If you want a more standard grimdark about bad guy main character pillaging and conquering with his army of Demons, I guess Overlord is for you.

I found OddTaxi to be far more emotionally mature than Overlord though. But Overlord hits at the more immediately obvious bad guy wins tropes.

I don’t consider Overlord to be of masterpiece quality. But it does scratch the itch

https://youtu.be/vci9YwpFFcA

I still say OddTaxi is worth it. It’s probably darker than you think it is. I’d argue that most of the characters in OddTaxi were smarter and better written than Death Note even (the intelligence level of Death Note was basically ‘I know something you don’t know’. Meanwhile in OddTaxi, the flaws of each perspective makes far more sense and nuance)

Overlord purposely flips the script. Every new arch a new set of heroes is introduced and then BRUTALLY MURDERED by the demons / in the glory of Ains Opal Gown. You watch the steady progress as this group of villains takes over the new world under the name of the God of Death, Overlord of Undeath.

The joy of Overlord for me is how hard the author reverse engineers villainous monologues or other stereotypical effects. Ains places gold at the top of his base to test the greed of the heroes. They took the money yet continue to explore, clearly they’re greedy pigs and liars who must be destroyed. If they were only invading his home dungeon for the money, they should have been satisfied with the riches on the first floor yet they explore deeper. They must be punished.

Go watch OddTaxi. Masterpiece of the 2020s era IMO.

It’s about a murder. The Taxi Driver (main character) has all the knowledge because he remembers all of his customers. And a set of his customers is related to the murder.

https://youtu.be/jX-Ry1VxeDQ

The episodes are formulaic:

1. New customer gets picked up

2. Minutes of talking in the Taxi.

3. A side note from another characters perspective (nurse, Pop Idols, comedians on the radio, etc. etc). Kinda random, but it’s surprisingly helpful context for the murder mystery.

You’ll find that the Seinen genre is low key and more emotionally mature. Sienen are made for adults after all. Death Note is still a Shonen at the end of the day (Teenager Anime)

I’m pretty sure there’s an anime out there that you’d enjoy, if only because the genre is so wide and deep.

That being said: my anime ‘why did I finish this??’ is Aldnoah Zero, as well as A Certain Scientific Railgun. Kinda bad in the great scheme of things but I kept going for some reason.

I think Aldnoah Zeros physics-accurate fighting got me to enjoy the fights even if the story was utterly trash. It’s like seeing a spec of gold in a pile of shit.

Ex: I forgot why they were fighting the lightning mech. But the main character tethers himself to the lightning mech then hovers. As long as he’s at the same electric potential as the mech, it’s impossible for the lightning to hit him (and as long as he’s not touching the ground or other large sources of electron storage, he’s insulated from the effects).

Did it matter much? No. This was like a 2 minute fight and the story otherwise sucked. But some anime director put a LOT of thought into the physics of this anime. And I was here to enjoy the 2 minutes of that per episode lol.