Steins Gate 0 comes to mind if you watched Steins Gate.

What sort of stuff do you like? Not just anime, but, like, fiction in general?

...Not that I'm even remotely up-to-date on the past four years, but it'll be a place to start from.

Here's some of my favorites:

Steins;Gate
Great Teacher Onizuka
Full Metal Alchemist
Death Note
Elfen Lied
Hunter x Hunter

I guess primarily I like mystery dramas with lots of suspense, but I would watch anything that is good.

I'm not sure that it's "must watch" ~ but I enjoyed these relatively recent ones:


Rage of Bahamut Virgin Soul ((神撃のバハムート VIRGIN SOUL)
Devilman Crybaby*
Berserk: The Golden Age Arc*
K
Children of the Whales
Tiger and Bunny
Inuyashiki Last Hero*
Gantz 0*
Miss Hokusai
Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet
No.6



*these are very graphic

It staggers at the ending a little bit but Erased was a great mystery series. Its still nice to see the main character figure things out, but if you're familiar with certain tropes you'll have a good chance of figuring things out before he does. The main character has an ability that forces him to live through a time loop until he does something he's supposed to and saves someone around him that was going to die. We see this happen to him once in the first episode with the implication its a seminormal thing to him. He's soon set up for a murder he didn't commit and then his mind goes back to when he was like 11 years old in the 80s where he has to figure out how to save a classmate of his that died back then. Also has a really nice OP



Speaking of series that are at least ok and have great OPs, there's Kekkai Sensen or Blood Blockade Battlefront. Its a mostly episodic deal that does have a main plot but takes a little while to get to it. Its set in a version of New York where like a demonic gateway opened up and monsters and shit just kind of live there now. Its a series that's hard to sum up so I'll just say its worth giving a shot.



There's Inuyashiki, that one is about a man who has a disease that makes him look a lot older than he really is and also realizes his family doesn't really love him anymore. He gets diagnosed with terminal cancer and none of them will even take the time to talk to him so he can tell them. So he goes to the park at night...then a UFO crashes and kills him and a teenager. The aliens inside freak out trying to fix it and the way they do this is by salvaging their consciousnesses and putting them in cyborg bodies. So you get to see the contrast between the sweetest old man ever who just wants to help people, and a sociopathic teenager who murders because it makes him feel something.



If you like Gundam or mecha in general MSG Iron Blooded Orphans was a good one, and its completely disconnected from any other Gundam series so you don't need to watch anything else for it. Its about a bunch of child soldiers that get screwed over by the adults that run the company so they kick them out/kill them and take over the company themselves. Then they get wrapped up in a big political mess where Mars is trying to gain sovereignty from earth and shit.

Ace Attorney is pretty good.

...That has to be a reference to Kurosawa's Ikiru, right?




Anyway, Please Understand, I've seen almost nothing from the past few years, so I'm afraid I don't have any suggestions there. If you want to go a bit older then I have a few, such as Psycho-Pass, Madoka Magica, Durarara!!, and Baccano! that would count as suspenseful mysteries. If you want to go even further back then there's Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and maybe Serial Experiments Lain, though that one is more surreal suspense-horror than mystery-thriller.

I've watched all of those except for Durarara!!. Dybia's suggestions seem very interesting. I will check your suggestions out, guys!

Let me know if you're ever in the mood for some isekai trash though. I eat that shit up. I held back on suggesting any of those for now though, but there have been some good ones in the last couple years.

Still those earlier got my mind running for other seasonal stuff that didn't get like super popular, but were still really good, and a few more came to mind. Like Ushio to Tora from a few years ago. Its an adaptation of a series from the 80s and you can kind of tell. Its about a guy who is forced to unseal a demon in his basement to use the demon killing spear that had it pinned to the wall. Its a bit monster of the week for a little bit but then the two of them go on a quest across Japan.



Then there's Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, you said you liked Attack on Titan well enough, and this is pretty much that. Like the same studio that made Attack on Titan made this between seasons 1 and 2 I think it was. Or between 2 and 3 I can't remember. Still instead of giants its Zombies with molten steal hearts that you need to destroy to kill them and everyone wields sword and steam powered guns. Everyone lives in walled off cities connected by trains, and the main character Ikoma is a guy that wants to study the zombies/Kabane and also kill them all...he's basically just Eren except he wants to kill all of the kabane because of his dead little sister instead of mother. He's also a more tolerable character than Eren thankfully and its not a mystery for most of the show why he has his abilities. He gets bit in the first episode and manages to halt the infection in his body.



