Best Anime OST: The Song That Still Gives You Chills

A good anime song does a strange job. It plays every week for months, attached to the same ninety seconds of animation, and somehow comes out of that repetition more loved rather than worn out. Plenty of people still know every word of an ending for a show they finished a decade ago.

The pool here is wide on purpose. Every opening and ending from the most-watched series is in, along with theme songs written for films, and a short list of score cues that outgrew their scenes — the Attack on Titan theme, Joe Hisaishi's waltz for Howl's Moving Castle, Yuki Hayashi's You Say Run from My Hero Academia. A long-running show brings dozens of its songs, so a famous series can meet itself several rounds in.

Smaller sizes are the practical way to play. A bracket of 32 pulls a random spread across the whole list, which turns up songs you forgot you knew alongside the obvious ones.

Judge the song, not the series. A show you dropped after three episodes can still own the track you would sing at karaoke.