Every year, the conversation around anime concentrates around a handful of dominant titles. In 2024 it was Frieren, Solo Leveling, Demon Slayer's Hashira Training arc, and Dungeon Meshi. These were all excellent — some were genuinely great. But the volume of conversation they generated meant that several remarkable anime aired, completed their runs, and quietly disappeared without receiving the audience they deserved.
This is a rescue mission. Here are ten anime from 2024 that deserve your time right now.
1. Bartender: Glass of God
The remake of the 2006 classic arrived with almost no fanfare and departed the same way, which is a genuine crime. Bartender: Glass of God follows Ryuu Sasakura, a young bartender in Ginza whose cocktail craft seems to have an almost supernatural ability to address the hidden grief or longing in each customer's heart.
It is a quiet, sophisticated anthology drama — each episode follows a different customer with a different story — with exquisite attention to the craft of cocktail-making and to the small, specific details of human emotional life. If you enjoyed Mushishi, Bartender occupies a similar contemplative register.
2. Metallic Rouge
Bones's original mecha-adjacent sci-fi arrived with a strong premise — a future Mars colony, android enforcers, and questions about what distinguishes artificial consciousness from the real thing — and a visual style that confidently referenced Cowboy Bebop without imitation. It didn't entirely stick the landing, but the middle section of this series is among Bones's most interesting original work in years.
3. The Witch and the Beast
A dark fantasy adaptation with an unusual central duo — a composed witch and her partner who contains a demon — that prioritised atmosphere and adult storytelling over the crowd-pleasing approachability that often dilutes dark fantasy adaptations. Studio Yokohama Animation Lab produced something genuinely unsettling and visually distinctive. It deserved three times the viewership it received.
4. Astro Note
The most charming slice-of-life anime to air in 2024 went completely unnoticed. Astro Note follows the residents of an apartment building whose landlady turns out to be an alien on Earth for mysterious reasons. The comedy is warm and consistently funny, the character dynamics are well-developed, and the romance subplot earns its emotional payoff properly.
5. Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf (Remake)
Some will argue this doesn't count as a hidden gem since it's a remake of a beloved classic. But the 2024 version attracted a fraction of the attention its quality warranted. The remake is faithful to the original while upgrading the visual presentation substantially, and for viewers who missed the 2008 original, it is an impeccable entry point to one of anime's great economic-fantasy romances.
6. Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night
This music-adjacent original told the story of four young women building a VTuber creative project, with each character carrying a backstory involving artistic failure or abandonment. The visual direction was genuinely striking — the night sequences in particular used colour with extraordinary confidence — and the character writing avoided the usual anime shortcuts when depicting creative ambition and its costs.
7. Train to the End of the World
One of the strangest anime to air in recent memory, Train to the End of the World sends a girl on a surreal train journey through a post-civilisation Japan to find her best friend. The worldbuilding is deliberately unexplained, the tone shifts between absurdist comedy and genuine existential melancholy, and the visual design is unlike anything else in the medium. It is not for every viewer. It is absolutely for some viewers.
8. Sengoku Youko
Based on Satoshi Mizukami's manga and running across multiple cours, Sengoku Youko is a historically-set action fantasy with the character depth and emotional ambition of Mizukami's other adaptations (Planet With, Spirit Circle). It is a slow build, but viewers who give it six episodes will find one of the most rewarding character-driven action stories in recent anime.
9. Pon no Michi
A mahjong anime that is actually a slice-of-life character study using mahjong as its backdrop, Pon no Michi prioritised the relationships between its four high-school-girl leads over the game mechanics. The result was something genuinely warm and specific — the kind of character writing that lingers after the episode ends.
10. Sasaki and Peeps
The most ridiculous premise of 2024 — a salaryman is reincarnated in another world by his pet Java sparrow, who turns out to be a powerful mage from a fantasy realm — generated surprisingly sophisticated commentary on bureaucracy, power, and the salaryman experience. It also committed fully to its absurdism in ways that were frequently very funny. Utterly bizarre, and surprisingly worthwhile.
How to Find More Hidden Gems
The algorithm on every streaming platform will funnel you toward the same titles that everyone else is watching. Breaking out of that loop requires deliberate effort:
- Check seasonal ranking threads on niche anime forums, not Reddit's main anime community
- Follow animation-focused Twitter/X accounts that cover smaller productions
- Use MAL or Anilist to look at what people you trust are rating highly, not just the overall score
Some of the best experiences in anime aren't the loudest ones. They're the ones you stumble across at midnight, watch in one sitting, and immediately want to tell someone about.
These ten deserve that moment.
