Completed Anime With Endings: 7 Whole Stories, Counted

The most disappointing thing in anime is a finale that turns out to be an advert. The last episode ends on a cliffhanger, the credits roll, and the manga is forty volumes further along with no second season in sight. It happens to good shows all the time, because studios often adapt a popular series to sell the books while the books are still being written.

Every show below tells a whole story, and the number beside each title is the whole number, with optional extras named so you can ignore them. They run from 11 episodes to 148. Where the ending is real but the source carries on regardless, that is said plainly.

Whole-story counts

Two evenings: The Tatami Galaxy and Kids on the Slope

The shortest whole story The Tatami Galaxy

• 11 episodes
• complete story

A Kyoto student relives his university years again and again, choosing a different club each time.

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The narrator of The Tatami Galaxy goes unnamed. He is a third-year student in Kyoto who believes the wrong club ruined his life, and each episode rewinds him to his first week so he can pick another: the tennis circle, the film club, stranger options after that. His friend Ozu, grinning like a goblin, turns up in every version to wreck things. Akashi, a blunt engineering student who is terrified of moths, turns up too, and he keeps failing to say anything useful to her. The narration is so fast that subtitles become a reading test, so pause without guilt. The last two episodes cash it in with an ending that answers the whole loop.

For music and friendship Kids on the Slope

• 12 episodes
• adapts the whole manga

Sasebo, 1966: a lonely classical pianist gets dragged into jazz by the school's most feared delinquent.

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Kaoru Nishimi arrives in Sasebo as a transfer student with good grades and a stomach that turns on him when he is anxious. Sentaro Kawabuchi is the brawler everyone avoids, and he plays drums in the basement of a record shop run by the family of Ritsuko, the class representative. Shinichiro Watanabe directs, Yoko Kanno handles the music, and the school-festival scene where the two boys take over the stage with a jazz medley is about as happy as television gets. Twelve episodes cover the complete manga, which is the problem as well as the promise: the final few compress years of story into a hurry, and the ending arrives before you feel ready for it. It is still an ending.

A series and a film: Violet Evergarden

The one that needs its film Violet Evergarden

• 13 episodes plus Violet Evergarden: the Movie (2020)
• the film is the finale

A former child soldier takes a job writing other people's letters, trying to understand what her commanding officer meant by his last words to her.

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Violet was raised as a weapon, and when the war ends she is left with a pair of metal prosthetic arms and a peace she has no idea how to use. She takes work as an Auto Memory Doll, typing letters for clients whose words fail them, because Major Gilbert said something to her before they were separated and she wants to understand it. Most episodes are a single commission: a playwright stuck on a script, a princess whose engagement is conducted in public letters. Kyoto Animation is at the height of its craft here, down to the way light falls across a typewriter.

The 13 television episodes stop at a sensible pause, and Violet Evergarden: the Movie, released in 2020 and running well over two hours, is the real ending; the official site bills it as the finale. A 2019 side-story film, Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll, sits between them and is optional. Content note: battlefield violence in flashbacks, and a great deal of bereavement.

A slow half that pays: Steins;Gate

For a thriller that ties off Steins;Gate

• 24 episodes
• complete story
• film and sequel optional

A self-styled mad scientist in Akihabara builds a microwave that sends text messages into the past. Stick with the slow start.

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Rintaro Okabe calls himself Hououin Kyouma, wears a lab coat for no reason, and runs a “laboratory” above a television repair shop in Akihabara with two friends: Mayuri, who greets everyone with a sing-song “Tutturu”, and Daru, a hacker. Their best invention is a modified microwave that can send texts to the past. For about a dozen episodes the show is a hangout comedy full of theory talk, with Kurisu Makise, a young neuroscientist, arguing Okabe into the ground. Then the consequences arrive, and the second half is one of the tightest stretches of television on this list.

Twenty-four episodes finish the story, and the loose threads you noticed early on get pulled. A 2013 film, Load Region of Déjà Vu, adds an epilogue, and Steins;Gate 0 is a 23-episode branch off the original’s late episodes; both are for afterwards. Content note: repeated violent death, and a lead whose trauma is played straight. When you finish, the Finder can suggest what to try next.

The long ones: Brotherhood and Monster

The safest long commitment Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

• 64 episodes
• reaches the manga's ending

Two brothers break the one rule of alchemy trying to bring their mother back, and spend the series paying for it.

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Edward Elric lost an arm and a leg. His younger brother Alphonse lost his whole body, and his soul is now bound to an empty suit of armour. That was the price of trying to bring their mother back, and Brotherhood begins with Ed as a state alchemist hunting for a way to undo it. Over 64 episodes the search pulls in a military government, a massacre in the country’s recent past, and a cast that grows to dozens. The ending is the manga’s ending, broadcast a few weeks after the final chapter was published.

Start from episode one of Brotherhood. The 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist is a separate adaptation with its own invented ending, and our comparison of the two explains when it is worth a look. Content note: an early episode involving a child is among the most upsetting things in the series, and the war flashbacks are grim.

For a long, patient chase Monster

• 74 episodes
• adapts the whole manga

A Japanese surgeon in Düsseldorf saves a boy's life instead of the mayor's. Years later, the boy he saved is killing people.

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Dr Kenzo Tenma is a rising neurosurgeon at a Düsseldorf hospital in 1986 until he operates on a boy with a bullet in his head ahead of the mayor who was brought in after him. It costs him his career, and it starts a chase across Germany that fills 74 episodes. Monster is slow on purpose. Whole episodes follow strangers who cross Tenma’s path once, and those detours carry some of the best scenes in the show, about what one person’s cruelty does to everyone standing near it.

The series adapts Naoki Urasawa’s complete manga, and the central case closes. The final minutes leave one image open to argument, which suits a story this interested in doubt. Pick Monster over Brotherhood if you would rather follow a manhunt than a war. Content note: child abuse, murder and suicide recur throughout.

The one with a caveat: Hunter x Hunter

The one with a caveat Hunter x Hunter (2011)

• 148 episodes
• ends the anime's arc
• manga continues

A boy from a fishing island takes a brutal licensing exam to find the father who left him. It starts as an adventure and gets much darker.

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Gon Freecss is twelve, very good at fishing, and determined to become a Hunter because his absent father Ging is one. At the exam he meets Killua, the runaway heir of a family of assassins, and their friendship is the spine of all 148 episodes. The show changes genre with every arc: a survival exam, a tower of paid fights, a mafia auction, a video game you can die in, and then a long war story in the middle that turns the adventure into something close to horror.

Episode 148 gives Gon and Killua’s story a genuine resolution, and it is a satisfying place to stop. The manga has carried on beyond that point and has yet to finish, so this is the whole story that exists as anime, with more on paper. Start with the 2011 series; the 1999 version is a separate, shorter adaptation. Content note: the middle arc has graphic gore and torture.

Check the dates before you start

A FINISHED badge only means the broadcast is over. Our seasons and cours explainer shows how to add up a franchise split across several entries, and the weekend guide does this same job for stories of 13 episodes or fewer. If the ending you want is two people finally getting somewhere, the romance guide sorts love stories by how far the relationship moves, including Nodame Cantabile, which reaches its conclusion across 45 episodes.