by Renara » Thu May 09, 2013 12:55 pm
My favourites are:
Darker Than Black; the first series was really good though the second was a bit disappointing (the accompanying OVA episodes were a lot better). It's a relatively serious series, but with enough light hearted moments that I wouldn't say that it's especially dark.
Black Lagoon is also really good, following some smugglers making ends meet, usually ending up with them stuck in violent, swearing laden action sequences. It can be quite dark but I wouldn't say it's overly serious.
Ghost in the Shell is a must-see I think, it does delve a bit too much into the philosophical at times, but then it has plenty of cyborg related action to easily balance that out. While you can get the condensed movies I think the series is best to watch as the overall plot of each is quite clever and pieces together over time.
Hellsing; stylish gory action with a delightfully evil good-guy vampire. I prefer the original series to the OVA adaptations, though the latter third of the series isn't great, it's still more than entertaining enough to stay with it.
Witch Hunter Robin is a great single series, though it's pretty dead-pan through most of it, and starts out very slowly, but really gets into it later on.
I also enjoyed watching Death Note and Code Geass first time around, they're not ones I would rewatch. Both are focused on a clever, not quite a good-guy main character, but if you rewatch then you see that their cleverness is really a lot of luck and plot device, plus the mecha elements of Code Geass often dominate entire episodes without ever adding anything to the series. Still worth watching once I think though.
I've been watching some older series recently, currently Outlaw Star which has a similar feel to Cowboy Bebop which I watched a while ago. Both are fun space-faring series that remain mostly light throughout. I might group Trigun in with them, as they're all single-series shows with a complete story; Trigun is very slow to get into though.
Personally I wasn't a fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion; it sounds like some of the movie versions of the series may be better as they change the ending, but I haven't tried any yet.