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7 Obscure Anime

These little-known gems deserve more attention!

By Rhi WrightPublished 7 years ago 5 min read
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These shows have less than 50,000 views on MyAnimeList, which, in a world where shows that people are talking about generally boast at least 300,000 views, makes them obscure. They’re all good shows though, and even if some of them are a little vintage, they deserve more attention than they’ve got. What follows is a list of ten really good shows for you to try. They all have an average rating of 7 or higher, meaning that most people who watched them liked them, and they’re diverse in terms of genre and who they’re aimed at.

RideBack

This one surprised me, I was expecting it to be more popular. I enjoyed it when it first came out, back in 2009, and recommend it to anyone who likes sci-fi and strong female protagonists. RideBack follows Rin Ogata, a woman who was set to become a professional ballerina until she suffered an accident that ended her career. Following this setback, she discovers a club of people who build and race machines called RideBacks that are a cross between a mecha and a motorbike, and enters the competitive illegal street racing scene with her own red RideBack.

The show is 12 episodes long and at time of writing, commands an average rating of 7.31 across 34,446 MAL users.

Murder Princess

A short, six-part series, Murder Princess is a story about a bodyswap. A princess of a fantasy kingdom finds her country under siege, and runs to evade being killed by the conquering army. As she escapes, she’s caught up in some magic, and ends up swapping bodies with a female assassin. The princess and the assassin make a deal. The assassin will liberate the kingdom from the invaders, and the princess, having nothing else to offer because she’s just lost her kingdom and has no skills other than princessing, will be her servant. The bodyswap is permanent, however, and the assassin has to permanently take the place of the princess.

This show pulls in a 7.41 average rating across 41,631 MAL accounts.

Taishou Yakyuu Musume

Set in 1940s Japan, this sports anime follows a group of underdogs; schoolgirls in a world that discourages girls from doing sport at all, seeing it as unhealthy and unladylike. These girls want to start an all-female baseball team and have to face a lot of obstacles to even find enough members, let alone be allowed to practice or compete against other teams.

It’s a solid underdog story, set against a backdrop of 20th-century history, with likeable characters, and deserves far more attention than the measly 13,056 people who have given it an average rating of 7.41.

Petite Princess Yucie

The title translates to Petite Princess Yucie, and this is a video game tie-in. With the recent release of Princess Maker 2 Refine on Steam, this show has suddenly found a new relevance. Following the adventures of Yucie, your girl from Princess Maker 2, and the fairy butler from the game, Cube, this does not, in fact, tell one of the potential stories from the game.

Yucie, in this show, is trying to capture the fragments of the Eternal Tiara and become the Platinum Princess, a title that is given to one worthy girl every thousand years, to break a curse that prevents her from aging and become the princess.

Petite Princess Yucie is a fun show of 26 episodes, from 2003. It has an average rating of 7.53, and is the most obscure show on this list, at only 8,633 users having rated it.

Chii's Sweet Home

Chii’s Sweet Home has been remade recently, but the remake is nothing like as adorable as the original.

Chii’s Sweet Home seems like a long series, 104 episodes, but when you consider that those episodes are around 3 minutes long, it doesn’t seem like a long show at all. It follows a kitten, named Chii, who is separated from his mother, but found and adopted by a family with a small child. As their apartment block does not allow pets, Chii’s presence needs to be kept a secret, and the show does not fall into the trap of making Chii a sexy catgirl, as he remains a kitten that looks like a kitten throughout.

This show is adorable, and presented in bitesize portions, perfect for watching between other shows or on a coffee break. This doesn’t explain that only 39,462 people appear to have seen it, but the average score is 7.81, so it is generally considered among the better obscure shows out there.

A Little Snow Fairy Sugar

A far longer series than the others on this list, at 24 episodes, A Little Snow Fairy Sugar is the only one that has been dubbed into English. The opening theme is fun to sing along to, being a Japanese version of a 70s disco song, and the show itself is, frankly, adorable.

Aimed at little girls, this series follows a little girl named Saga who rescues a small apprentice fairy. In this world, fairies are responsible for the weather, and the one she saves from hypothermia happens to be a trainee snow fairy named Sugar. Sugar and her friends, two other young fairies, are helped Saga to find the magical objects known as ‘twinkles’ so that Sugar and her friends can become fully qualified weather fairies.

A Little Snow Fairy Sugar has an average rating of 7.18 across 15,694 users, and the dub is probably a good show to use to introduce small children to anime with.

On Your Mark

I’m cheating a little here, because rather than a series, this one’s a music video.

You like Hayao Miyazaki? Most people do. From the iconic My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away to his less well-known works, an awful lot of people got into anime in the first place because Miyazaki is good and Studio Ghibli tend to put out amazing stuff. But did you know he once directed a music video? Only 15,336 MAL users have seen it, with an average rating of 7.57. "On Your Mark" by Chage and Aska is one of Miyazaki’s least well-known works, but it is amazing to see a Ghibli film that only takes a few minutes to tell its story.

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About the Creator

Rhi Wright

I spend a lot of time watching anime and playing video games

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