Kidou Senshi Gundam SEED

The Tokyo Anime Awards started in 2002, but was named in 2005. The first, second and third award ceremonies were simply named 'Competition'. The award ceremonies were held at the Tokyo International Anime Fair (TAF) until 2013. In 2014, after the merger of the Tokyo International Anime Fair with the Anime Contents Expo and the formation of the AnimeJapan convention, the Tokyo Anime Awards was changed into a separate festival called Tokyo Anime Awards Festival (TAAF).

Since 2014, Tokyo Anime Award Festival has given an Anime of the Year Grand Prize in two categories, Film and Television.

(Source: Wikipedia)

The Animation Kobe (アニメーション神戸) was an event established by Kobe in 1996 to promote anime and other visual media. The Animation Kobe Awards (アニメーション神戸賞) were given annually until 2015 by Kobe and the Organizing Committee to creators and creations.

The TV animations broadcast in Japan from September of the previous year to August of the event year, excluding rebroadcasts, become candidates. The candidates are selected not only from Japan but also from other countries. However, the committee sees more importance in a point of view promoting young creators of Japan.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Doroku (土6), a shortened name for the 6 p.m. time slot on Saturdays, was Mainichi Broadcasting System (MBS) and its sister network Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS)'s programming block. Doroku was first launched in October 2002, however, the first anime series to air on the block was in July 1993. The block ended was replaced by Nichigo in April 2008.

Worldbuilding - "the process of constructing a world, originally an imaginary one, sometimes associated with a fictional universe." These kinds of shows are usually set in a fantasy and/or sci-fi world, and excel at establishing & showcasing the rules/history/economy of their fictional universe. List was created through collective data from multiple websites of people's answers as to what shows are considered to have great world building.

Now, let's be real - as a franchise, Gundam is being perceived as this mess of close looking, but slightly different shows, and when you actually that they don't have direct continuity, being in separate timelines and all this, there's a high chance for the person to "NOPE" out of the topic.

But still, from person who has seen alot of what the Gundam franchise has to offer, it's safe to say not all timelines of this monster of a franchise are worth it, in fact, some of them are so thematically different, they're whole separate genres. So I'll try my best here to explain which show may be to whom's liking, since unlike the "main timeline" of the Universal Century, the alternative ones can be totally enjoyed as a separate things of their own. I do also believe that enjoying these timelines might pique your interest towards the main one as well, since more or less the themes of the Gundam shows does feel pretty close, despite the different timelines.

All shows featured in Super Robot Wars V
Not included:
Gundam Crossbone (manga)
Full Metal Panic (post-anime Light Novels)

Real robots are a subgenre of the mecha genre, in which the mechas are depicted as realistic warmachines as opposed to the superheroistic depiction of the super robot subgenre. It was started in 1979 by Mobile Suit Gundam.

Seires debuted in SRW Alpha Gaiden-SRW J

Every superhero has an origin story ... and so does every anime otaku. While I got exposed to anime when growing up, my own journey only really took off in the early 2000s as digital fansubs became widely available and I took full advantage of the fast (for the time) internet provided by my university accommodation.

My anime watching activity dropped off a cliff as I got older and life got in the way, but by that point I'd already lived through the first decade of the 2000s and watched quite a lot of what came out during that decade. Enough, at least, to make a decent stab at this.

This first decade of the 2000s was transformational for the anime industry, particularly with respect to accessibility to western English-speaking audiences.

Legend has it that before this period, anime fansubs used to get distributed physically via VHS tapes. It was a pain in the ass for fansubbers, distributors as well as the consumers so only the hardcore got involved. However, around the turn of the millennium, the rise of DVDs (allowing high quality rips) and faster internet (enabling tolerable download times) killed off VHS fansubs and ushered in the digisubs era. And with this dramatic lowering of the accessibility bar, fansubs exploded across the internet, bringing in a legion of new fans. (Fun fact: MAL itself came into existence during this early period of digi-fansubs.)

It's not just the illegal side of anime viewing that took off though. Kids' series like Dragon Ball Z and Pokemon were great international success stories in the late 90s and early 2000s, and people realised there was an appetite for anime in western market. More shows started getting licensed, DVD sales boomed and some non-kids anime like Cowboy Bebop even got exposure on TV.

Anime production in Japan ramped up in the first half of the decade, though I'm not sure how much of this is to do with its growing following in the west given it was still dominated by the domestic market. But in the very least, success in the west was beginning to have a significant effect on anime production. One notable anime, The Big O, was allegedly made with western audiences in mind. While in Japan it flopped so badly that only half of the originally intended 26 episodes got made, its international success eventually led to the production of a second season.

As more and more anime titles became available to western English speaking audiences, the industry grew into a bubble. Companies started licensing anime almost indiscriminately and the Japanese companies demanded sky high licensing fees even for shite scraped off the bottom of the barrel that some dog did a number two in. A lot of stuff didn't sell nearly enough to make up the cost and this was exacerbated by a declining DVD market, widespread piracy and, later on, the Great Financial Crisis. Inevitably, the bubble burst in the second half of the decade: US licensors like Geneon and Central Park Media went bust, retailers like Suncoast went bankrupt, and Cartoon Network's anime-focused block Toonami got cancelled.

