The Ten Best New Anime Series Of 2022

Despite delays and work problems created by the global pandemic, the 2021 anime year was full of amazing new series, including Mushoku Tensei, To Your Eternity, Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song, ODDTAXI, Sonny Boy, Blue Period, and more. So it seemed unlikely that 2022 would give us that kind of a packed roster — and it almost did. While there are not quite as many top-tier new series in 2022 as the previous year, the second-tier excellent shows are more numerous. I’ll take that trade-off, if it means we get fewer animation catastrophes like Ex-Arm or misogynistic pedo garbage like Koikimo. (OK, this year we got the ecchi isekai about a sex slave owner, so, I guess it’s a wash.)

Below are my Top Ten new anime series from the past year, not including second or follow-on seasons of series that premiered in previous years (sorry, Bleach). Let me know in the comments what you think of the list, and what your list would look like.

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My Dress-Up Darling
I admit that I wondered if I was so smitten by My Dress-Up Darling because I am a cosplay photographer, and the show is about a beautiful girl, Kitagawa Marin, absolutely obsessed with cosplay and the boy with sewing talent, Gojou Wakana, who becomes her costume maker. But the show sits at an 8.29 out of 10 on MyAnimeList.net, so I’m clearly not the show’s only fan.

My Dress-Up Darling captures the excitement and the struggle of cosplayers and crafters more accurately than some reality shows from many years back I could mention. It also captures well the budding romance between the two leads, including a straightforward and believable representation of that growing romance from a female lead’s perspective that is all too rare in anime. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Marin and Gojou’s relationship and hobby leads to some of the best ecchi and sexual tension in anime to date.

Spy x Family
Whether you pronounce it “Spy Family” or “Spy ex Family” there is no doubt that Spy x Family lived up to the hype brought to it by readers of the very popular manga. The simplicity of the character designs makes it seem odd that it took two studios, Cloverworks and Wit Studio, to bring this manga to anime, but when you see the sakuga in even a simple action scene you understand why.

The comedy inherent in a fake family made up of super spy father Loid, super assassin mother Yor, and secret telepath child Anya — with only Anya knowing everyone’s secret — is played out very well, with real laughs every episode. And real thrilling spy action too.

Summertime Render
I almost didn’t include this series because it is locked behind a Disney+ region lock outside of a few areas, like Japan, with no word as to when it will air in North America. But the description of a series about people disappearing on a small island and maybe time travel elements sounded so up my alley I actually bought a subscription to a VPN to watch it. I am so glad I did.

Summertime Render is a throwback to sci-fi series of a decade ago. It is a single-cour, 25-episode series that tonally reminds me a great deal of Steins;Gate while being a wholly different story. The lead character, Ajiro Shinpei, left his small island community at the end of middle school to attend high school in Tokyo, leaving behind his friends and not-quite girlfriend Kofune Ushio. Three years later he returns to attend Ushio’s funeral after she appears to have drowned at sea rescuing a struggling young girl. But signs indicate maybe she was killed, and the murder mystery sci-fi adventure starts and twists its way right to the end.

Call of the Night
A series that has a sexy vampire lady seemingly in her 20s (but actually closer to her 60s) in a relationship with a middle school boy should be a huge red flag, despite how chill the writing is and how gorgeous the artistic portrayal of Tokyo at night is. And it would be a hard pass but for the fact that the boy, Yamori Kou, may be the first realistic portrayal of an asexual person I’ve seen in anime. To be clear, the show never claims Kou is asexual, but his complete inability to fully grasp love or attraction to the vampire Nanakuza Nasuna, despite knowing he has to fall in love with her to achieve his goal of having her turn him into a vampire, makes it very clear he is not a normal middle school boy when it comes to the matters of the heart. And while Nasuna does tease him pretty often, this is nothing like FLCL territory.

With both the OP and the ED as certified bangers, and surprisingly deep character writing, the very chill Call of the Night definitely subverts expectations.

Lycoris Recoil
Cute high school girls with guns is nothing new in anime. Cute high school girls who straight up murder criminals as part of a secret syndicate officially sanctioned by the government, in order to make the streets of Japan even safer than they really are — well, if that was all that Lycoris Recoil had going for it I would still watch it. What got it on this list is the incredible character writing, mainly between the two leads, cheerful troublemaker Nishikigi Chisato and sullen outcast Inoue Takina.