Baki 2018 is pretty good. I'll go ahead and say this is an adaptation of an arc of Grappler Baki a ways into the series. You do not need to go back and watch the older anime to see the stuff before this. Baki is a teenager who wants to get strong and be able to beat his dad Yujiro Hanma. His dad is the strongest person on the planet. In this setting Yujiro Hanma looking for a good fight is why the U.S. military had to pull out of Vietnam. Yujiro doesn't have much to do with anything in this whole season though. All at once the world's most deadly assassins all break out of hyper secure prisons and head to Tokyo looking for a good fight because they all want to taste defeat for once in their lives. So they get setup to fight Baki and all of the side characters in the series.



Then there's Pop Team Epic if you feel like scrambling your brain on Japanese in jokes. Its based on a 4koma gag comic, and every single episode has a dub with one set of voice actresses and a different version of the episode with varying male voice actors because in one issue of the manga they made a joke about who their voice actors would be and both said male voice actors.

One Punch Man. Full stop. I think that's the biggest thing that came out in 2015, Mob Psycho 100 is pretty good too, but I don't think it's as good as OPM.

I'd second Devilman Crybaby, provided you aren't depressed.

I can't think of anything else that were must watches at the moment but I'm pretty sure there are others.

Big meh.
Animation quality is abysmal at times, plot is rushed due to having to fit the hour-long trials in digestible chunks, and I don't feel a lot of the new bits are up to par.

Recommendable to huge fans but otherwise a no for me.

Dybia, I feel a lot of your recs have very little mystery save for Erased which is a big rec for me, even though the big twist was obvious.

One I didn't see yet but a big recommendation for any Death Note fan would be Mirai Nikki / Future Diaries.
A group of people have to battle to the death for Godhood, each has been keeping a diary and sees future entries so each one has a little premonition. The main character describes ANYTHING that happens in his life in his diary, and he's helped by his stalker who keeps a diary on HIM. Suspenseful and very dramatic.

Of course Jojo is a standard rec.

I think I'm gonna try Psycho Pass and Tokyo Ghoul though I have limited info on either. Rank high in suspense lists though.

I liked Akame ga Kill for its suspense in the first few episodes a LOT but hated the anime improvised ending almost as much as the original Hellsing's.
Hellsing OVA's are also a standard rec.

My tastes trend towards lighter stuff and comedy, though I do like some dramas also. As far as catching up with the last few years of anime, my top 10 anime list for 2016 went like this:

#10 Sakamoto desu ga?
#9 ReLIFE
#8 Jojo: Diamond is Unbreakable
#7 My Hero Academia
#6 Tanaka-kun is Always Listless
#5 Erased
#4 Konosuba
#3 Saiki Kusuo no Ψ-nan
#2 Yuri!!! on Ice
#1 Mob Psycho 100

As for 2017 onwards I'm still not quite caught up yet and don't think I made a ranked list but from memory in no real order: Tsurezure Children, Recovery of an MMO Junkie, Tsuki ga Kirei were all fun. Made in Abyss is very good, but not my preferred type of show as it's a bit too dark/horror themed for me.

2018: Yuru Camp△, Hinamatsuri, Megalobox, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (still ongoing)

Currently in this season I'm watching Dororo, Kaguya-sama, Mob Psycho 100 season 2, and the slime isekai.

Currently Houseki no Kuni is high on my backlog to watch later, and also I've watched a fair amount of Detective Conan (a.k.a Case Closed) lately, after I saw one of the movies on a flight and enjoyed it.

I've heard mixed things about Mirai Nikki, mostly around it going all-in on being edgy. I like the premise, but it does feel like a concept that could be done very poorly.


As for Psycho-Pass, it's been a while now since I watched it, but it was a solid cyberpunk(ish) mystery series that gets very existential (not in the "am I a person?" way, but in the "how do I decide what is right?" one). It's not perfect, and gets surprisingly gory, but I really like the protagonist and it's well worth a watch.



As I mentioned up-thread, I've just read the first five volumes of the manga, and it's really good. Action, drama, comedy, philosophy, and gorgeous art (which I gather the anime largely manages to keep? Which is a neat trick).

