The 10 Highest Rated Anime Finales, According To IMDb

The most exciting part of watching an anime is seeing how it’s going to wrap up. While some series have been on for years and have hundreds of episodes, and others are just one season, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of finally knowing how a story is going to end.

But some series give us a better ending than others, so that we’re a little less sad leaving our favorite characters and universes in the past, since they had a good send-off. Some have held up even over years and decades.

10 Naruto: Shippūden: 7.7

By the time the finale to Naruto: Shippūden rolled around, we’d been spending time in Konoha with Naruto and his ninja friends for over a decade. The original Naruto anime had 220 episodes, while Shippūden had a whopping 500. Needless to say, this is the longest-running anime on our list. By the time the series ended, fans had a lot of questions they wanted answered: Will Naruto meet his goal and become Hokage? Is he going to marry Hinata? Is Sasuke coming back into the fold? Luckily for us, all of those questions are answered, leaving us with a satisfying ending to a long-running series.

9 Erased: 8.8

Erased follows a young man, Satoru, who has the ability to travel back in time to the moments right before someone is hurt or killed, giving him the opportunity to save the lives of his loved ones: his mother from being murdered and several of his childhood friends from being kidnapped and then killed.

Satoru has discovered the kidnapper, and the culprit has tried to kill him to stop him from exposing him, leaving Satoru in a coma, to wake up 15 years later with no memory of what had happened. The finale is a tense wrap-up in which the viewers know the identity of the murderer but we don’t know if Satoru himself knows how much danger he’s in.

8 Berserk: 8.9

guts is wearing the berserker armor in berserk

Berserk is an interesting anime, with a premise both ambitious and utterly bananas. The series follows the story of a group of mercenaries and the work they do and features some of the bloodiest, most intense fight scenes in anime, and is generally considered a classic. But the last few episodes, in which a group of demons makes an appearance, a member of the group betrays everyone else, puts the violence and chaos on an entirely new level. What’s more, the series ends on a cliffhanger, with the main character declaring his intention to get revenge for the betrayal.

7 Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood: 8.9

The Elric brothers, Roy Mustang and Winry Rockbell in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

Fullmetal Alchemist has been a fan-favorite anime for almost 20 years, and the reboot of the series, Brotherhood, has only cemented the series in anime fans’ eyes. While the first series veered away from the story told by the manga, Brotherhood followed the story more closely, giving us the full intention of Hiromu Arakawa’s vision.

The series has one of the few finales of an anime where everything happens exactly as viewers might hope, with a happy, if somewhat bittersweet, ending, and the animation and excitement are off the charts.

6 Samurai Champloo: 9.1

Samurai Champloo is Shinichirō Watanabe’s second-most best-known work, after his hit Cowboy Bebop, and viewers had high expectations of the ending. The series, only 26 episodes, follows Fuu, Jin, and Mugen as they travel Edo era Japan looking for a samurai who smells of sunflowers. The group gets into a million shenanigans along the way, becoming closer as friends and developing real feelings of loyalty to each other, despite wanting to rip each other’s heads off all the time at the start of the series. So, knowing whether they successfully find the samurai they’re looking for, and what they plan to do once they achieve this goal, is important for this ending with these characters we’ve come to love.

5 Gurren Lagann: 9.2

Gurren Lagann was created by the Gainax staff that would eventually form Studio Trigger, and the series had all of the elements we’d come to know and love from the studio: hilarious comedy, awesome character and mech designs, and absolutely insane animation.

The series, which takes place in a Mad Max-style dystopia, opens with the characters being forced to live in underground villages and follows a group of characters as they begin to take back access to the surface world and regain their liberty. The finale is a pyrrhic victory, with some of the characters we love not getting the happy endings we might have liked.

4 Your Lie in April: 9.2

Your Lie in April is the story of a young man and a young woman, both of whom are musicians, and the way they inspire each other to keep playing. A melancholy series, Your Lie deals with themes of death, issues of self-confidence, and being honest with yourself and the people you love before it’s too late. The series finale is not a happy one, as a major character dies suddenly, and her friends have to deal with the fallout, spending the end of the series grieving and using the way she lived her life as examples for how to go on with their own.

3 Cowboy Bebop: 9.3

Shinichirō Watanabe’s second entry on this list, Cowboy Bebop is one of the most beloved anime of all time, even after more than two decades. The jazz-infused shenanigans and adventures of our favorite bounty hunters kept us dancing for all 26 episodes, with the main plot following Spike and the criminal syndicate he used to work with, which he escaped in order to run away with the woman he loved.

The series finale ends with the climax of this story and his final showdown with the rival he has been trying to escape from for the duration of the series. The anime leaves off on an ambiguous note, with no one knowing for sure whether Spike dies at the end of the episode.

2 Dragon Ball Super: 9.4

Dragon Ball Super was highly anticipated when it came out, since we can’t get enough Dragon Ball content. This was the first new Dragon Ball series in a long time. Unlike its predecessors, Dragon Ball Super wasn’t reliant on a manga being completed in order to tell the stories; Akira Toriyama created the story and shared the plot with both Toyotarou, who drew the manga, and with the show creators. The story was being told even as the manga was created, so no one knew how the series would end, making the finale even more highly anticipated and well-received.

1 Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion: 9.8

Code Geass follows the story of Lelouch, a prince who has been given the ability to make anybody do his bidding by maintaining eye contact with them. He decides to use this ability to get vengeance on his father for the death of his mother and for his kingdom’s aggressive attack on Japan. As he becomes more powerful and closer to achieving his goal, Lelouch loses sight of his plans and begins to take advantage of the people around him, leading to a finale in which he has succeeded but is no longer the hero we thought he was at the beginning of the story. The story becomes about seeing that Lelouch will fail, even more than hoping he will win.

NEXT: Code Geass: 5 Reasons Why This Popular Anime Should Continue (& 5 Why It Should Stop)