As far as I’m concerned, there are pretty much two main kinds of sci-fi: space adventures and cyberpunk. Cyberpunk never had a big presence on TV, and I’ve covered most of the attempts at it by this point. They’ve ranged from very successful, like Max Headroom, to far less so (TekWar) in terms of bringing it to life, but none of them have found much of an audience in the Western world. It’s rather bizarre, if you ask me; cyberpunk IS the fiction of the present, for all intents and purposes. But there is one place where cyberpunk thrived, a place intimately tied to the genre from its very origins–Japan. You can’t throw a rock in a cyberpunk dystopia without bouncing off a Neo Tokyo here or there. And a lot of classics of the genre come in the form of cyberpunk anime, so here are a few series that I feel are must-see.

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Defiance is often touted as a one-of-a-kind, groundbreaking multimedia franchise, the first time that a video game and a television series have been so closely tied together. But most fans of the show aren’t aware that a TV series tied in to a video game has been done before. And, of course, where better for such an experiment in cross-media storytelling to take place than Japan? Just over a decade ago, the .Hack// franchise emerged, all at once, across every form of popular Japanese media available. And while it probably wasn’t the first, it’s one of the best examples I know of where it began in multiple, connected forms instead of spreading out. Read more