The Most Powerful Anime Characters Ranked

Anime is a vast, complex landscape of genres, tropes, and subject matter. Want to watch space cowboys contemplate their regrets to a killer jazz soundtrack? Say hello to Cowboy Bebop. How about a surrealist critique of fairy tale archetypes? Enter Revolutionary Girl Utena. Perhaps you'd prefer to immerse yourself in the world's most high-octane portrayal of ping pong? Here comes Ping Pong: The Animation.

Indeed, the world of anime is a massively varied one. But at the end of the day, even the most sophisticated anime fan has a character they love for the simple fact of their bananas superpowers. From magical girls to gun-toting assassins to alien warriors, anime certainly offers a whole lot of choices in this department. But which anime characters dwarf all the rest? We're here to answer that eternal question. These are the most powerful anime characters around, ranked from the least formidable to the most massively mighty.

Izuku Midoriya starts out as a kid who's anything but powerful. In fact, he's initially defined by his powerlessness. In a world where just about everyone has superpowers, known as Quirks, Izuku is born Quirkless. This is devastating to the young boy, as he idolizes All Might, top dog of the pro hero world. Izuku doesn't love the world-renowned "Symbol of Peace" for his muscles alone, however — he loves All Might for the way he uses his strength to save those in need.

It's this kind heart that transforms Izuku from a no-account fanboy into one of the most powerful heroes on the modern anime scene. As it turns out, All Might's power comes from the unique "One for All" Quirk, which can be passed down. Izuku becomes its ninth holder, and he spends the rest of My Hero Academia proving why he's the right choice. One for All gives Izuku access to gargantuan amounts of versatile energy. He's capable of astonishing speed, strength, and durability. Of course, the Quirk isn't without its caveats — Izuku has to train as hard as he can to use a minute percentage of One for All's power, and he still manages to shatter his own bones pretty much every time he uses it. Still, Izuku is well on his way to surpassing All Might's career, which basically means he's on the road to becoming the most powerful superhero in a world chock-full of them.

Serial Experiments Lain is a truly terrifying anime about a middle school girl named Lain, who's living an apparently normal life in the Japan of the near future. Lain's creators foresaw the rise of the internet fairly accurately, all the way back in 1998. Here, it's known as "the Wired," and it's present in basically every aspect of human life. Virtual reality is so robust, in fact, that the border between it and actual reality has blurred. But things get weird when a dead classmate emails Lain, claiming to be alive within the Wired. Then, they get even weirder when Lain doppelgangers begin popping up.

Lain is a purposefully abstract series, so the specifics of its central character's powers are a bit vague. What's made clear by the end of the series, however, is that Lain is a sapient computer program capable of fully dissolving the line between virtual and material reality. When she finally embraces this truth, she promptly erases her own existence. No memory of the girl she was remains, even within the mind of Alice, her dearest friend. Though she was created to unify the planet in a radical way, to the point of eliminating individuality itself, she refuses to do so. Lain seems to be content to edit herself out of the picture and observe the goings-on of the people she loves. If she ever changed her mind, however, she'd be able to do a whole lot more than that.

You don't get to be the youngest State Alchemist in history without being an out-and-out genius. Even among his enormously skilled friends and colleagues, Edward Elric's talent stands out as especially dazzling. His alchemy is innovative, flexible, and backed up by encyclopedic knowledge. Moreover, Izumi Curtis' training shaped him into a brilliant martial artist with an unquenchable interest in new techniques, ideas, and approaches.

But what sets Ed truly apart is the fact that he's bested God. In the world of Fullmetal Alchemist, those who attempt human transmutation are punished by Truth, a supreme metaphysical entity who sits beside the Gate, from which all alchemical knowledge springs. In Ed's first encounter with this being, after the Elric brothers' attempt to resurrect their deceased mother goes awry, Ed regains Al's soul from Truth through some insanely quick thinking. This is impressive enough on its own, especially given the fact that Ed is a child when he pulls this off. But beyond that, in witnessing Truth, Ed gains the extraordinary ability to perform alchemy without a transmutation circle. 

