Top 10 Craziest Anime Plot Twists
How do they come up with this stuff?! Welcome to WatchMojo.com and today we are counting down our picks for the Top 10 Craziest Anime Plot Twists.
For this list, we'll be counting down the times where an anime went off the rails with a sudden narrative development. Some are good, some are awful, but all tread the line of WTF territory. As you might have guessed, its nothing but spoilers from here on out, you have been warned!
#10: Trust Nobody, Not Even Yourself
"Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works" (2014-15) Take out your notebooks kids, because like everything in the Fate-verse, things are about to get complicated. Turns out that in an alternative timeline, our boy Shirou became disillusioned with becoming a hero of justice after seeing how self-destructive humanity could be. After going on to become a sort-of-ish Heroic Spirit and brought into the Fifth Holy Grail War, he decides the best course of action to fix things is to...kill an alternative version of his younger self so as to counter the...ah forget it! Where's that wiki page?!
#9: Oh, This? It’s Laced with Satan
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"Devilman Crybaby" (2018) You know how it is, one day you're just kicking back, and then the next thing you know your best friend turns out to be the Prince of Darkness. After discovering his true identity, Ryou tries to recruit Akira into his plan for wiping out humanity and declaring war on heaven. Given how Ryou was the one who set him on his demonic path to begin with and inadvertently caused the death of his beloved Miki, Akira is not exactly in a cooperative mood.
#8: Reincarnated and it feels so good
"Naruto: Shippuden" (2007-17) Most fans tend to gloss over Naruto and company's final battle with Kaguya, simply because it introduced so many crazy new concepts in such a short space of time that it ended up doing the anime a disservice. Out of the medley of sudden twists, the fact that Naruto and Sasuke are implied to be the reincarnations of the Sage of the Six Path's children takes the cake for us. Wasn't this series originally all about fighting against fate, prophecies and all that malarkey?
#7: Jibun Wo-h Come On Now
"Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion R2" (2008) Form the get-go, it was clear that Lelouch's father was a scumbag wrapped in the body of a dictator. After all, he didn't think twice about enslaving the Japanese and using the power of Ragnarok in the hope of taking control of all beings. So yeah, definitely not dad of the year material. But on the positive side, at least Lelouch's mother was a sweet and caring woman, one who was tragically killed when -- oh wait, nope, she's just as bad as her hubby, as its revealed she went above and beyond in setting things in motion in the hope of unleashing Ragnarok. Even as a Geass ghost she's a deceitful witch of a woman!
#6: In Awe at the Size of This Lad
Top 20 Craziest Anime Plot Twists
"Attack on Titan" (2013; 2017-) Eren Jaeger is a determined young man who has managed to push past all manner of obstacles with sheer power alone. Getting devoured by a Titan is not one of them. Even if we had no doubt that the protagonist wouldn't be killed off only a couple of episodes in, it was still damn shocking to see Eren get bitten down to size on his first mission. Things of course went totally balls to the wall afterwards when he emerged from his captor's stomach, now a Titan himself. Oh sure, we're all used to his rampages by now, but back in the anime's inception, this was hardcore stuff.
#5: The Hideauze Are Humans
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"Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet" (2013) In the end, you can always count on mankind to find someway to mess everything up. As a soldier for the Galactic Alliance of Humankind, Ledo had was raised believing that the space-squids known as the Hideauze were nothing more than monsters in need of exterminating, but how wrong he was. After finding himself stranded on Earth, which had now literally become waterworld, he discovers that his alien enemies were once humans who had decided to genetically alter themselves in the hope of escaping into space. That certainly wasn't in the galactic handbook.
#4: Congratulations Shinji
"Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo" (2012) Poor, poor Shinji. No matter what he does, no matter how hard he tries, he always ends up getting kicked to the curb. Contrary to the previous film's ending, which had us believe that Shinji had managed to save Rei by letting his EVA unit go full-on God Mode, this third entry in the Reboot franchise reveals that he actually messed everything up, and now everyone hates his guts, even getting fitted with an explosive collar in the process. Will someone give this guy a break?
#3: Trigger Does Maury
"Kill la Kill" (2013-14) Starting to see a pattern here? Anime loves nothing more than giving us as much twisted family drama as possible. Case and point, when main girl Ryuko discovered that she's actually the artificially augmented daughter of psycho-fashion diva Ragyo. Unfortunately, mommy dearest's affection for her daughters happen to come in the form of either brainwashing or outright violence. The fact she proved their connection by literally tearing out Ryuko's heart in front of her is just the icing on the cake.
#2: Ancient Aliens
"Darling in the Franxx" (2018) You just couldn't help yourself could you Studio Trigger? We were perfectly fine with a show about adolescents dealing with puberty and sexual confusion through the medium of co-piloting giant robots...but then you decide to throw in aliens at the last minute. We already had the mystery of the klaxosaurs to contend with as well as APE's insidious exploits, did we really need the likes of VIRM to come along and shake everything up? Too many cooks spoil the broth you know!
#1: Guillotine Gorilla
"Samurai Flamenco" (2013-14) This isn't so much a twist as it is a betrayal of the anime's own premise. The fact our hero was nothing more than a male model who wanted to be a superhero due to a romantic sense of justice was oddly flattering, especially in its realistic portrayal of how such an idea often led to him getting wailed on by each criminal he encountered. And yet in one scene that all goes out the window. As Flamenco finds himself taking on a giant gorilla that has a guillotine in place of a stomach, all before finding out there is an evil organisation out there that wants his head. Uh, little late to be going the tokusatsu route guys.
