Top 10 Anime of Summer 2020

Sugoi indeed. With her mischievous nature, admitted adorableness and unmistakably large and bouncy tendency to annoy the crap out of her senpai, Uzaki is the whole package. It’s a rom com that honours the source material by capturing the bizarre relationship between this hapless duo, as their everyday hangouts consistently lead the way towards romantic confusion and the occasional helping of fanservice. She may cause no end of trouble, but we dare you to look at her fang and not be willing to put up with it all.

Screw it guys, we had fun with it! Rest assured, this isn’t a spin-off to the phenomenon that is Monster Musume, it’s far tamer, with an actual emphasis on plot as a human doctor encounters, treats, and grows close to the many monster girls that dominate this fantasy land. For those of you craving something a tad more ecchi, stick around long enough and you’ll be sure to find the good doctor end up in the occasional outlandish scenario with some of the patients.

Fans of Attack on Titan, this may be the show for you! Except this time, there’s a tad more beneath the surface than the high-octane fights against giant monsters would have you believe. While things are still very much focused around the partnership of the chipper and armless Natsume along with her grizzled mentor, the added twist that digital beings are logging in to watch and experience the non-stop blood sport of humanity’s last bastion struggling to survive is certainly interesting. We’ll have to see where this crazy train stops, but for now we can only keep guessing!

And that’s another win for the manhwa genre! While it has yet to truly reach its potential, namely due to the questionable nature of its recent pacing, no one can deny that this thing made one hell of a strong first impression. We have legitimately incredible action choreography, a merry band of fighters hitting all those beloved shounen tropes, and so many crazy abilities we can’t wait to see how the power system in this world works! Let’s hope the rumours about this being the Dragon Ball of Webtoons comes to fruition!

What a dilemma. On the one hand, we’ve got a protagonist who might be the One Simp to Rule Them All, while on the other we have a clear candidate for best girl in the form of Chizuru. After renting her services as a temporary girlfriend, Kazuya’s love life becomes a spiralling mess, as he not only has to keep Chizuru’s profession a secret from their college peers, but also deal with the most manipulative ex-girlfriend we’ve seen in modern anime! Not helped by the fact that, again, this guy seems to have confused self-respect for “let me just say yes to anything this siren asks” every step of the way. It’s a cluster of cringe…and we can’t get enough of it.

The culmination of one pragmatic asshole’s insistence to try to help his ungrateful peers, or the climatic conclusion to one of anime’s biggest love triangles? Well, as of right now, it looks like our motley trio are in the unenviable position of having to face their own emotional burdens, forced to mature as their graduation prom slowly approaches. Yukino’s struggling to make herself more independent, Yui is finally starting to thaw that ice queen persona, and our boy Hachiman might finally come out of this whole thing without getting dunked on. We hope. There’s still time for things to blow up!

We’re just as shocked as you. The absurdity of this series is just so…in your face about it that’s its transcended into awesomeness. Reincarnated several thousand years into the future, Demon King Anos now literally spends his days attending a magic academy where he never wastes a chance to flex on everyone else, in between picking and plucking new members for his fan club. You might think that it sounds like every other light novel adaption out there, but we dare you to find anyone who can obliterate an opponent with his heartbeat alone, before reincarnating them with a snap of his fingers so he can do it all over again.

You have to hand it to these guys, they know how to rouse a fanbase up in an instant, and all it took was three little words. With his beloved oni out for the count, you’d think that would be all the punches this much anticipated sequel season could dish out, but it seems pretty driven to outdo the original in every way possible. We’ve got the reveal of Echinda and the other Witches of Sin, that shockingly powerful reunion with Subaru’s parents, and plenty of horror and tragedy on the horizon. This was so worth the wait!

There goes Kirito, somehow getting more top tier girls while comatose than the rest of the male population will get for generations to come. It’s not enough that we now have Asuna and Alice showing off their skills against the ever-growing threat, but now we have Leafa and Sinon coming in with their next level gaming skills and waifu prowess. At this rate, it’s not only Underworld that’s going to break from the polish of this franchise’s final instalment. The world isn’t ready for this combination of high budget battles and ungodly harem candidates!

Lit doesn’t even come close to describing just how good this second outing is! Take everything you loved about Shinra and the 8th Company, introduce a far-more high stakes plot with the reveal of the Eight Pillars, fight scenes that might just make best of year, and infuse it with as much metal as possible, and you have this shooting star of a series. Seriously, the thing has barely started and it's already eclipsed plenty of what 2020 has had to offer. It has lit a spark like few sequels have, and we can’t wait to see where it will lead.