15 best anime on Netflix to kickstart your obsession

Best Anime on Netflix: Erased: The Town Without Me

This one’s for the mystery and thriller genre fans out there. As a warning, this anime does contain slightly sensitive content about child neglect and disappearances. If that’s a trigger for you personally, there’s plenty of other anime in this list to choose from. I’ll follow that up with, while this is a tough anime to watch, it’s the most well-written story on this list, and rivals even the most popular of thriller live-action shows, which is why it had to be listed for the best anime on Netflix to kickstart your obsession.

Erased: The Town Without Me starts with introducing Satoru Fujinuma, a struggling manga author who is held back by his inability to dig deep and express his true self. That could be because his true self is a little more than unusual. Satoru has a gift called “Revival,” often involuntary, that allows him to skip back in time a minute or two in order to save someone’s life, an ability often triggered when he witnesses the accident he has to prevent. Without giving too much away–because every detail in this show was accounted for and any info could become a spoiler–Satoru is involved and framed for a horrific accident that traumatized him so much that he launches many years back in time.

Satoru wakes up to realize he’s back in grade school, reliving the same year of his life when select kids from his school mysteriously disappeared and were later found dead. While the killer was allegedly caught, Satoru and his mother were always suspicious that the real killer was still out there. A grade-school Satoru makes it his mission to save the first victim, a quiet girl from his class, and discover the real killer to prevent any more kidnapings and save his friends’ futures.

Erased is a 12-episode anime, able to be binged all in one night and you will definitely want to. Each episode is more engaging than the last and always ends on a torturous cliff-hanger. This is definitely not an anime to watch casually. Truthfully, even the opening credits should be watched all the way through with each episode. The writers and animators really didn’t miss a single beat with this show and used every single part of this show to point to the killer. Erased is worth watching through twice, even after you know the ending, just to see if you can notice the easter eggs you missed the first time around. It’s truly brilliant storytelling and sets the bar high for other anime and is the main reason it’s on our list of the best anime on Netflix.