How You Can Determine If An Anime Is Worth Your Time

With so much anime out there how do you determine if an anime is worth your time?

There are so many streaming services giving people access to anime at the fingertips.

While this is a great thing it does have one major drawback which is FOMO or the fear of missing out.

It can be a tad frustrating to scroll through so many options and feel like by not watching a show you will miss out.

So today I am here to solve this problem by providing a definitive list of things to consider when deciding if an anime is worth your time.

By the end of this list, you will have a framework of how to identify which anime you will enjoy watching.

So, let’s begin with things to consider if an anime is worth your time.

It’s important to know what types of stories you prefer.

With anime, you will have to get aquated with the anime specific genres.

Ex Mecha, Seinen, Shonen, and Shojo.

The bottom line is to make sure that the anime’s genre is something that you would actually be interested in.

You can check for the genre on any anime database site Myanimelist or aniDB.

The other thing to consider is what genres you don’t like.

Keep this in mind when doing your research to avoid a bad anime experience.

My recommendation for beginners is to go with what you know and watch genres that you enjoy no matter the story.

From there you can slowly start watching other anime of different genres now that you are familiar with the medium.

For everyone else, you should have no trouble finding anime of genre that you like to watch.

Anime is unique in that the number of episodes can range from as little as 12 to over 900.

There are several factors to consider here.

The first is how much time do you have to commit to watching anime. Some people can watch 10 episodes a week while others can barely find time to watch one episode a week.

This is obvious but you don’t want to choose a long anime to watch if you are lacking in any free time, to begin with.

With a long anime if you take too long of a break between episodes it is very easy to forget what was happening.

This problem applies to short anime as well but I find that even after long breaks with shorter anime I still remember what was going on.

Now, this is not an exact science but generally speaking, longer anime will have more characters, more arcs, and grandeur stories.

Contrast this is with short anime where you will have fewer characters and fewer arcs. But you get a more focused story around the smaller cast of characters.

Now there is no right or wrong here rather it comes to personal preference and what you can handle at the moment.

Keep these in mind when picking an anime and you should be fine.

Reviews on any site are subjective in nature. I will even admit that Myanimelist can be a bit dubious when it comes to user reviews.

Which is important to point out since I heavily rely on that site for information.

Regardless reviews still have value.

The key is to read/watch reviews from sources that you consider credible.

I would also suggest having in mind what you want to know about the given anime so you can skim through reviews faster and find the important stuff.

Everything is subjective but if an anime is getting positive reviews you can at the very least add it to your watch list.

Thus by reading reviews you learn if the anime has your favorite content and is well received by critics.

If you don’t trust the internet then try your best friends. For example, one of my friends recommended Full Metal Panic and despite my initial hesitation, I watched it.

To this day FMP is one of my favorite Mecha anime of all time.

The biggest advice that I have is to only use reviews and recommendations as a way to guide you in the right direction.

Use your common sense and apply the other tips here as well.

Anime is an art form and is home to many unique art styles. One of the reasons for this is because people are different and not everyone is going to love the same art style.

So, it’s really important to understand which styles appeal to you.

For example, you might like anime that have more realistic less cutesy. In that case, you would not like MOE anime.

If you having an issue with finding a style just note that you will naturally resonate with ones you like. With this in mind, you should look at different shows and even watch some clips on YouTube or other places that have anime clips.

By doing this you can expose yourself to different styles and thus learning what appeals to you.

One final tip here if you start watching an anime and the character designs bother you, then reconsider if this anime is for you.

Keep in mind you are going to be looking at those characters for the duration of the anime.

This one is the most personal on the list because it concerns why you are watching the anime, to begin with.

That may seem like an odd thing to consider but it is not.

The reason is that anime can provoke different feelings and emotions.
Thus, understanding what you want to experience will lead to choosing the right anime.

For example, if you want to watch anime that you will get your heart pumping and adrenaline going obviously do not watch some that is more slice of life.

To bring this point home is a story where knowing what I wanted to get out of an anime prevented me from wasting time.

There is an anime called Schwarzesmarken which is about soldiers in the cold war fighting Aliens.

After reading the plot on Myanimelist I went into the anime expecting a nice historical fiction story with great action and elements of sci-fi.

But instead, I was treated to a horrible mess full of bad animation and horribly drawn characters and a waste of great the setup.

The takeaway here is knowing the why will help you figure out early on if the anime is worth your time.

So that’s the list there are definitely other ways to determine if anime is worth your time. In fact, you have some let me know in the comments below.

But from this list, you now have a framework by which to stop wasting your time and only watch anime that you would enjoy.