10 Incredible Anime Series Nobody Remembers

1 month ago 14

Published Jun 16, 2026, 2:03 PM EDT

Daniel Trock is a Contributor at DualShockers specializing in PC games, lists, and reviews. He has been writing professionally since 2018 and covering games since 2020, with previous work spanning guides, news, lists, and reviews across multiple publications.

Before joining DualShockers, Daniel contributed guides to GamerJournalist and lists to TheGamer. He currently covers tech topics for SlashGear and BGR. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Marist College and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing from Western Connecticut State University.

In the same vein as games, a positively massive quantity of anime airs on a regular basis, and as anime becomes more mainstream, especially thanks to Shonen Jump adaptations, that amount only increases year over year. As a result of this oversaturation, not every show can get the undisputed spotlight it may deserve, or even if it does, it gets muscled out just as soon as the season rolls over. It’s the nature of the beast, sadly.

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I’ve been watching anime consistently for decades, moreso in my adult years, and I’ve seen more than a few shows either impress me personally or make a surprisingly big splash in the community, only to drop off the face of the Earth just a few years later. Sometimes, these shows get an extra season that helps to keep the proverbial pulse up, but whether due to evolving tastes or that aforementioned oversaturation, they just don’t seem to find a permanent place in the public consciousness. In the interest of dredging up some old favorites, here are a few anime that were pretty excellent in their time that I wish more members of the anime-watching community could be bothered to remember.

10 Daily Lives of High School Boys

A Wholehearted Commitment to Teenage Idiocy

I wasn’t the biggest social butterfly in high school, but even I got up to my fair share of assorted nonsense with my friends. It comes with the territory; if there’s any group that’s good at wrestling entertainment out of literally nothing, it’s a bunch of teenage dudes. That’s the kind of energy that comes from Daily Lives of High School Boys.

It’s pretty much exactly what it says on the tin; the daily lives and exploits of a bunch of dudes who attend an all-male high school. There’s little overarching plot, nor much in the way of character development, just constant, boneheaded shenanigans. Sometimes one of ‘em picks up the perfect stick on the street and decides to become a JRPG hero, other times one of ‘em gets harassed by a girl on the riverbank who’s into chuni stories. Whatever it is, it’s all funny.

The show was big in online circles for its inherent memeability, which is why many of the memes have outlived the show itself. If you’ve ever seen an image of a high school girl tossing away a large rock after learning something was just a joke, that’s where it’s from.

9 Kokoro Connect

Getting to Know You

Kokoro Connect

Cast

Part of what makes being a high schooler such a tricky time is that you can’t always tell what the people around you are thinking, so you’re never really sure how you’re supposed to respond to something. Though, even if you could know exactly how someone else feels, you might not end up liking what you learn. This is how the protagonists of Kokoro Connect have their bonds tested.

Kokoro Connect focuses on a group of five ordinary high schoolers who happen to find themselves the obsessive target of Heartseed, an extradimensional entity who’s a little too interested in how humans work. In order to test their assorted theories, Heartseed subjects the five to a series of supernatural phenomena, including spontaneous body-swapping, inhibition removal, de-aging them into children, and unwilling mind-reading. These teens are going to have to endure all of this supernatural nonsense if they want to keep their lives and friendships from completely falling apart.

It’s a show that does a good job of establishing a lighthearted baseline before beating you over the head with heavy emotional beats, which make for some of its most memorable moments.

8 Outlaw Star

A Toonami Classic

Like many children of the 90s, my first exposure to anime as a whole was Cartoon Network’s Toonami block, where I was introduced to the wonders of Dragon Ball, Gundam, Sailor Moon, and more. In addition to those major shows, though, there were several other relatively smaller, but no less interesting shows to enjoy, such as Outlaw Star.

Outlaw Star is a space opera series set in the far future, where mankind has successfully taken to the distant stars and established contact with alien races, with powerful galactic empires vying for power and resources. Our hero, Gene Starwind, stumbles into possession of an experimental starship, plus the special bio-android that can interface with it. This ship, the titular Outlaw Star, is the only vehicle capable of finding the “Galactic Leyline,” an ancient cosmic nexus of immense power and knowledge, setting off an intergalactic race between Gene and his crew, and various other powerful crews and governmental bodies.

In hindsight, I think I was a little too young to be watching Outlaw Star, given its violence and occasional raunchiness, but that didn’t stop me from liking its pulpy, almost western-like stylings.

7 Space Dandy

Made for Adult Swim

Speaking of Cartoon Network, in 2012, Toonami returned from cancellation, newly integrated into the late-night Adult Swim block. It ran some old stuff at first, but gradually started expanding into newer and, more importantly, wholly original anime, including 2014’s Space Dandy, which actually aired in America before its Japanese release.

Space Dandy follows the titular spacefaring bounty hunter as he works the only job he’s semi-decent at: trolling through under-charted regions of space in search of undiscovered alien species, with every one he successfully brings in for registration earning him a paycheck. These jobs often fail, leaving Dandy and his tiny crew to either take on other types of work or go drink themselves stupid at Dandy’s favorite spacefaring Hooters knock-off.

Space Dandy was directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, who also gave us the classic cast of Cowboy Bebop, which earned the show some street cred. It was a little too random and weird to have the same kind of staying power, but it was still pretty cool to get an original anime made just for western viewers.

6 Servant x Service

The People You Meet on the Job

You never forget your first office job. Even if it sucks, and it probably did, you still learn a lot about the world and the kinds of people who live in it. I imagine you’d learn even more about the world from working in a local government office, which happens to be the setting of Servant x Service.

