Kengan Ashura

Blue Lock

Blue Lock reimagines the sports manga as a survival game, and aims it straight at the striker's position. After a humiliating World Cup exit, Japan's football federation launches a radical, ruthless program: lock three hundred of the nation's best high-school strikers in a facility and pit them against each other to forge the single most lethal goal-scorer in the world. Lose your duels and you're eliminated — your dream of ever playing for Japan gone for good. Yoichi Isagi is a smart but unselfish forward who has to unlearn everything polite about his game and discover the ego a great striker needs. That's the show's real subject: the arrogance, hunger, and individual brilliance that team sports usually train out of players. It's football as a battle royale, and it's electric. The manga is ongoing and the anime brings its high-voltage duels to the screen. Whether or not you follow the sport, Blue Lock hooks you on the psychology of wanting to be the best — and being willing to leave everyone else behind to get there.

Air Gear

Ikki Minami is a junior high school student with a dream—to become the best Air Trek rider in town. It won’t be easy, as he faces a lot of competition from boys and girls alike. What is Air Trek? Just the latest craze that involves taking a two-wheel inline skate and adding a motor, suspension, and a shock absorber to enable the wearer to execute the wildest, wackiest, most aggressive moves you can imagine. Ikki has a lot to learn as he fights his way to the top in this wild, sexy manga from the creator of Tenjho Tenge! (Source: Kodansha USA)

Initial D

Only the fearless survive in the white-hot world of street racing, as teams take on dangerous roads in the shadow of Mt. Akina. Behind the wheel of the mysterious "Ghost of Akina" is Takumi, on his way to becoming the greatest racer ever. (Source: TOKYOPOP) Note: the chapter count includes six extra chapters published in volumes 2, 3, 30, 33, 39 and 48.

Hinomaru Sumo

The weak sumo club of Odachi High School welcomes a new "small" member, Hinomaru Ushio. Everyone thinks he's too small for this sport, where having a "big" and "heavy" body is crucial, until they reveal his past! The goal is to become a yokozuna, the highest rank in sumo wrestling. Fired up high school sumo begins now! (Source: Manga Plus) Note: Includes 1 bonus chapter.

Sword Art Online

Sword Art Online opens on a nightmare dressed as a dream: ten thousand players log into the world's first full-dive VRMMO, only to find the logout button gone and a single rule waiting for them — die in the game, die in real life. Clearing all hundred floors is the only way out. That premise turned SAO into one of the defining franchises of the "trapped in a game" era, and it still anchors the whole isekai wave that followed. What keeps people coming back isn't just the death-game hook; it's Kirito and Asuna, whose relationship grows up alongside the stakes, and a setting that keeps reinventing itself — Aincrad's floating castle, the fairy-world of ALfheim, the gun-metal arenas of Gun Gale, and the philosophical deep end of Alicization. It's a series that's just as happy staging a sword duel as it is asking what a "real" person even is once minds and machines blur. New here? The light novels came first and run deepest, but the anime is the easiest on-ramp and the reason most fans found the story at all. Start at the beginning — Aincrad earns everything that comes after.

Cowboy Bebop

Few shows wear their cool as effortlessly as Cowboy Bebop. Set aboard the spaceship Bebop, it follows a crew of broke bounty hunters — the laid-back Spike Spiegel, the gruff ex-cop Jet, the con-artist Faye, a genius kid hacker, and a suspiciously smart corgi — drifting between planets and paydays that never quite work out. Each episode plays like its own short film, and the jazz-soaked soundtrack does as much storytelling as the dialogue. Underneath the episodic bounties runs a quieter current: these are people running from their pasts, and the show knows none of them can outrun it forever. That tension between breezy space-western fun and genuine melancholy is why Bebop is still the series people recommend first to anyone curious about anime — it asks almost nothing of newcomers and rewards them completely. There's no long manga to catch up on and no sprawling franchise to untangle. It's a tight, self-contained 26 episodes plus a film, built to be watched in order and remembered for years. If you only ever finish one series on this site, this is a very good candidate. See you, space cowboy.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners takes the sprawling video-game world of Night City and does something the games rarely have time to — it makes it hurt. Studio Trigger's ten-episode run follows David Martinez, a street kid who loses everything and claws his way into the life of an edgerunner: a mercenary who trades pieces of his own body for chrome, speed, and a shot at mattering in a city that eats people like him for breakfast. It's loud, neon-drenched, and animated with the kind of kinetic swagger only Trigger brings — but the reason it landed so hard is the love story at its center and the slow, dreadful math of how much humanity you can sell before there's nothing left to save. You do not need to have touched the game to feel every second of it. At ten episodes, Edgerunners is one of the most complete emotional gut-punches anime has produced in years, and a rare tie-in that stands taller than its source. Come for the style; stay for the ending you'll be thinking about long after the credits.

Chainsaw Man

Chainsaw Man is what happens when a shonen battle series stops pretending it has any manners. Denji is a broke teenager drowning in debt, kept alive by his chainsaw-devil pet Pochita — until a betrayal fuses them into a creature who can pull a cord in his chest and turn into the Chainsaw Devil. Recruited by a government devil-hunting agency, he discovers his dreams are almost insultingly small: food, sleep, and maybe someone to touch him. The horror around him has other plans. Tatsuki Fujimoto writes it with a manic, unpredictable energy that swings from grotesque body-horror to deadpan comedy to sudden, genuine heartbreak, often in the same chapter. Nothing is safe and no one is protected by plot armor, which is exactly why it hooks so hard. The manga's first arc is complete and its second is ongoing; the anime adaptation covers the early story and is the gentlest way in. Read or watch — just know that Chainsaw Man is at its best when you have no idea what it's about to do next. It rarely does.

Solo Leveling

Solo Leveling built its reputation on one deeply satisfying idea: the weakest hunter alive gets a second chance to become the strongest. In a world where gates to monster-filled dungeons have opened across Earth, Sung Jinwoo is an E-rank nobody who survives a lethal dungeon only to wake up with a mysterious "System" that lets him level up like a video-game character — grinding stats, unlocking skills, and raising an army of shadows from the things he kills. Originally a Korean web novel and then a smash-hit manhwa, it's power-fantasy done with real craft: the art is spectacular, the progression is addictively paced, and every arc raises the ceiling just as you've gotten comfortable. The recent anime adaptation brought that ascent to the screen with the flashy set-pieces the story was always built for. If you like watching an underdog become an apex predator one hard-won level at a time, this is the series that perfected the formula for a generation of readers. Start with the manhwa for the full journey, or the anime for the fastest, flashiest introduction.