Which anime left the strongest impact on you?
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My first "this is anime" anime was Ranma 1/2, so I suppose that was the most formative series which got me into anime (and anime-adjacent media).
Of course, after I learned that "anime" was an actual thing, I also learned that my actual first anime was Doraemon; I just didn't think of it as anime. Which means I always get slightly confused when translations try to localize Doraemon references to something more US-centric, because to me of course I understood the Doraemon references, while I don't always understand the localized references.
My first anime purchase was Love Hina. My first "this is amazing" reaction to anime was Card Captor Sakura.
So overall, my current tastes are in sweet and happy slice-of-life with a touch of magic, and either a female main character or a harem, or both if possible.
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@eternal-wanderer Higurashi is terrifying. I watched it fairly early on as a new anime fan, and I still can't forget it.
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Angel Beats probably had the strongest impact on me. It got me looking up more shows and also got me thinking to sign myself up as a Organ Donor when I got old enough to do it.
Hopefully it led others to feel/think the same way. -
@someoldguy Err... that movie doesn't exist.
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If we're talking impact, for me it would probably be Digimon and Gundam Wing since those are the two series that really brought me into anime and then into the shows oriented towards older kids.
@shrike_al That's the english title for Eureka Seven: Pocketful of Rainbows
Edit: wow, the reply button gave me the wrong username to @ -
@jon-mitchell said in Which anime left the strongest impact on you?:
anime that 'wierded' me out to most: School Days
Oh yeah... that totally freaked me out by the end... And I do not even mean how the budget ran out at the end, similar with NGE... the only other anime I can think came close to that which I have seen was Happy Sugar Life...
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@jan-suzukawa Let's hope the new season is good then.
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@jon-mitchell School Days... Yeah. Ok. Quite the ending there. Still haven’t been able to bring myself to play the game on which the anime is based.
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@paul-nebeling I think I've heard the anime's ending is worse than any of the games ending.
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Well if we are talking early formative stuff then my first experience was either Battle of the Planets (Gatchaman) or Star Blazers (Space Battleship Yamamoto) when I was 5 or so... I noticed the difference from the American stuff right away and was always on the lookout for more like those. But the one that sealed the deal was Robotech (I was always into the Genesis Climber MOSPEADA portion the most).
Despite those formative experiences I am not really all that into mecha drama -- I much prefer romantic comedy as a genre.
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@paul-nebeling It's probably better that way, from what I've heard the game is bad but not so bad it's good like the anime, and it focus a bit too much on vaginal blood.
Do you like death, war and misery ?
Do you like badass op loli who let nobody got in their way ?
Do you like vengeance story?
If so then then vote for The girl who ate a death god -
@raitoiro Translation: I’m not missing much.
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@paul-nebeling It's only what I've heard when I was getting into VN so take it with a grain of salt, but yeah it doesn't seems to be worth the time.
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Most impactful anime discussions always interest me. I hold a personal belief that favourite anime is a window into one's soul, and I will fight anyone who argues the contrary. I will also pay you to not hurt me, though, so that might dent my credibility a tad.
Y'all listed some interesting choices. Mostly tasteful. I don't have to dismiss any of you as lowly plebs just yet.
Plenty of Eva makes me happy. I don't care if it's overrated. It still spawns sprawling in-depth analysis articles on Polygon, and reading them is my crack cocaine.
@Raitoiro is classy because Shin Sekai Yori was legit scifi. Now if only I didn't have to endure the animation.
@Eternal-Wanderer speaks the truth. I played the vita version of Higurashi over a year. A FREAKING YEAR. I was in freaking Hinamizawa for a year of IRL time. And it was the best and I'd do it all over again. The only work I experienced after the age of twenty five to touch me on a very personal level.
@Jason-Maranto Trauma high five! Otonashi was my display pic for a long while through my university years. Resonated with me in what was probably a rather unhealthy way.
@shrike_al Haven't seen all of the series but was introduced to it through Super Robot Taisen. Eureka Seven characters had a sick BGM, so points to them. There can never be enough four-cour mecha epics, and I honestly hope there'll be a way to revive them in the future.
@unsynchedcheese O_o
Your choices, excluding Ranma 1/2, are eerily similar to my own road map. First anime without realizing it was anime was Doraemon, watched in real time. First anime knowing it was anime was Cardcaptors. Yes. Cardcaptors. The Nelvana dub. It was butchered and terrible and still better than everything else on TV at the time and I couldn't get enough of it and needed more and that's how I ended up on the Internet as a wee lad.
And when CCS ended and I felt the void... In came Love Hina. Which supported my burgeoning addiction until it, too, left me. Heartbroken and suffering from withdrawal, I turned to Eva.
