How to Find New Anime to Watch

I see hundreds of threads on the Anime Reddit asking over and over “I finished X Anime, What should I watch next?” or a “Recommend me an Anime” Thread. So I decided to write this article to help people find new recommendations for anime without just giving you a bunch of anime titles you may or may not find interesting.

So you have just finished an amazing anime and you’re curious about another anime, if you want to know about it and if you’d like up a review, and not just a video review. Some people say that they’d rather just watch the first episode of an anime than watch a 20-30 minute review, and while that is a good reason not to watch a video review, you shouldn’t ignore written reviews, and while some “writers” like the ones on MyAnimeList tend to be very biased in their own reviews if you’re really curious you should read written reviews.

I would recommend looking at individual anime reviews on blogs or anime sites more than aggregate reviews, because the writer of the blog will put more time and effort into their review for their blog than the aggregate site because they want you to stay on their site more than others.

There are thousands of anime sites and anime blogs, and you can find one that you find trustworthy and you can read their reviews if you are curious about an anime.

Reviews on Amazon or RightStufAnime can help as well.

If you have an account on Reddit and you are looking for a new anime to watch, you could start a thread and ask other people on Reddit what you should watch, but it’s always a shot in the dark and unless you link to your MyAnimeList account or Anime-Planet, AniList or your Anime News Network account to show other people what kind of anime you like, you’ll usually end up with a list of popular titles that you might enjoy, but there’s no guarantee that you will like the recommendations you get from Reddit.

Here on Hubpages you can read a lot of anime reviews, and not just the reviews I’ve written, you can use the search bar on Hubpages to search for anime reviews on the site, but since not all of them show up in the results you might have to look at the author’s profile and browse through them to see if they reviewed an anime you’re interested in watching.

I always share all my articles on my social media sites so you can always find links to my articles there, but I also make sure to link other reviews of anime that either the voice actors are in or if the anime I’m reviewing is part of a series so you can always find similar anime if I have reviewed it.

I wouldn’t recommend MyAnimeList reviews because they tend to be poorly written and extremely biased for anime they like or anime they hate. It also has a very toxic and annoying community and you should avoid the review section of the website. Since people mainly use it to keep track of what anime they are watching, it’s not the best place to read reviews.

If you don’t have time for an anime review you could always look up a “First Impressions” video for an anime you are interested in. But I will warn you in advance, the YouTube anime community runs on a lot of initial hype for anime when they first air, so they might initially be excited for an anime then complain about it later.

Take the anime hype aspect at face value because the anime community does tend to have the herd mentality of everyone watching the same anime that is airing and hyping that anime before they find something to complain about if it doesn’t go their way. Initial first impressions may not be the best, but you should get some idea if you will like something or not.

Just keep in mind that anime YouTubers tend to hype things up for views and clicks for ad revenue money.

If you’re curious about an anime and you don’t want to watch a long review or read reviews, you can always look for the trailer of an anime you’re interested in and watch the trailer. You can see how the anime looks and sounds without watching a long video about the anime.

It might be a little harder to find anime trailers for older titles, but you should be able to see a lot of trailers for more recent anime.

You can always go to an amine’s official licensed website and browse their catalogue, they have many anime organized by genre so you can pick what genre you like and browse the website for similar titles.

If you like Shounen anime, then you should browse through the Shounen section of the licensor’s official website. You can do this with almost any anime genre. Most anime licensors do organize their titles by both titles and genre so unless the website doesn’t organize by genre you should read the summaries of stories and find what might interest you.

If you’re watching an anime on Funimation, if you scroll down to the bottom of an anime show page, you can see recommendations for similar shows to what you are currently watching. Funimation also has user reviews on their show pages if you want to read those before deciding to watch a different anime.

If you’re interested in the newest titles most anime sites show the most recent videos for seasonal anime so you might be able to find something new that you’ll enjoy.

If you have a Netflix account and you can browse Netflix suggestions based on anime you have already watched. You can also browse the Netflix anime section and read summaries of various anime to decide if you want to start another anime on Netflix. You can also read my article about Great Anime to Watch On Netflix

You can also find suggestions using Google, Bing or other search engines and search for anime similar to titles you have watched already. There are a lot of articles and anime blogs that will give you recommendations based on anime that you have watched already. Google can also help you look up anime you might have heard about but not watched yet.

I wouldn’t recommend Wikipedia, because their longer summaries contain spoilers, and if you want to remain spoiler-free, then you shouldn’t read Wikipedia. It’s also the reason I don’t recommend MyAnimeList because besides having poorly written aggregate reviews, the longer reviews also contain spoilers as well.

There are plenty of ways to find anime to watch, whether it’s browsing video reviews, written reviews, first impression articles and videos, official websites, online anime stores, and social media platform. You should be able to find something that you’re interested in that you can watch. I want to warn anime fans that you can get caught up in “seasonal hype” and only want to watch new anime because everyone is discussing them on social media, but you should only watch anime that you are actually interested in and not just to participate in the discussion.

You should watch anime that you want to watch, just because I wrote a review saying I enjoyed a title doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy the title, and just because I have a low score to an anime doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it. If you find a title that interests you, give it a try, it might become your favorite anime.

You have plenty of ways to find something to watch, so have fun and enjoy an anime, whether it’s new or old, you’ll find something entertaining that you will hopefully add to your anime collection.