There are so many different types of anime from Shoujo to Isekai, but they all have one thing in common: they love to throw in plot twists. Many anime series are willing to kill, betray, or change characters entirely to surprise their audiences. The bigger the twist, the riskier it is. Some twists can be seen a mile away or are received poorly by the audiences, but others land just right and become all the more popular. It all depends on the execution.
The best plot twists are those that the audience never see coming. There’s just enough build-up that the twist isn’t nonsensical, but it also isn’t given away too much before it actually happens.
Here are the anime that managed to pull off plot twists that no one saw coming!
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10 Jujutsu Kaisen
MAPPA
Jujutsu Kaisen revolves around a high school student named Yuji, who is unnaturally athletic and a member of the occult club. When he and his friends come across an artifact with turns out to be one of Sukuna’s fingers, they trigger a number of events that result in Yuji eating Sukuna’s finger in order to save everyone. By doing this, he allows Sukuna into his body, but has an unusual amount of control over the extremely powerful curse. Seeing this, the superiors at Jujutsu High School allow Yuji to live with the condition that he help hunt down the rest of Sukuna’s fingers. This is just an extended death sentence however, as at the end of it, Yuji will still have to die.
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A plot twist that happens early in the series is that Yuji dies. He fights a special grade curse and becomes severely weakened, allowing Sukuna to take over his body to save them both. When he’s finished, Sukuna expects Yuji to take back over, but realizes that he’s too weak to push Sukuna back. So, instead, he rips out Yuji’s heart, claiming that he can survive without it, but Yuji can’t. Knowing that he won’t live through it, Yuji manages to take his body back from Sukuna in order to stop him from running rampant, and immediately dies. Ultimately, this death isn’t permanent because Sukuna was able to revive the body with some disturbing conditions, but it was incredibly shocking to watch.
9 Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba
Crunchy Roll
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba begins with Tanjiro’s entire family being slaughtered by demons. The only survivor is his beloved sister, Nezuko, who is turned into a demon herself. But there still seems to be some humanity left in her, so Tanjiro makes it his mission to try and find a cure for her. To do this, he starts to train to become a member of the Demon Slayer Corps. In order to join, he has to pass a final test, as the Demon Slayers only allow the elite among their ranks. There is a very intense training sequence that takes place over the course of two years.
At the end of his training, his mentor will only allow Tanjiro to take the test if he is able to slice a giant boulder in half with his sword. It seems impossible, but two of his mentor’s former students, Sabito and Makomo, appear to help him. Once Tanjiro is able to complete his objective, the two students disappear. The twist is that while Sabito and Makomo were former students of his mentor, they died during their final test. During Tanjiro’s own test, he is forced to fight the demon that killed them.
8 Darwin’s Game
Nexus
Darwin’s Game is a survival anime in which a high school student named Kaname accepts a seemingly harmless invite to a phone app. By doing this, he starts a dangerous game that involves the users of the app needing to kill each other to survive. Kaname is gifted with a particularly powerful ability for the game where he can create weapons out of nothing and teams up with others to try and get through the game and find out who is behind it all.
Throughout all of this, Kaname refuses to actually kill anyone. He is very adamant that he can get through the game without losing his morality. But everything changes in the final episode. When Kaname’s longtime friend, Youta, is kidnapped by an enemy group and subsequently killed, Kaname completely loses it. He begins to kill the enemy team indiscriminately, surprising both his group and the audience alike.
7 Tower of God
HBO Max
Tower of God follows two childhood friends, Rachel and Bam. They have lived near a mysterious tower for their entire lives that contains all manners of life and societies on different levels. It’s said that if you reach the top, you can have a wish come true. However, to get to the top, there are tests that you have to pass, and if you don’t, they could kill you. Bam is horrified when Rachel decides to enter the tower, telling him to forget her and leaving him behind. Instead, Bam follows her, doing everything in his power to find her and help her.
The plot twist comes in the final episode when Rachel betrays Bam. Despite how much he’s done to assist her, she pushes him off of a ledge and into a lake of Shinsu, a substance what would kill him. It’s then revealed that Rachel had been planning to kill him the entire time. She was told at the beginning of the tower that the only way she would be able to ascend was to beat Bam. So, she did. And, more frustrating, she got away with it.
6 Chainsaw Man
Mappa
Chainsaw Man follows a down-on-his-luck guy named Denji who has a pet devil, Pochita. He works as an unofficial devil hunter for the Yukuza in order to pay off his father’s debts, but soon finds himself betrayed by them. As he’s dying, Pochita saves him and becomes his heart, giving Denji the powers that Pochita had, which includes chainsaws protruding from his head, arms, and legs. Seen as a unique, but dangerous, asset, he is taken in by the Public Safety Bureau and is put on a special division of devil hunters that are mostly not human.
