is full (in both good and very evil ways) of such characters. Since the art, while simplified, is absolutely grand (Manga is so detailed it arguably killed the creator of overwork), the characters are detailed with far too human flaws, and there’s just enough hope held throughout that you feel forced to watch the disaster unfolding. And the many details of the world building, and the powers behind the scenes, well, somewhat like reading Warhammer 40k lore, you see hidden and not so hidden inevitabilities strewn throughout.
The anime I mentioned is pretty much only covers the beginning of the story, outside a moment at the very beginning and end, it is of course flawed, because SO MUCH MORE happens later. There are some more modern movie versions covering different arcs of the story, but those mostly use a somewhat jarring combination of computer animation that they never worked for me as well as the first release.
Let me add an enthusiastic twelve thumbs up for Frieren.
Love One Punch Man, wish they’d do a second season… 
Eighty-Six is really good.
Very much loved Planetes.
I would like any recommendations for others anybody can offer… I am looking for shows that are NOT about kids, that are not eternal (hundreds of episodes), and that have no stupid fan service crap.
Wow, that first and third point are going to be difficult, especially in conjunction.
Maybe (!) Zom100? The primary protagonist starts as a post-college salaryman later crushed by work, while a few of the characters are younger, they all act like adults, not like kids. The maybe comes from fan service - it’s subjective, but I think most of the time we have it, it serves to further the story, OR to mock the trope in a very self-aware fashion.
Another probable is Campfire Cooking in Another World, if only because the protagonist has such shitty love luck that even the gods comment on it, but IIRC, there’s enough gratuitous FS from the goddess that it probably wouldn’t quite cut it.
Slightly better is probably Restaurant to Another World, though there’s a young kid working the tables - but other than providing a outsider looking in POV and adding a bit of cute, it’s largely not about them other than the first episode.
I would also second the first couple seasons of Sword Art Online as well as the Gun Gale Online spinoff. I just generally like that genre of stuff happening back and forth in the VR/dream and real world where what goes on in one has real consequences in the other (Inception, Matrix, Ready Player One, etc).
I grew up with classics like Battle of the Planets, Voltron, Speed Racer, Robotech, Akira, Ghost in the Shell as a kid in the 80s.
As a young adult in the 90s I liked Cowboy Bebop and stuff that played on Adult Swim from time to time. Studio Ghibli stuff like Nausicaä, Princess Mononoke, and Howls Moving Castle.
I never really got into Gundam but it seems like something I would have liked. The one series I did enjoy was 08 Mobile Suit about a small platoon of regular soldiers with what I guess are stock mecha and vehicles.
More recently I liked Attack on Titan. The final season sort of veered off from the rest IMO and seemed to last like five seasons.
Netflix also has a film called BLAME! which is pretty trippy. It’s about a group of humans sort of trapped in a “city” which I can only describe as a massive (like Dyson sphere or larger massive) endless automated megastructure that got away from it’s human inhabitants and just keeps expanding,
No kidding!
Others I have enjoyed lately: Ergo Proxy and Psycho-Pass.
Cowboy Bebop is an old favorite of mine, of course.
I am just not interested in the 9000th iteration of the old coming-of-age story; I already came of age, and have seen the concept represented (or terrible attempts to subvert it) too many times already. Easiest way to avoid it is just to find shows about adults.
I think my favorite Japanese anime TV series is Future Boy Conan, the 1978 Nippon Sunrise show loosely based on Alexander Key’s dystopian juvenile SF novel “The Incredible Tide,” about the titular Conan and his friends struggling to survive in a post-cataclysm world. The show asks the big questions about technology, conflict, morality, society, man’s relationship with nature, and since it’s by the dream team of Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and Yasuo Otsuka, the show is filled with action, fantastical mechanical devices, giant architectural structures, and a sense of space and movement within that space that is rare to see in film, animated or otherwise.
Other faves… Patlabor (especially the 1988 film), Giant Gorg, Aim For The Ace (particularly the 1979 film), the 1968 short film Flying Phantom Ship, the 2001 Cyborg 009 series, the 1979 Galaxy Express 999 feature film, the 1984 film Macross: Do You Remember Love.
I loved the beginning of that story, in fact it was one of my favorites and then it didn’t jump the shark, it fired the shark into orbit on rockets.
holy cow, forgot to mention the recent Netflix series Pluto, based on not just the original 1960s Astro Boy series, but the “Greatest Robot In The World” story arc from that series, given a tremendous reimagining by modern manga artist Naoki Urasawa. In a similar, but much darker vein is Yuasa’s Devilman Crybaby.
Try Oddtaxi. Read no reviews because they have the potential to spoil it. (Avoid the movie because it is literally just a few episodes of the series patched together.) Maybe Delicious in Dungeon if you aren’t already familiar with it. (I’m also finding your criteria extremely limiting.)
I found Frieren to be very enjoyable. Older ones I liked include Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop, and Violet Evergarden.
Another newer one I’ve liked is Dandadan, although the first couple of episodes have rather uncomfortable fanservice-y scenes, it steers away from that for the most part. Episode 7 has a pretty emotional sequence.
As I recently mentioned in another thread, I’m pretty bad at coming up with lists of favorite things. But I tend to like lower stakes, slice-of-life (and coming-of-age) series more than action-centric ones. I’m currently catching up on reading Witch Hat Atelier in anticipation of the upcoming anime (14 volumes of the manga are available in English so far, the first season of the anime probably won’t cover more than a couple of them).
I mean, everyone is going to see things differently. For a lot of people, despite the opening scene, going from a gory but vaguely (!) realistic mercenary story to political intrigue to the increasingly supernatural elements felt really unnatural.
YMMV of course.
I mostly see it as the loooong (there are many, Many volumes of manga) prologue where we see what made Guts happy before they strip it ALL away, and in the words of Stephen R. Donaldson -
“This you have to understand. There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything. Give him back something broken.”
Which made me very much doubt the later volumes where Guts is trying to recover a bit of himself, and the world seems be be offering a chance at recovery.
One show I like is Dr. Stone, about one person’s crusade to rally humanity to recreate civilization 1000 years after the modern world has crumbled to dust. The main characters are nominally teenagers, but at no point do they do anything particularly adolescent (e.g. they don’t have schools or clubs or love triangles, they just work on building stuff and investigating the disaster).
One thing I like about it is that they have encounters with hostile groups, but they don’t resolve them by having 10 straight episodes of punching and/or blasting each other with increasing powerful attacks (or having 10 straight episodes of a random tournament which involves blasting and/or punching – Frieren, you were doing so well up to that point…). They use investigation, diplomacy and technological superiority instead.
Another show I enjoyed on Netflix was Tokyo Override about motorcycle couriers in a dystopian city. Only 6 episodes; the story was fine, but it looked great.