IGN's Top 25 Anime Characters

In all honesty, aside from Cowboy Bebop, I still have yet to see an English dub that I like better than FUNimation's dub for Yu Yu Hakusho. I love their script for it, even if they changed around a lot of lines from the original script (and they did, but I honestly don't mind at all ).
 
I find Kamina to be, by far, his greatest performance ever and, since he won his first award for it, I'd say most people would agree. Although it has many of the same voice actors as Code Geass, I found it to be a far superior dub.

I know some people just plain don't like Michelle Ruff, which I can understand, but again, I found this to be one of her better performances.
 
Some list or something.

That's....kind of hard for me to actively go with.

Not to be a total fanboy (okay, I totally am but still) Between Yu Yu Hakusho, Darker Than Black, Fullmetal Alchemist, RomeoXJuliet, BECK and being perhaps the only dubbing company who didn't screw up a dub of One Piece I think they have a track record of being the best both in quality and in consistency (and that's just some of the examples I know. I haven't even seen all of FUNi's dubs)

I mean, the dub for Baccano is perhaps something that should be used as a lesson to every dubbing company on how to use accents that actually fit the characters. That company actually got me to get "Shuffle" because I heard a dub clip and liked it a lot. I don't even like harem anime, I just liked the voices I heard
 
Meh, already knew something was wrong when Luffy was so down on the list and below Ichigo.

That said it was par for the course really. Hit all the expected notes on what constitutes a top 25 anime character list. That said, I personally would have went for a "One character for one show" rule so that it wouldn't be bogged down by multiple characters in the same series. Makes for a more interesting list in my opinion.
 
The absolute quality is still better to me. Maybe I shouldn't count Bebop, as that has the advantage of being recorded with the cast merabers interacting instead of doing the lines separately.


FUNI's good, but I don't get that "natural" quality of conversation like GTIS or Hellsing and that's all I look for in anything. Otherwise it's like a "turn the next page" thing for me and I end up too distracted on the next line rather than enjoy the scene.
 
Holy crap, they bothered to record CB with the cast all at once? What patient saint did they hire to direct CB? O.o


CB is probably Bandai's best dub, but I agree FUNimation's in-house stuff is still the best and more consistent.
 
I'll buy Goku as #1, but the rest of the list? Some of the characters on this list are too fresh. There was a weird mix of legit iconic(in the West) and current popular(in the West). Some on this list have proven staying power, while others don't. I guess they wanted to make a list that catered to old and new fans. Oh well. I wasn't going to take this list seriously. I refuse to recognize any list that doesn't have Faye Valentine on it.
 
While I like the dubs for series like Helling and others done in LA, I would still argue that the English dub for YYH by FUNimation is easily the most "natural" sounding dub that I've ever heard in terms of the conversations between characters. Its tied with Cowboy Bebop for my favorite dub ever (I could never really pick between the 2). Not once in the series did I ever feel like the VAs were just reading from a script and not actually responding to one another, even though that's what they were doing. I think a lot of that has to do with them re-working the script to be more suitable for the English dub, though.
 
I just wanted to put it out there that the English dub version of Yusuke is easily top 25 material in my book. [On a side note, I also noticed that Yusuke seems to have a lot more of a "mischevious" sort of attitude to him in the manga than in the anime; well, I couldn't come up with a better word to describe it, anyways.]

Of course, I agree that he's not exactly top 25 material, but hey, if Ichigo could make the list, then IGN has no excuse for why a much more interesting character than him could've made it, which Yusuke is to me, in this case. That said, if any YYH character were to make it into the top 25, I'd honestly say that Kurama deserves the spot. Unlike most of the "bishounen smart guy" characters that we see in most shounen these days, Kurama actually pulls the role off right (IMO), and he actually manages to be clever with his plans, rather than other characters of his type in other series. I mean the ones who always seem to be one step ahead by default with some convoluted scheme that is just there to throw-off the viewers into thinking that its an intelligent plan since the writers couldn't come up with something better.



Not for someone who's not a fan of Code Geass, though. And just for the record, I really dislike Light, but I won't deny him his place as a great anime villain.
 
Now you're speaking my language. You guys know I love me some Kurama.Meh, Light may be an egomaniac with a god complex and supernatural tools to back it up, but so, to some degree, is Lelouch... only he retains his humanity where Light doesn't. And that makes him much more interesting (and a better overall character) in my book... though I like them both.

That said... I prefer Suzaku
 
The character choices were fine, but I think the order was wrong.


Naruto deserves a spot. He'll be one of the few characters from this decade who becomes iconic.
 
But that was always the point of Light. He was slowly being driven mad with the power he had at his disposal with the Death Note, which made him into that egomaniac with an insanely arrogant god-complex. That said, I actually found that development itself to be more interesting than the character himself, if that makes any sense.
 
That's another reason to watch the Gurren Lagann dub: Steven Blum as a flaraboyantly gay guy! Judging from the Gurren Lagann dub "bloopers" (almost all hilarious lines Blum ad-libbed for Leeron), I can imagine you'd need some patience, but he wouldn't get to act like that if he wasn't so talented and all-around awesome. If there's one thing that LA dubs have over FUNimation ones, it's Steven Blum.
 
I was thinking about that myself after reading the list. Pikachu is a character in the anime series, but the reasons they gave for placing it in this list had more to do with it being one of the most recognizable mascots out there. They didn't even use a picture from the anime series, but an image that looks like Pikachu's design when the series first came out. Having Ash on there instead would have made a bit more sense to me.

I thought that the top five characters made sense, although I think Speed Racer is there mostly for being a recognizable early anime series. Still, it works better than the rest of the list. I think that Luffy should have been closer to the top ten, if not in that section, and I think that they could have included maybe a couple of more female characters for some reason. I've honestly seen worse lists out there, but that still doesn't make this list that much better.
 
Johan not at #1? List fails.

Seriously though, if we're talking best characters, Yu Yu Hakusho should definitely have taken a couple of spots. If not Yusuke, Younger Toguro, or Kurama, then at least Sensui.

But this isn't that kind of list. ;P
 
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