Everything seems to be going well with the special division until there is a surprise attack by the Gun Devil’s followers. The division is seemingly absolutely destroyed, including Makima, Denji, Himeno, Kobeni, and Hirokazu. It isn’t revealed until the next episode that somehow, Makima faked her death, Denji, despite being cut in half, was able to restore his body because of Pochita, and Hirokazu saved Kobeni from being shot. Himeno and Hirokazu, however, remained dead. Aki was gravely injured, with his life severely shortened due to the use of his sword that halves his life during the fight.
5 Assassination Classroom
Toho
Assassination Classroom has the intriguing premise of a powerful, octopus-like creature teaching a classroom of junior high students with the intention of having one of them kill him. Koro-sensai tells them that he destroyed the moon and that he was going to destroy the Earth next if someone didn’t kill him in one year. The government puts up a huge reward for whoever is able to assassinate him, but he has so many powers that it seems impossible. Koro-sensai is actually a great teacher, teaching his students not only normal subjects, but how to assassinate him, as well. He claims that he’s giving humanity one last chance to stop him.
In a heart-breaking twist, it’s revealed that Koro-sensai never destroyed the moon. What happened to the moon actually had nothing to do with him at all. The reason that he wanted to be killed was because his body was soon going to explode, and he wanted to avoid destroying Earth. Despite his students desperately wanting him to live, they are forced to take his life to save the planet.
4 Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
FUNimation
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood centers around two brothers who try to bring their mother back to life with a taboo form of alchemy. It goes horribly wrong with Edward losing his left leg, and Alphonse losing his entire body. Fortunately, Edward was able to recover Alphonse’s soul by sacrificing his right arm, and then attaches his soul to a giant suit of armor. This begins their journey to try and find to bring their bodies back to normal. They spend a large amount of the series trying to track down the Philosopher’s Stone, a fabled object that could restore their bodies back to normal without any more cost to themselves.
The twist comes when the brother’s finally find out the truth behind the Philosopher’s Stone. In order to create one, it requires human souls that remain trapped within it. The only reason that it appears to bypass the laws of equivalency exchange is because when it is used, it consumes the human souls inside the stone instead of taking something away from the user. The brothers realize that this isn’t a viable option for them from a morality standpoint and refuse to do it.
3 Death Note
Nippon TV
Death Note follows a seemingly perfect student named Light as he discovers a notebook that has the ability to kill anyone in the world in any way he wants if he writes down the name and knows their face. The power of the notebook becomes too much for him and he ends up going on killing sprees that he feels are justified. A super intelligent and awkward consulting detective named L is hired to help with the investigations of the mass killings and becomes Light’s main adversary. They engage in intense battles of wits that quickly became a staple of the series.
That’s why it was so surprising that they killed L off mid-series. Light finally was able to outsmart L and get a step ahead of him with the use of Misa’s Shinagami, Rem, resulting in L’s death. While it was definitely a surprising twist, it was not an easy one to swallow. It is generally believed that the show went downhill once L was taken out of it.
2 Attack on Titan
Funimation
Attack on Titan has a fairly clear premise in the beginning: protect the cities behind the walls from Titans. Eren is clearly the main character, swearing to fight off Titans to avenge his mother, who was eaten by one. He joins the military to do so, but is upgraded to the special ops squad due to his ability to turn into a sentient Titan, a skill made possible by his father’s experiments on him. As the story continues, things become more complicated when its revealed that many of the Titans are transformed humans.
However, the biggest plot twist is that the main character of the show becomes the main antagonist. Eren betrays his friends and the military, becoming an entirely different person. He becomes a powerful Titan that can control other Titans, and he uses this to initiate “the rumbling.” His end goal is to destroy all of humanity, other than his friends and the people within the walls of his city.
1 Naruto: Shippuden
Studio Pierrot
Naruto: Shippuden takes place after the events of Naruto, but still follows Naruto as he tries to become the best ninja he can be with the dream of becoming Hokage. In this series, the Akatsuki, a dangerous criminal organization, further present themselves as antagonists to Naruto. One member of the clan, Itachi, is Sasuke’s brother. He is seen to be evil throughout the show as he was the one that killed he and Sasuke’s entire clan, including their parents. Sasuke pledges to kill Itachi in order to avenge them.
However, after Sasuke succeeds in killing Itachi, it’s revealed that Itachi’s motivations weren’t what they seemed to be. Itachi was ordered by the village leaders to kill the clan, who was planning a coup, in order to prevent a world war between the villages. He only joined Akatsuki as a spy and acted as a villain to Sasuke so that it would be easier for his little brother to kill him. He believed he deserved to die for what he did and wanted Sasuke to be the one to slay him.
