The List
7 Strange Anime & Manga Spin-Offs
by Lynzee Loveridge,
Modern-day anime series usually come from three major categories: a light novel or manga adaptation, a mobile game or idol group promotion, or a completely original project. However, there's a growing category of anime series spin-offs too. Sometimes these are also light novel or manga adaptations, like older examples a number of years ago, but this time we're diving into some new spinoffs, some old stuff I missed, and just one manga that I couldn't leave out.
Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya
From a layman's perspective, the core Fate Cardcaptor Sakura adds parallel worlds and characters' distaff counterparts to complicate the plot.
Attack on Titan: Junior High
Next to magical girl spinoffs, transplanting characters into a normal school setting might be the most common variation. The same idea is central to super-deformed school shenanigans is certainly cause for a double-take. Fortunately, the show is funny enough to pull it off.
The Cat Returns
In Hiroyuki Morita. The Cat Returns follows Haru, a girl who winds up engaged to the Prince of Cats, and The Baron, the cat statue in the window brought to life, who agrees to help her get the engagement rescinded.
Betterman
Betterman is a dark and gritty The King of Braves: GaoGaiGar. That series was about invading aliens. Nonetheless, characters from The King of Braves: GaoGaiGar make reccurring appearances within Betterman, and a timeline was further fleshed out in audio dramas. Then The King of Braves: GaoGaiGar's sequel closes the loop, showing incidents that happened within Betterman being reported on TV.
Puni Puni Poemy
I didn't really think you could ramp up the craziness of OVA episodes take a crack at the magical girl genre and nothing is sacred. There's bondage, crucified robot dogs, and weird alien dicks. The anime even managed to get banned in New Zealand.
School Days: Magical Heart Kokoro-chan
It's School Days! One of the most notorious slasher eroge has a reputation for its Bad Ends. So it's not the first example that springs to mind when I think of a bright and cheery setting. School Days: Magical Heart Kokoro-chan seems like an attempt to lighten the animators' moods.The OVA is fully self-aware, so it skips any pretense of being a serious magical girl show and instead lets parody run wild. The now infamous "nice boat" makes an appearance, and one group of former love interests create a sentai squad.
Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project
Shinji never could catch a break. That might be why he lives on in manga adaptations with a much nicer life. He moonlights as a detective in Neon Genesis Evangelion: Legend of the Piko-Piko Middle School Students, and otherwise lives a normal high school life. Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project plays out like a romantic comedy where our usually depressed hero is instead focusing on which of his two classmates he likes the most. The whole premise comes straight out of the original Evangelion itself, when the series' final episode shows Shinji getting woken up to go to school by Rei and Asuka. The idea was popular enough for fans of the original series to get behind, and this spinoff manga ran for 10 years.
(Keep) watching Neon Genesis Evangelion! (Twitter.)
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