Heroes can’t just hog the spotlight all the time: the best anime also give villains their own time to shine! Many of the best episodes of anime are villain-focused, telling a story devoted to one or more villains with nary a protagonist to be seen. Even more fun are the occasions when an episode focuses on not just one villain, but an entire team of them, allowing fans to get a much better sense of the villains' dynamic and relationships to each other. Though it’s not always done, well, when it is, the result can leave viewers with a lot more sympathy for the antagonists.
The tones of these episodes can be extremely broad. Some of them can be funny, showing a formerly intimidating villain kicking back and having fun in their free time. Others flesh out the characters under the spotlight in the heaviest way possible, perhaps showing a tragic backstory or revealing parts of their personality that they would never let on to anyone else, much less the heroes. The best villain focussed episodes give fans a better understanding of who the heroes are facing, and can even invoke sympathy despite the evil they represent.
Dragon Ball Zintroduces some of the franchise’s most iconic villains and antiheroes, namely Vegeta, who would go on to become the face of the franchise just as much as Goku. Butin his earliest episodes, he and Nappa caused trouble before even getting to Earth.They get themselves captured on Arlia for front-row seats to the planet’s turmoil, involving a tyrannical king, an Arlian-eating monster, and two lovers separated by the regime.
This episode is the debut of the Frieza Force’s planet -destroying Galick Beam!
Vegeta and Nappa kill the king and free Arlia. Nappa muses about how they’ve become the planet’s heroes, but Vegeta, still lightyears away from hisfamous redemption arc in the later parts ofDragon Ball Z, decides he’d rather just blow the whole thing up. The dark comedy tone of the episode reaches its absolute bleakest when the separated Arlian lovers finally reunite in its final seconds…just before the debut of Vegeta’s Galick Beam blasts them and their whole world to bits.
The lack of later manga to adapt allowed theoriginal 2003 adaptation ofFullmetal Alchemistto be freer with its interpretations of characters. This is especially true of theHomunculi, who, rather than originating directly from the villain, are the twisted results of human transmutation.Despite having the form and memories of the person to be resurrected, they will never fully be that person, causing pain to them and the alchemist who summoned them alike.
Unlike her manga incarnation, who died cursing Roy for killing her, the more this Lust learns about her human life, the more she craves death. Helping a village suffering from a fatal disease, while her fellow Homunculi want to destroy it in an experiment, brings back her memories of the alchemist who resurrected her. By the end of the episode, Lust is shaken enough that the seeds of rebellion are planted within her for the first time since her rebirth.
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure
While Yoshikage Kira’s solo episodes ofDiamond is Unbreakable,“Yoshikage Kira Wants to Live Quietly” and “Cats Love Yoshikage Kira,” are strong contenders, the prize for best villain episodes ofJoJogo to some much goofier people. Oingo and Boingo don’t exactly rank up withDio’s strongest or scariest minions inJoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, but they don’t know that.Their truly sincere efforts to best the Stardust Crusaders are more silly than actually damaging.
Hol Horse later joins Boingo in the “Hol Horse and Boingo” two-parter in Oingo’s place.
In “Khnum’s Oingo and Thoth’s Boingo,” the pair attempt to assassinate the heroes by poisoning their tea, planting a bomb in their car, and disguising Oingo as Jotaro, which not a single one of his friends notices. They achieve about as much success and as many laughs as Wile E. Coyote hunting the Road Runner. Thanks to Thoth, the superpowered comic book, they even get to change the credits of the show into their own style!
Most of thebest duels inYu-Gi-Oh!are the heroes’ moments of victory (or, in very rare cases, crushing defeat). However, this episode of the Battle City Arc is an exception to the rule. After scheming in the background the whole season,Yami Bakura, Marik, and Yami Marik lay all their cards on the table with each other in a duel with deadly stakesin one of the arc’s many two-parter episodes.
Forced out by his worse half, the real Marik has no choice but to team up with Yami Bakura in a bid to win his body back, in a partnership that was short-lived but interesting enough to hold fans’ attention for years. A brief fight with their Millennium Items emphasizes how vicious both duelists are before they’re tearing each other’s souls up with their Monsters, with an explosive finale courtesy of the Winged Dragon of Ra and its secret effects.