The secondary characters are all interesting and fun on their own parts, and the overall plot plays out over the course of the 12 episodes deftly, keeping you engaged in the mystery of some missing stolen military weapons while the episodic stories develop the characters in ways that are always exciting and interesting. Add on to that some of the best gunplay animation in anime and you have a solid hit. Think John Wick meets Working!

Uncle from Another World
I find anime comedy a difficult thing to pull off well. Which is why I am happy that Isekai Ojisan is the first of two very funny shows on this list. The series really lived up to the promise of its ridiculous premise. A man who has been in a coma for 17 years wakes up while his nephew is visiting him in the hospital, and the nephew discovers his uncle (ojisan in Japanese) has been in a fantasy other world all that time and brought his magical powers back with him.

The series takes a lot of classic fantasy and isekai anime tropes and doesn’t so much subvert them as draw them out to logical conclusions in ways nobody has thought of (or didn’t bother to include in their own isekai, because they would be too silly). The only problem with Isekai Ojisan is a back-end issue. Despite premiering in the summer season, the show ran into production problems and only just picked up again a few weeks ago. With three of its 13 episodes left to go, it may not finish in 2023.

Chainsaw Man
Does anything really need to be said about Chainsaw Man? The most anticipated manga adaptation in my memory turned out to not disappoint, except to those anime fans that will never, ever, accept any use of CG in anime, no matter how exquisitely it is blended with 2D animation. Chainsaw Man is beautiful to look at all the time and disgusting to watch on surprisingly frequent occasion. OK, not surprising if you’ve read the manga, but I haven’t so when Denji … never mind, you either know the scene or don’t, I absolutely don’t want to spoil it for you.

The show takes character and narrative to places I’ve not yet seen in anime. That alone would make Chainsaw Man a must-watch, but that gorgeous animation and insane fight sakuga put it over the top — way over.

Bocchi the Rock
I went into this thinking it was going to be like K-On! — cute girls doing cute rock music things. Instead, Bocchi the Rock is one of the funniest and most touching anime I’ve seen. Middle school student Gotou Hitori is an extreme introvert who after hearing a guitar player on TV say that she learned guitar to overcome her social anxiety decides to do the same. Three years and thousands of hours of practice later high schooler Hitori is an incredible guitar player, but still suffers from social anxiety, and the guitar hasn’t helped her join a band or make friends. That’s when cheerful Ichiji Nijika on first meeting Hitori asks her to join her band, Kessoku Band.

The jokes are laugh out loud funny and the animation is innovative as hell — particularly when capturing Hitori’s frequent moments when her social anxiety takes her over completely. As Bocchi (her band nickname) very slowly grows out of her shell, there are moments when you will absolutely cheer as loudly as you have been laughing.

Akiba Maid War
This looked like a fun story about the history of maid cafes, set in the late 1990s at the height of the maid craze in Akihabara. Within one minute I was staring at my screen with an absolute “WTF?!” look on my face. Without giving away too much, the most important word in that title is the last one. Akiba Maid War is funny, darkly satirical and ultra-violent.

Aside from the fish-out-of-water main character Nagomi, most of the characters, including her fellow protagonists, are wonderfully terrible people. If you want an anime like Is the Order a Rabbit? mixed with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia by way of the movie The Warriors, this is right up your alley.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury
I’ve only watched a few things from the vast ouevre of Gundam anime properties, but I’ve liked everyone I watched. I’ve also liked most of the high school shoujo anime I’ve watched, like Fruits Basket or Kageki Shoujo!!. But I never thought I would like the melding of those two categories, until I saw the first episode of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury. The series has blended these seemingly wildly different types of anime in a way that makes sense and is fun and exciting.

When you add in the fact that all of the mech and fighting animation is 2D, hand drawn work, it is even more impressive a feat. Not that I have a problem with 3D anime, clearly, but I have to acknowledge the extra effort that sticking to 2D even in the intense mech fight scenes required. And the studio, Sunrise, is perfectly fine with using 3D in anime, such as most of the Love Live shows and Tiger & Bunny, so this was certainly a creative decision, not a budget one, and I applaud it.