This question straddles all three of anime, manga, and light novels, so I figured I’d just drop it in the anime community first. Though if it doesn’t belong here, feel free to delete it and I’ll go somewhere else.
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I’ve only been watching anime for a few years. This year, I’ve started reading manga and LN of some anime I’ve seen. There are a few titles where I feel like the anime adaptation was just as good and there are some where I feel like it was better. Fortunately, I haven’t encountered any cases where I think the anime completely dropped the ball, but I know there probably are some like that.
What are some titles that have huge disparities in quality between its anime adaptation and the source?
Samurai Deeper Kyo, without a doubt and the anime is objectively pur trash. In the anime they changed samurai ennemies into aliens with sekigara battle becoming an alien invasion. In the manga we are in a classic seinen chanbara with light fantasy (the two biggest fantasy element are kyo and kyoshiro sharing the same body and nobunaga’s almost immortality with his body rotting).
I haven’t even heard of that title before, that’s interesting. I wonder if those differences were made out of creative intent or out of compromise somewhere in the production process.
it’s an old manga. the change on the anime was to tone down the story and makes it appeal to younger audience (the manga is highly adult only with a lot of bodies cut with lot of blood but because in the anime the ennemies are monsters blood was changed to vomit kind of green). The sad thing is that the manga is reaaaaaally, lots of action, tragedy, politics and highly deserve the Shaman King treatment of a kai version (even badly animated as long they stick with the story, characters personnality and background because it would be better than what we had)
The anime is a good twenty years old at this point. In isolation, if you’re not familiar with the source material, it’s an okay-but-forgettable action series.