Naruto
With the amount of character-centricfiller and backstory episodesNarutois stocked with, it has several kinds of villain episodes to choose from. It even has short arcs dedicated to some of the particularly important ones. Famously, Itachi Uchiha isn’t the villain he makes himself out to be, and his filler arc,“Itachi’s True Story: Book of Light and Darkness” lets his true personality shine through: broken and grieving instead of cold and sadistic.
Despite his reasons being wildly different from the public story, Itachi was still the one who massacred his clan and repeatedly ground his brother Sasuke’s mental health into a fine powder. What drove him to make such horrific choices was a childhood spent traumatized by war and violence, and his prodigious skill making him a tool for village and clan alike. The shinobi world itself takes innocence and good intentions and twists them into brutality, and Itachi is far from its only victim.
This incredible laid-back slice-of-life animetakes the premise of these types of episodes and expands it into an entire series. Most shounen anime and tokusatsu TV shows (the latter of which this story is based heavily on) feature a team of rangers fighting to save the world from an evil, often alien or supernatural, organization.This is what the leader of one of these organizations does when he’s off the clock for the day.
The General of the villainous forces is boastful and intimidating on the battlefield. But out of his armor, he’s quiet, introspective, and slowly but surely falling in love with everything that Earth and humanity have to offer, that he could never have dreamed of on his home world, despite his insistence that all these things are just trophies for when he conquers the planet, even the heroes recognize that their biggest enemy has a soft side.
My Hero Academia
Fan favoriteMy Hero Academiacharacters the League of Villainsgot their own dedicated arc in season 5 ofMy Hero Academia.The gang of villains abused and abandoned by a hero-worshiping society aim to tear that society down,and their efforts make them U.A.’s most powerful enemy. In this episode, they must test their strength against the Meta Liberation Army and another sect of All For One’s minions.
The challenges they’re up against are interesting enough, especially with the Meta Liberation Army’s equally sympathetic motive of wanting freer use of oft-maligned Quirks in a world where your Quirk makes or breaks your whole life. But what really gets fans excited about this episode and its follow-ups are how thoroughly the League rises to them, smashing every opponent in their way and showcasing what a truly massive threat they are to the protagonists.
Sometimes, a lucky villain will get not just an episode, but an entire yearly special’s worth of attention.Inspector Zenigata is the professional thief Arséne Lupin III’s most persistent nemesis,and he can usually think of nothing else but sending Lupin to jail. This particular caper starts with Lupin and friends trying to steal the keys to finding the Tokugawa shogunate’s hidden treasure, and one ofanime’s best detectivestrying to protect them.
It escalates wildly into Zenigata being suspended from the police force, teaming up with a psychic reporter to carry on the case vigilante-style, and taking on an entire lab of secret super-soldiers to take the real culprit down. The special showcases both Zenigata’s most notable traits: his determination to get one over on Lupin, and perhaps even more than that, his compassion and drive to protect those who need his help.
Bleach - Season 14
Tier Harribel may be one of thescariest sharks in anime, but she’s also one of the most pacifistic of the Arrancar. Protective of her fellow Hollows and determined to create a more just world for them, Harribel lives up to the title of her backstory episode.She collects a following of other overlooked Hollows, growing strong enough to challenge even the most arrogant of their kindand willing to accept the risk to her life she’s taking to do it.
The most affecting part of the episode is how deeply loyal Harribel’s Fracción become to her despite their insistence that they won’t be sticking their necks out for anybody. They keep to Harribel’s strict code of honor, and Harribel will cut down anyone who threatens them without mercy. She is even willing to attack Aizen when he trivializes the lives of those under his command.
As some of thebest comic relief characters in anime, Team Rocket gets the spotlight in many episodes of the long-running series. Their best episode comes fromPokémon Chronicles,a whole spinoff telling the side characters’ stories while Ash is doing his thing in Hoenn. “Training Daze” is aboutJessie, James, and Meowth recounting the tale of how they joined Team Rocket and became partners.
This episode’s original Japanese title translates to “Team Rocket: The Origin of Love and Youth”!
At first, the trio didn’t get along at all after being assigned to a team. However, after they go through a series of grueling tests and training missions together, they start becoming the close-knit friends fans know and love from the main series, even willing to sacrifice themselves for their teammates instead of screwing them over. The focus on all three of them puts it above other Team Rocket episodes such as “Go West, Young Meowth.”
