New Feature Best Sword Sorcery Fantasy Anime

You know the tropes. Big swords, daring heroes, dangerous villains, unpredictable magic, giant dragons. Turns out the whole subgenre of swords-and-sorcery fantasy that we all know, courtesy of everything from Lord of the Rings to The Wheel of Time, is its own subgenre of anime as well.

When I first got into anime, I was somewhat more aware than most people of the way it had been influenced and shaped by Japanese culture generally. That's part of why I was surprised (again, more than most people) to see anime that was unabashedly Western-style sword-and-sorcery fantasy. As it turned out, there was a whole vein of such material -- especially novels, among which was the 120+-volume epic Guin Saga (shown here), recently adapted for TV -- albeit thirty years after the first volume came out!

Western-style fantasy anime got its biggest push during the boom years of the 80s and early 90s, when anime titles were being commissioned at a furious pace to fill the shelves of then-new video rental stores. The pace has cooled off, along with the rest of the industry shifting gears, but fantasy titles in this vein continue to come out every so often: Tower of Druaga, The Sacred Blacksmith, and so on. The .hack franchise (including the recent .hack//Quantum) might even fit loosely into that category as well, since it's about people playing an MMO that has a fantasy theme.

Check out our list of Western-style anime fantasy titles, and also check out our lists of fantasy titles that include Japanese-themed productions like Katanagatari.