Y'know, now that I think about it, this explains a lot about what's wrong with me. -
@kevin-s said in Which anime left the strongest impact on you?:
I'll put in a good word for the sublime, but sometimes underappreciated, Haibane Renmei. That unassuming series about angel-girls literally made me think about life, death, and life after death in ways I never had before. (I prefer not to say exactly how or why, though, as no small amount of the joy of this series comes from the discovery.) Fifteen years after it came out in the US, I still watch it periodically, and still find new things to admire and appreciate about it.
Haibane Renmei is an oft overlooked gem. It sits near the top of my all time favorites along side some of the other iyashikei greats like Windy Tales, Mushishi, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō, Girl's Last Tour, Cat Soup and Grave of the Fireflies.
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@deilight said in Which anime left the strongest impact on you?:
Plenty of Eva makes me happy. I don't care if it's overrated. It still spawns sprawling in-depth analysis articles on Polygon, and reading them is my crack cocaine.
I consider that as an actual part of what made and still makes the classic version of NGE special. Without doubts it is easy to say the series has more holes to it than Swiss cheese, and especially the ending was philosophical mind breaking for mainstream taste - leaving me still unsure if it was just due to the running out budget. However, it had a very similar mystery vibe as X-files back then, another series which I also enjoyed very much despite the "plot holes" - or because of them.
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As a 90s child, Evangelion was probably the one that made the biggest impact, as it took me almost 10 years to gather my feelings and re-watch it to make sense of it. On the other hand, I wasn't aware of what anime was itself back then, it was just a cool (albeit fucked up) cartoon in my eyes back then.
The second most impactful is probably Death Note, as it was the one that brought to me subbed anime, everything I watched previously was dubbed anime on regular TV, which eventually prompted said NGE re-watch previously mentioned.. And here I am, 11 years later, still watching anime.
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I'm old enough to have watched Robotech, Star Blazers, Voltron etc before I knew what anime was - and Astroboy! That was super popular when I was a little kid, like Pokemon a generation earlier without the toys (Transformers covered that in that era - a mate at primary school had Omega Supreme, holy crap it was huge! I had the original Devastator and the toys weren't in scale to each other at all!).
First anime I knew was anime was either Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, or there was Technoman/Tekkaman Blade or whatever it was, then the Dragon Ball Z hype train.
Evangelion the first time it aired was pretty amazing, prefer EoE ending over TV cause Asuka's last battle was epic.
I got on the seasonal anime train for Re:Zero - watching that come out weekly was a hell of a thing and nothing has been as intense since then; how's he going to die this week? Who will he see killed in front of him, etc. Wonder how the hype and meme trains will go for S2 given Rem [Redacted, but you all know].
The biggest impact other than Re:Zero's "holy shit" factor were the ones with all the feels - I made the mistake of watching Your Lie in April and Angel Beats back to back. I'm not sure how I survived that. A Silent Voice in the cinema was pretty intense too, even though I'd read the manga and knew what was coming it was still pretty powerful and I thought made the more popular/hyped Your Name look weak (even with all the cut stuff I thought it was a good adaptation overall).
So, I'm not really sure. I devoutly watched DBZ when it first aired, but I didn't go hunting other anime because of it, likewise with Eva. Re:Zero is what likely got me into the seasonal legal anime fandom specifically, but I was already tangentially in the wider anime/manga/LN fandom due to fanfics derived from Eva, DBZ, Ranma 1/2, Oh My Goddess!, and had already read the Full Metal Panic! LNs by then. I guess Re:Zero tied the watching anime and reading stuff in general together and got me reading and watching official legal releases and tied it all together? This anime was made from this source manga/LN so for for the original material as well to see what happens after the anime ends sort of thing. I dunno, different impacts at different ways at different points in my life.
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@smashman42 said in Which anime left the strongest impact on you?:
Your Lie in April
yea, I wasn't sure what I was expecting, but I watched it and wept.
I'm of a previous generation- Yes I watched StarBlazers and G-force (Gatchaman) when I was 11 or 12. But before that I watched Ultraman and Space Giants (Ambassador Magma) Live Action Kiaju, on the local UHF channel, on a black and white TV, when I was in kindergarten! I didn't realize until really looking back how much Japanese media influenced my tastes
EDITed to add:
wow - I didn't know until just now (thanks Wikipedia) Osamu Tezuka who was the creator of Space Giants, also created Astro Boy and Black Jack! and might be the originator of Anime as we know it (He is credited with first using and popularizing the 'large eyes' style of character design, now a hallmark of japanese anime/manga--and highly influential globally. (Compare Princess Elsa to Snow white and tell me that the Disney company isn't influenced by anime!)
