Need some anime recommendations!

[Reprimand]

It's been about a month since I've watched a new anime and I'm looking around for something similar to a few other things if the playground could recommend a few I'd really appreiate it.

So I recently finished log horizon and am up to date on everything .hack// and was a fan of sword art online until the second season can anyone recommend another anime that has a similar premise about being inside a video game or concepts that are similar you know of?

Also recently watched fate/stay nights unlimited blade works and thought it was pretty good some thing like that are pretty good too.

I also watched Kabeneri and the Iron Fortress and that was super good as well.

I basically just want to stay away from most mainstream content (as I've either seen them or didn't like the premise) and mary sue characters. Low power and survival settings are a plus.

Or if the power level goes up but has a build up of extreme struggle I guess that fine too.

[Fri]

Watch these two back to back.

Grimgar Of Fantasy And Ash, a maudlin take of newbie adventurers from real world thrusts into video-game-style fantasy universe

And

Konosuba (Kono Subarashi Sekai Ni Shukufuku/God's Gift on This Wonderful World) a comedy take of newbie adventurer from real world thrusts into video-game-style fantasy universe.

Both are single season anime (so far). They're actually aired in the same season, despite the 180% difference in tone. Me and my friend says that they're basically rpg campaign by the same DM with different group of players, one who take the premise given by the GM seriously, and the other group take it into comedy campaign.

A bit of warning, Konosuba is honestly really funny, but it got quite a bit of fanservice (though not actually that much, except for a single parody episode near the end, mostly it's Aqua's barely-there skirt and the guild leader's shirt).

They both are quite good from the start, but I remember they both get really into their groove at around episode 4.

[DoctorFaust]

I'd second the recommendation of Konosuba, and there's always Fate/Zero as well. Um, I haven't personally watched it, but from what I've heard about Re:Zero, it might fit what you're looking for. And if you liked Kabenari, there's always Attack on Titan. Having gone down my watched list, I don't really see any other anime of the "transported to a fantasy world" genre that jumps out as really high quality, but if you're okay with manga (might be a manhua), there's also 1/2 Prince.

For straight fantasy settings, Record of Lodoss War (the 1990 Madhouse version) might be worth a look too. And if you like Fate/Stay Night: UBW, and if you watch Fate/Zero and like it, I would also highly recommend the Kara no Kyoukai series.

[Hiro Protagonest]

You still liked the first season of Sword Art Online...

Okay. I'll just stick to recommendations.

Grimgar, as said.

Sword of the Stranger. A movie about a wanted boy and a ronin. Has good interactions between the two main characters, and the few fight scenes are well-made. Tone is subdued compared to most things.

Samurai Champloo. A dark story mixed with absurd comedy in ancient Japan. I didn't like the comedy, but many people do and it's not just standard anime comedy.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Absolute standard recommendation. Two young brothers, one a cripple and the other a soul bound to a suit of armor, become State Alchemists working for the military in order to try and find the secrets to getting their bodies back. Honestly, SAO was a shounen, and this is the best shounen anime.

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Yep, I'm putting this here too. But moreso for Phantom Blood than anything else. But the series doesn't pull punches. Despite being over-the-top with many shounen tropes and lots of hype, it can hit with a lot of force when it wants to. Each part is a completely different story arc, and JoJo's was often used as an experiment by the author so they all have differences. If you get to Part 3, much of the first half before Battle in Egypt is irrelevant, honestly.

[Ramza00]

Also recently watched fate/stay nights unlimited blade works and thought it was pretty good some thing like that are pretty good too.

So FSN Unlimited Blade Works is an anime based off a thing called a visual novel. Think of a visual novel as a mixture between an old school playstation RPG but without gameplay just story, music, etc. This old school playstation rpg mixed with a comic book / moving comic format, and a choose your own adventure novel but more graphical.

So FSN UBW was one of 3 main routes you could take in the visual novel Fate Stay Night (released in 2004). The 3 routes and intended order was


Fate
Unlimited Blade Works
and then
Heaven's Feel


Well the fate route was turn almost immediately into an anime (it was released 2 years after the game was released) and that anime was a mix bag. The studio who made the fate route was known as studio deen, and fans debate on a scale how bad the adaptation was.

In 2010 Studio Deen also released a Unlimited Blade Works movie that was a 105 minutes long.

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In 2006 and 2007 (so 2 years after FSN was released) we got a light novel series (mixture of novella and comic book) for a prequel to FSN called Fate Zero. Fate Zero takes place 10 years earlier and deals with the 4th grail war and has many protagonists and antagonists one of which is Shirou Emiya's adopted father Kiritsugu.