It's worth noting that anime wasn't the only industry in trouble: the whole bricks and mortar business was in decline, as was the DVD-driven entertainment business. And just like in other entertainment industries, the business paradigm was shifting. From the ashes of the anime crash grew shoots of new life. As the decade drew to a close, Crunchyroll (you may have heard of them), which started life in 2006 hosting user-uploaded pirated content, moved towards exclusively showing legally secured titles. The age of anime streaming had begun.

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On the anime production side, when the decade started, I distinctly remember 26 episode was considered a standard season for TV anime, with quite a few shows going up to 52. As the decade wore on, 26 episode series became increasingly rare and anime around half that length became the norm as the shorter seasons reduce the financial impact of flops while holding the door open to extensions for successful shows. You can really feel the difference this had on the pacing: early 2000s shows with 26 episodes were generally slower with frequent episodic side stories thrown into the early stretches of the series to pad out the story and/or develop the characters.

Animation wise, digipaint became the norm in the early 2000s, replacing the old analogue method of cell animation. As with all transitions, there were some initial teething problems. For example, early digipaint anime were done in lower resolution as full HD wasn't much of a thing back then. These kinds of issues means that anime made in those early years have aged about as well as milk, and not even remastering can do much to salvage them.

While there'd been plenty of light novel anime adaptations before, the popularity of these adaptations hit new heights during this decade. This probably owes a lot to the ludicrous successes of Bakemonogatari and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Towards the end of the decade, adaptations of light novels with long titles that double as plot summaries also started taking off.

This wasn't just a good decade for light novels adaptations, but also visual novels, including eroge aka hentai games. This can be seen as part of anime's increased focus on catering to the otaku subculture. The shift in focus is also evident in trends like the rise of late night anime and, much to my dismay, the dreaded moe. It's not all bad though. In the case of late night anime, it also gave birth to Fuji TV's noitaminA block, which aimed at an atypical anime demographic and produced a string of critically acclaimed shows (spoiler: some of them are in this stack).

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Anyway, enough rambling on anime history; now onto the stack itself! I came up with a complicated system to determine the potential candidates for this list. Those who aren't crazy enough to be interested just need to note that I consider all the entries to be at least great (9+/10 on MAL or 2.0+ on my personal scale) and that I'm only including one anime from each franchise (usually the earliest one that provides a good jumping in point). Let me also slap on the disclaimer that I haven't seen a lot of these for well over a decade, so I don't know if they all hold up. Feel free to skip the remainder of this section and go straight to the entries.

The main thing that people might find a bit odd about this stack is that it appears to contain entries prior to the 2000s as measured by the more commonly used metric of starting year. This is because I consider an anime to be from the 2000s if it aired DURING this decade. But that's not all! Things get more complicated for franchises. For these, I'm including multiple entries as a single entity if the storyline are closely connected, e.g. in the case of multiple seasons of a show. This results in the inclusion of series that, while did not air in the 2000s, are closely connected to sequels that did (I prefer this over the alternative of putting in some random middle season of a franchise which is not helpful for anyone wanting to start their exploration).

Finally, when judging whether these multi-entry entities are good enough to actually make the cut for the stack, I try to decide based on the merits of the entries that aired during the 2000s as a whole. To illustrate this with a real example, the reason why the Kara no Kyoukai movie series did not make the cut is that while they included a great movie in Paradox Spiral, I don't consider the entries released in 2000s to be great as a whole. Similarly, even though Cowboy Bebop qualified for this list due to the Knocking on Heaven's Door movie airing in 2001, the movie itself fell short of being great so the franchise didn't make the cut (though it would if I were making a 90s stack).

Confused? Good. It wouldn't be my stack if it weren't built on top of a convoluted system! But hopefully things will become clearer as add case-by-case clarification in the controversial entries themselves (disclaimer: it may lead to further confusion).

Animes that had been aired on any Filipino major channel (ABS-CBN, GMA, TV5 etc.). Not included are the shows that only aired on Animax-Asia.

Anime that aired in Britain on TV. Does not include streaming, home release, etc. Some air dates are included.


My source for some of these is through word of mouth or archived forum posts so if there are any inaccuracies I apologize. As a rule of thumb if an air date is included it means the show definitely aired.

In 2012, The Asahi Shimbun announced the 104 TV anime that they considered to be the most representative and memorable of all TV anime between 1963 and 2012. It's a good starting point for exploring general TV anime history, and the shows are all worth giving a shot. The list was not ranked, and ordered by release date.

These are the anime that appear in Super Robot Wars Alpha 3 for PlayStation 2.

These are the anime that appear in Super Robot Wars J for Game Boy Advance.

These are the anime that appear in Super Robot Wars W for DS.
This is often considered one of, if not the best written Super Robot Wars game, and is a personal favourite of mine.

These are the anime that appear in Super Robot Wars K for DS.