By adult I mean over 18-20 years of age and with adult appearances. Nothing against anime with younger characters, but interested in finding some with older characters.
By adult I mean over 18-20 years of age and with adult appearances. Nothing against anime with younger characters, but interested in finding some with older characters.
Off the top of my head, Darker than Black. Same director, different take on bleakness: Wolf’s Rain. The main characters don’t really have ‘ages’ given, but they’re pretty clearly adults.
Record of the Lodoss War (a D&D campaign turned into anime, if I recall rightly)
That time I reincarnated as a slime (technically the main character is ~34, and very few children are shown, but the cast has a lot of ‘childishness’ in them… the style is the equivalent of a popcorn superhero movie I’d say)
Legend of the galactic heroes
Witch Hunter Robin
Van Helsing (if you just want to laugh at idiocy, simply watch the abridged series, but the actual show is good)
Dragon Ball Z, except for a few episodes every now and then. The show itself is obviously aimed at the younger shonen crowd though, if you haven’t seen it.
.hack//sign (dot hack sign) is a pretty interesting one. It has several other series in its ‘canon’ if you like it. I’d say it was the adult oriented, well-presented premise of sword art online before sword art online was wet-dreamed up. A friend described it as ‘waving its dick around because they had an actual orchestra for the soundtrack’ in several scenes.
Mixed-age cast—the main characters are adults in the context of their society, but not all are necessarily 20+ years of age. Also be aware that there are two different versions of this, an OAV and a later TV series. There are significant differences in story between the two (the TV series adapts more of the original material, the OAV ends differently). I prefer the OAV, but it’s mostly a matter of taste.
The last time I watched it (admittedly about ten years ago now), I found that it hadn’t aged all that well. The loose ends left because it was a prequel to some of the games in the .hack franchise were very noticeable. (It’s still a better version of the “trapped in a game” trope than SAO, though, because it doesn’t repeatedly reduce the female lead to a damsel in distress). And not all the main characters were adult, although some clearly were. The soundtrack is still excellent if you like Yuki Kajiura’s style, though.