Aniplex dropped a new Walpurgisnacht: Rising trailer at its One Focus livestream on Saturday, September 12, and with it a fresh Ume Aoki visual and Maaya Sakamoto's casting as the unnamed upperclassman who looks like Homura. Fifteen years after Homura first reset a month to save one girl, the franchise is still mining the same idea — which is a decent excuse to settle which anime actually do time travel well.
Quick answer
The highest-ranked time-travel anime on SenpaiRanks are Steins;Gate (adjusted score 9.04, White Fox, 24 episodes, 2011), Summer Time Rendering (8.43, Bug Films, 25 episodes, 2022) and The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (8.34, Kyoto Animation, 2010 film). SenpaiRanks rates every title on two axes — Consensus, how broadly it is liked, and Quality, how well it holds up — rather than the single blended score MyAnimeList and IMDb publish. Most of this list streams on Crunchyroll; Re:Zero and Tokyo Revengers also appear on Hulu or Netflix depending on region.
What counts here
Three shapes, all included. The loop — a character repeats a fixed stretch of time until they get it right (*Steins;Gate*, Re:Zero, Higurashi, Madoka). The jump — a one-way or limited trip to a specific past (*ERASED*, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Tokyo Revengers). And the message — no body moves, only information (*Steins;Gate* again, Orange).
What is excluded: isekai with a reincarnation framing but no causal loop, and stories where time travel is a single throwaway episode. The mechanic has to be the engine.
The ranked list
1. Steins;Gate — 9.04
White Fox, 24 episodes, 2011. Streaming on Crunchyroll. The genre's ceiling, and the show that made "world line" a phrase anime fans use unprompted. Eleven episodes of Akihabara hangout comedy, then a hard turn into a man sending texts to the past and watching every correction cost him something else. The rules are consistent, disclosed early, and never bent to save the plot — which is why it still outranks everything that came after it.
2. Summer Time Rendering — 8.43
Bug Films, 25 episodes, 2022. Streaming on Disney+ in most regions. A shadow-horror mystery on a small Japanese island where the protagonist respawns on death, and the show treats that as a tactical resource rather than a tragedy. The most underwatched title on this board relative to its score — it aired on a platform where anime fans were not looking.
3. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya — 8.34
Kyoto Animation, 2010 film. A two-hour-forty-minute film that fixes the biggest problem in the Haruhi TV run by taking it completely seriously. Kyon wakes into a world without the SOS Brigade and has to decide whether he wants the weird one back. The single best thing anyone at KyoAni made before Violet Evergarden.
4. Re:Zero -Starting Life in Another World- — 8.22
White Fox, 25 episodes, 2016. Streaming on Crunchyroll and Hulu depending on region. Return by Death is the loop played for attrition — Subaru cannot tell anyone he is looping, so every reset also isolates him further. It is an isekai on the surface and a psychological endurance test underneath, and the second half of the first cour is where that clicks.
5. ERASED — 8.17
A-1 Pictures, 12 episodes, 2016. Streaming on Crunchyroll and Netflix depending on region. Known in Japan as Boku dake ga Inai Machi. An adult gets pulled back to 1988 to stop a child murder, and the show is at its best when it stays small — a boy noticing which classmate goes home alone. The ending divides people; the first eight episodes do not.
6. Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part 3: Rebellion — 8.12
SHAFT, 2013 film. The one the new Walpurgisnacht: Rising film is a direct sequel to. Rebellion takes Homura's loop — the TV series' central reveal — and asks what someone becomes after running it a hundred times. The 2026 sequel opened in Japan on August 28, took #1 in its opening weekend, and sold 535,000 tickets for roughly 940 million yen in three days, so the question clearly still has an audience.
Here is the new trailer Aniplex showed on September 12 (it contains spoilers for the film):
7. Steins;Gate 0 — 8.05
White Fox, 23 episodes, 2018. Streaming on Crunchyroll. The sequel that is really a midquel: what the failed world line looks like from inside. Slower and bleaker than the original, and it needs you to have seen it, but the last three episodes justify the whole thing.
8. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time — 8.02
Madhouse, 2006 film. Mamoru Hosoda's breakout. A teenager discovers she can leap backwards and spends the first act using it on karaoke and test scores, which is exactly what a teenager would do. The cost shows up later. Still the most emotionally efficient use of the mechanic in the medium.
9. Higurashi: When They Cry — 7.78
Studio Deen, 26 episodes, 2006. A village festival, the same week repeated with different killers each arc, and a structure that withholds the loop's existence from you for half the run. Dated animation, undated construction.
10. Tokyo Revengers — 7.58
Liden Films, 24 episodes, 2021. Streaming on Crunchyroll and Hulu depending on region. A failing adult jumps back twelve years to save his middle-school girlfriend from a gang war. Loose with its own rules compared to everything above it, but the delinquent-drama engine is strong enough that most people do not care.
11. Orange: Future — 7.28
Telecom Animation Film, 2016 film. The retelling-plus-epilogue companion to the Orange series. Letters from ten years ahead, a classmate the group is trying to keep alive, and a treatment of suicide prevention more careful than the premise suggests.
The loop as a narrative tax
The reason a few of these outrank the rest is not cleverness — it is cost. Steins;Gate and Re:Zero both make the protagonist pay for every reset, in memory or in isolation, so the loop is a debt rather than a cheat code. Shows that treat time travel as a free retry tend to slide down the board, because the audience stops believing anything is at stake. Madoka sits between: Homura's loop is free mechanically and catastrophic morally, which is the trick Rebellion builds an entire film on.
Reading the two axes
SenpaiRanks publishes Consensus and Quality separately for exactly this kind of list. Tokyo Revengers has broad Consensus and a softer Quality read — a lot of people watched it, fewer defend the time-travel logic. Summer Time Rendering is the inverse: a narrow audience, a high hold-up score. A single weighted average — MyAnimeList's model, and IMDb's — puts those two within a few tenths of each other and tells you nothing about why.
Each entry links to its page with both axes and the full vote distribution. If you have finished one of these, rate it — that is how the board stays a reflection of what anime watchers actually think, rather than a static top-N someone wrote once.
Where to go next
Neighbouring cuts of the same board: best sci-fi anime ranked for the harder end, best mystery and detective anime ranked for the Higurashi and ERASED adjacency, and best 80s and 90s anime ranked for the era that invented most of these structures. The biggest anime movies of 2026 at the Japanese box office tracks where Walpurgisnacht: Rising sits against the year's other releases, and what to watch this fall covers the current season.
Frequently asked questions
Q: What is the best time-travel anime?
A: Steins;Gate, at an adjusted 9.04 on the SenpaiRanks board — the highest-rated of any title built on a time-travel mechanic, and one of the highest-rated anime overall.
Q: Is Re:Zero a time-travel anime?
A: Yes. Return by Death is a death-triggered loop back to a fixed save point, which is a time-loop mechanic even though the series is framed as isekai.
Q: Where can I watch Steins;Gate?
A: Crunchyroll carries Steins;Gate and Steins;Gate 0 in most regions. Availability varies by territory, so check your local listing.
Q: Is Madoka Magica a time-loop story?
A: Yes, though the TV series hides it until episode 10. Rebellion and the 2026 sequel Walpurgisnacht: Rising build directly on Homura's loop.
Q: Which time-travel anime is the shortest?
A: ERASED at 12 episodes, or The Girl Who Leapt Through Time if you want a single 98-minute film.
Q: How does SenpaiRanks rank these?
A: Two scores per title — Consensus for how broadly it is liked, Quality for how well it holds up — computed with a disclosed Bayesian method, instead of the single weighted average MyAnimeList and IMDb publish.