In 2011 and 2012 type moon productions the company who owns FSN (type moon is another work inside the nasuverse) decided to go with another anime studio known as Ufotable. They decided to adapt the Fate Zero prequel and the two season adapation of fate zero is easily far superior to the UBW fate adapation and I will argue a more successful work.

(I am not arguing Light Novel Zero vs Visual Novel UBW which is a better story, I am arguing specifically anime vs anime Zero is far better).

I highly recommend watching fate zero.

Now type moon liked the jog Ufotable did on Zero so much that they then commissioned Ufotable to do UBW as a two season anime series which was released in 2014 and 2015 this is the series you supposedly already watched and liked. There will also be a 3 movie story of Ufotable doing the final 3rd route of the fate stay night franchise Heaven's Feel in 2017.

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Now there are other stuff in the nasuverse which Fate belong into, including a vampire series (Tsukimine) which had an anime you should not watch for it is so bad (far worse than Studio Deen's Adaptation of the Fate Route). Now Tsukimine is based off its own visual novel also known as Tsukimine and it is supposedly going to get a remake done for it, but then again Half Life 3 may come out before hand (The Tsukimine remake suffers from Valve time where people say it is always coming but it is stucked in some form of development hell / molasses)

There is also another nasuverse work called Kara no Kyōkai (Garden of Sinners) which deals with an assassin type like character who deals with supernatural issues. Kara no Kyōkai has some small overlap with fate (think counter guardian stuff which is in turn related to the counterforce) as well as some relation to some tsukimine characters. Now Kara No Kyokai was adapted into 10 anime movies with each movie being an hour or two hours long. In fact the people who did the Kara No Kyokai series is the same studio Ufotable that you saw did the UBW adaptation that you saw earlier. (Years the movies came out were from 2007 to 2013)

Oh there is also another hillarious "joke tv show" called Carnival Phantasm which is done by Type Moon / Nasuverse and it mocks its own characters from Fate Stay Night and Tsukihime Visual Novels. This show is pure heaven, but to truly enjoy it you should watch fate zero a little more, and perhaps play the tsukimine and fate stay night visual novels.

There is also a magical girl franchise where set in an alternate universe where a 10 year old Illya and other people are invovled with another holy grail war for the holy grail war systems was stopped but someone created another holy grail system where people are able to become pseudoservants via instead of manifesting the servant into reality as a human being / heroic spirit / half ghost / half alive character they instead take over a human body. This tv series is known as Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya (cherished Illya)

There are also some nasuverse spin off with their own light novels set in alternate universes. (I am looking forward to the manga called Fate Apocrypha which is a grail war set in Romania where two teams fight with 7 servants vs 7 servants)

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I apologize if my post is overwhelming. My goal is to not make you understand everything I just said, and I hope you kinda forget it. I am just kinda giving you a rough ideal of the chaos that is the nasuverse for they have so many properties it can get confusing.

My real goal is to get you to just watch Fate Zero, if you still want to continue exploring the Nasuverse after Fate Zero that is a whole another manner, but right now it is so obvious what anime I would recommend and it is simply watch Fate Zero, it is time to go back to zero.

And as a final tease here is one of the songs from the anime.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mK_0up-LMc

[DoctorFaust]

So, a few corrections to your post, Ramzaa, since there's a few details you got wrong that I feel throw off Reprimand from making informed decisions about what to watch. I know you were just trying to sell them on Fate/Zero, but since you mention all of those other works, I figure the information about them may as well be accurate.

It's Tsukihime, not Tsukimine, and it is indeed so bad that there's a running joke that there is no Tsukihime anime. Read the visual novel or the manga if you want, but give the anime a skip.

Kara no Kyoukai doesn't really have any relations to any of the rest of the Nasuverse (the general term for works by Type-Moon), but since it is one of the earliest works by Kinoku Nasu, it introduces a lot of concepts that will show up in later works like Fate/Stay Night. Which might've been what Ramza meant by overlap and relation, come to think of it :smallconfused:. There's also only seven movies in the main series, most of which run about 50 minutes, and two that go ~two hours. There's also two different epilogues, but I would argue those aren't really required watching unless you're a massive fan of the characters or the cosmology of the Nasuverse, as they don't really add anything to the story.

And these aren't really corrections, but tbh, as fantastic as a number of works in the Nasuverse are, you'd probably get most of the jokes in Carnival Phantasm just by reading the Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night TvTropes pages if you don't want to go through all eight routes of the two works, in addition to the various side stories and sequels. Also, if you don't like loli fanservice, avoid Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya. There's some great fight scenes, but search "Illya kiss" if you want to see why I dropped the second season like a brick.