So I'm gonna lay this out again. I like Isekais. In a discord server I'm in I talk about them enough that other people in the server have just been evolving a nickname they changed me to from Mr. Isekai all the way into Mr. Dr. Prof. Yeet-a-kai. Whether they're mad power fantasies about average everyday guys becoming unstoppable or not, If its about someone going to another world I will at least give it a few issues of my time. I'll admit there's a mountain of light novel based trash covering any diamonds in the genre, but every now and then there's some that stick with you.

The Eminence in Shadow
I like this one that only has 2 issues so far because it starts off with a kid who fell in love with the concept of this antihero side character from a series when he was a kid that controlled an organization from the shadows. So he sets out to be like that guy. He trains and becomes buff, and even learns every martial art he possibly can and decides "Naw, I need to be able to shrug off a nuke like the guy in the show. I need to learn magic." So he even learns everything he can about every form of mysticism he can find. At one point he's beating his head against a sacred tree trying to gain omniscience when he sees a light in the distance and assumes its magic and runs after it. He then gets hit by the truck whose headlights he saw, and gets reincarnated into another world. He then starts hiding his abilities as he grows up there thinking he's so much cooler because he hides them. I won't go into the plot any more than that but I like it because the main character is kind of a shithead and can't believe people buy the crap he tells them and its funny.

The other world doesn't stand a chance against the power of instant death.
Could you tell this one is based on a light/web novel? A girl's entire school bus full of classmates is transported to another world and most of them are given abilities by going there. The ones that get no powers are left there as bait for a dragon that was coming to kill them all. A couple get killed at first but one of the boys still there slept through the summoning process and the explanation about everything. When he wakes up he just waves his hand and the dragon is dead. He has had the power to kill anyone and anything with just a thought since before they even got summoned. I kind of like isekais where the main character that got summoned or ended up in another world already had abilities before going. This one is just kind of like one punch man but with highschoolers but in an isekai. The main character can just wave his hand and 99% of problems are solved other than getting back home.

Kuro no Maou
This one is about a japanese high school boy who has kind of a thuggish looking face who gets summoned to another world where he immediately gets a slave band slapped onto his head that forces him to obey as he's kept in what is essentially an evil laboratory below the vatican. He's forced to fight monsters for months with abilities they forced into him through experimentation. Then one day he thinks he's fighting a dummy in armor like usual but realizes they made him kill another japanese person they summoned. Pretty soon he breaks out of the lab and sneaks away on a boat. Once he's gotten away he eventually runs into this little fairy girl and starts hanging out with her. Only a couple issues of this one out so far, but the tone seems cool.

Even if the Sword Saint is Boring He's Still the Strongest
Average Japanese high schooler is killed by god by mistake, and god asks if he can make it up to them when he reincarnates him and he says he wants to be the strongest in the world. God says ok and dumps him in the forest where he meets a sage that god got to train him. He then proceeds to train in the sage's arts for the next 500 years until one day a woman dies in the forest to wolves holding a small child. They save the little girl and his master tells him to leave the forest and raise her. His skills are super boring. He dodges really well and can reduce or increase his weight, and he can make really strong strikes. He doesn't have big showy abilities but he trained for 500 years with basic sword techniques and can beat pretty much anyone he meets effortlessly. Then he becomes a noble lady's bodyguard so he can provide for his new daughter.

The Eminence in Shadow sounds like the coolest show in the whole world.

Edit- Wait, I think its a novel. Still sounds cool.

It's alright? Kinda cringey, but not as bad as I originally thought it would be. I've only read a manga of it though (and only a couple chapters), so I don't know about any novel form/s.

Yeah, I forgot to say I was going off the manga for all of those. Every now and then one will be interesting enough that I go read the source material if there's a translation, but those I just listed I've only read the manga. One light novel isekai I have been reading is The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs. Guy's little sister blackmails him into 100%ing one of her otome games over a weekend and by the end of it he's exhausted and falls down some stairs and dies. Then he wakes up as a background character from the otome game who is the third son of a low ranking noble. He uses knowledge from the game to go get a pay to win DLC item he bought to complete the game quickly when he played it, and it just keeps rolling from there. He also has an intense hatred for all of the boys that were capture targets in the game.