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Servant x Service is a mostly-grounded workplace comedy about civil servants working in a government office building in a small city in Hokkaido. It’s our protagonist, Lucy’s, first job, and she’s resolved to do her best and grow as a person. However, she has a secondary motivation: finding the civil servant who made the remarkably stupid decision to authorize her parents to make her legal first name over a dozen different names long, which has given her no shortage of headaches in life. Her coworkers are quirky, but mostly normal, save for her section chief, whose crippling shyness has him interact with everyone through a remote-control plushie.

Like I said, it’s “mostly-grounded.” Most of the characters’ interactions are funny in a relatable way, though the series usually veers into abject nonsense at least once every few episodes just to keep you on your toes.

5 Mushishi

There’s More to the World than Meets the Eye

I’ve always liked the perception of mythology through Shintoism, that the world is populated by myriad gods and supernatural entities like yokai, all existing just outside of humanity’s sight. Part of what makes that concept so interesting is that, much in the same way that our reality has its lesser lifeforms like bugs, so too must a realm beyond our own, which we get a glimpse into via Mushishi.

Mushishi is set in a hypothetical spot between the Edo and Meiji periods of Japan, where the borders are still closed, but technology is starting to advance. We follow the episodic journeys of Ginko, a traveling researcher specializing in Mushi, a species of insect-like primitive supernatural entity. People experience various problems and illnesses caused by Mushi, and Ginko makes it his job to seek them out and remove them, both to protect the people and to ensure the Mushi can exist safely away from humanity.

Mushishi is a very quiet series, especially for one with a supernatural setting. Ginko is generally a very laid-back protagonist, only occasionally getting serious when the moment demands it, focusing instead on careful observation of the Mushi and the problems they cause. He’s less like an exorcist and more like a supernatural entomologist conducting field surveys.

4 Welcome to the NHK!

Told People to Touch Grass Before it was Cool

You hear a lot about the loneliness epidemic these days, how people can’t seem to get out of the house and socialize with others in a healthy way. While the problem may have more eyes on it recently, though, it’s always been a concern, even back in the mid-2000s when Welcome to the NHK aired.

Welcome to the NHK follows Tatsuhiro Sato, a paranoid hikikomori, or a severe shut-in. He’s been unemployed for four years after dropping out of college, and has managed to convince himself that his current misery is the result of some manner of grand conspiracy to ruin his life specifically. By chance, he encounters a girl named Misaki, who makes it her personal mission to cure Sato of his shut-in ways and crippling anxiety, with the series following their various attempts, plus Sato’s interactions with his otaku next-door neighbor.

It’s a dark comedy, more the former than the latter, with a big emphasis on psychological analysis, touching on some heavy topics like depression, the effects of prolonged isolation, and even drug abuse. As a former psych major, I’m naturally drawn to this kind of story, though I think it may be more important to think about in the current climate of the world.

3 Kids on the Slope

A Few of My Favorite Things

Music is a powerful force, able to pull those invisible strings in our hearts and spark feelings you never knew you could feel. There have been plenty of anime over the years that have touched upon the transformative power of music, but one of my favorites still remains Kids on the Slope.

Set in the summer of 1966, Kids on the Slope follows Kaoru Nishimi, an intelligent high schooler whose wealthy, constantly-moving family has left him feeling a bit bereft in the social department. At his newest school, he meets a spunky delinquent named Sentaro, who happens to be a major jazz fanatic. Sentaro drags Kaoru to the basement of the local record shop, where the two strike up a friendship over a blooming affinity for jazz and their free-flowing jam sessions.

I don’t claim to be any particular expert on jazz, but I know good music when I hear it, and this anime has both some excellent music and a demonstrable love of it. The first scene where Kaoru joins a jazz session on the piano is an absolute delight, as you see him shed his shyness for a moment and completely lose himself in the rhythm.

2 Blood Blockade Battlefront

Rule of Cool Realized

Many Shonen action anime operate on the principle known as “Rule of Cool.” Basically, it doesn’t matter how inexplicable it is, so long as it looks cool. Most Shonen series do need some level of consistency to work, but at least in my opinion, one of the few exceptions is Blood Blockade Battlefront, created by the same madman who brought us Trigun.

The series is set in Hellsalem's Lot, formerly New York City, a borough where humans loosely coexist with a myriad of bizarre creatures and entities from beyond the veil of reality. The organization Libra covertly keeps the peace in this city, with each of its members wielding superhuman combat abilities based around the manipulation of their blood. Our focus character is Leonardo Watch, a photographer and courier who happens to possess a pair of all-seeing eyes, prompting his recruitment into Libra as their secret weapon against the threat of ancient extradimensional vampires.

There are two things I love about this series: first, the action scenes are awesome, with every use of a special ability punctuated by a pounding text effect I can’t really describe in words. Second, in the series’ quieter moments, its weird, twisted cityscape is oddly chill, with both humans and Beyonders just sort of doing their best to go about their days.

1 Assassination Classroom

I Wish Korosensei Taught Me as a Kid

I got way into Weekly Shonen Jump around the mid-2010s. There were so many big Shonen anime airing, I started getting curious about their source material, so I started reading and reading and… well, you get it. It was because I got into the magazine around that time that I also got into Assassination Classroom, and started watching its anime adaptation as soon as it started.

The focus of Assassination Classroom is Korosensei, a superpowered octopus-like creature who appears on Earth one day after blowing up most of the Moon, saying that, in exactly one year’s time, he’s gonna do the same to Earth. He offers the world governments a sporting chance: he’ll stay in one place and welcome any attempts to kill him, but in exchange, he gets to teach a struggling class of Japanese junior high students, who are also trained to be assassins in the process.

Despite the absurd premise, Assassination Classroom is one of my favorite ensemble cast character studies in Jump. Every student has the potential to be incredible had their school and/or families not failed them, and Korosensei provides a caring and intelligent tentacle that helps them each be the best they can be.