The end of the year is rapidly approaching. For me, it has been a year of procrastination and failures. I sincerely hope that it has been different for you, dear reader, and you are able to enjoy a well-earned rest, perhaps reading some manga or watching some anime, if you’re in that kind of stuff.
Today I thought of sharing a list of anime and manga I would like to recommend to all who sometimes enjoy extremely violent fiction (not suitable for children). Below is a sort of countdown of my personal favorites in this genre. Can you guess all of them without looking in the description at the end of this post?
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Here is the list of anime and manga that are in the images above. Each of them has a brief description of the things that I enjoyed (and disliked) the most.
7. Vagabond (manga); Strengths – gorgeous artwork; badass main characters and fight scenes. Weaknesses – repetitive; very annoying side characters
6. Hellsing (OVA); Strengths – endless carnage; some epic scenes can really give goosebumps, outstanding voice acting in both the original and dubbed versions. Weaknesses – horribly cliché anime humour scenes that do not fit the theme at all; weak plot and no character development
5. Dorohedero (manga); Strengths – design and style; dozens of mysteries; rich imaginary universe; (visually) intriguing characters. Weaknesses – nearly impossible to associate with reality; fluctuates between extremely dark themes and immature anime elements
4. Gantz (anime); Strengths – merciless plot, absurd and grotesque situations; (exaggerated?) display of perversion and selfishness of human nature. Weaknesses – the same absurd and grotesque situations; unsolved story
3. Shigurui (anime); Strengths – nearly realistic; very dark; superb soundtrack and animation; watching it is somehow similar to seeing a strange and distant vision. Weaknesses – at some parts too sadistic for my taste; not exactly a mood lifter, but nor is any other from this ranking
2. Berserk (anime, manga, movies); Strengths – the sense of humanity’s inferiority and vanity of it’s struggles (it is best displayed in the anime); each of the mediums provides slightly different experience and yet they all are unforgettable; perfect soundtrack, which is great for reading the manga as well; compelling dark medieval universe. Weaknesses – the quality of the story degrades over time and becomes a horrible hybrid of it’s former maturity and supernatural school kid type manga
1. Vinland Saga (manga); Strengths – good balance between the fictional and historical; interesting storyline; character development; realistic settings. Weaknesses – the characters weren’t exactly convincing – that’s all I can think of now, I actually put Vinland Saga at the top because it has less weaknesses than Berserk
All the images were found by using Google and I’m not their owner.
Thanks for reading and enjoy your holidays!
Covered in Dust 