Then, at the series' end, Ed manages to surprise and impress Truth by sacrificing his alchemy in exchange for his brother's body. Granted, all of this happens because Ed plays by Truth's rules. But still, he manages to catch the supreme deity of his universe off guard. That doesn't just take power — it takes skill, finesse, and unimpeachable confidence.

It's all right there in the title, really. Saitama just needs one punch to get anything done. He's so powerful, in fact, that he's defined by his boredom. Baddies come and go from his life, but no matter how legendarily formidable they are, they all fall to him in the end. Ho-hum. At least that gives him more time for grocery shopping.

It's easy to lose sight of how stupidly powerful Saitama is, given his lackadaisical attitude, so let's take a moment to reacquaint ourselves with the details of his dominance. Over the course of One-Punch Man, Saitama shatters a katana with his teeth, jumps from the moon to the Earth in a single bound, and punches through a meteor. When asked if Saitama is capable of blowing up the Earth, series illustrator Yusuke Murata answered, "I guess he can if he wanted to, but I don't think he will do it." 

This hilariously chill answer reveals the heart of Saitama's power. His series is a comedic one, where the central joke is the utterly bonkers nature of his skill. Thus, his true superpower is his ability to calmly defy reason. The only limit on his power is how likely it is to make fans' laugh, and given the fact of One-Punch Man's enduring popularity, that basically means he's an unstoppable god — albeit one who can't regrow his hair.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann's true antagonist is the force of negativity itself, personified by the Anti-Spiral. "Spiral Power" is the foundation of life in Gurren Lagann. It's the energy that drives sentient creatures to constantly evolve, innovate, and achieve. But long ago, an alien race foresaw the uncontrolled use of Spiral Power leading to disaster. Thus, they froze themselves in suspended animation and became the Anti-Spiral, a reality-warping force of cosmic stagnation.

How does Simon, once a humble digger, defeat the Anti-Spiral? Like any true shonen protagonist, he hits it really, really hard. Specifically, as portrayed in the Lagann-hen movie, Simon brutally fist-fights the Anti-Spiral, creates a drill out of his own blood and willpower, and carves a hole straight through its chest. He literally, physically shatters the concept of hopelessness. Also, this comes after a battle in which he pilots a giant robot so large that it throws spiral galaxies like shuriken. 

Gurren Lagann leans as hard as it can into giant robot anime's most absurd excesses — "Spiral Power" basically means "shonen vibes," after all — and Simon's ultimate victory serves as the series' mission statement. When bad guys tell him his blazing willpower will bring about the end of everything, he tells them he'll prevent that from happening with his blazing willpower. And he does. Simon curb-stomps the apocalypse by embracing everything that makes his genre of anime unique. No wonder Gurren Lagann became an instant classic of the form.

Does Goku even need an introduction, really? The Dragon Ball franchise is so internationally influential that series creator Akira Toriyama has been knighted by the French government. The property is worth billions upon billions of dollars. Goku is a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. So yeah, you probably know about Goku — but let's stop to really consider the depth of his power. This most super of Saiyans is a warrior of unparalleled skill. Enemies capable of regeneration, teleportation, and literal miracles all fall to his might in the end. Just look at how many different planes of Super Saiyan-dom he's ascended to as the years have gone by. Odds are, there are at least two more than you last remember there being. 

But Goku's power goes beyond this. Like Superman, to whom he's frequently compared, his cultural stature makes him powerful in a uniquely transcendent way. Goku will always win because millions of fans around the world love him for being the guy who always wins. Within his own universe, he's unbeatable, but that goes for a lot of characters on this list. What puts Goku over the top is the fact that within our universe, he's so popular that he literally creates international incidents because people want to watch him save the day so badly. Goku might be a cartoon character, but the scope of his power is three-dimensional.