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• Witchblade as an anime is very different from the source, and is very hard to reconcile with the comic canon as a result, even though Word Of God says it is part of the canon.
• The Akira movie suffers severely from Adaptation Decay; they pretty much try to squish 2000 pages of manga into a two-hour anime movie and the whole thing feels very rushed and confusing because of it; many important things were changed as a result, including who/what Akira really is. However, the script was written by the author of the original manga, and is perfectly fine if you see it first.
  • Also, only half of the manga had been written.
• The Galaxy Angel manga, especially in regards to making a love triangle between Milfeulle, Tact and Ranpha the focus of the series and removing half the story. The show based on it has no such illusions.
  • This is because the manga is actually based on the game instead of the anime. The anime was orginally was supposed to be based on the game, but when it was held back due to problems, the anime had to go ahead with its current "plotline". The manga is actually quite faithful to the videogame.
    • The whole anime counts as intentionally exaggerated Adaptation Decay for this very reason.
• Among other things, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon caught flack from the fansub community for its mutation of Minako from a ditzy, loopy, yet oddly clever and reliable girl to an overserious Ineffectual Loner, and the neutering of Rei's volatile personality. Although both cases might be a result of the show starting off being closer to the manga than the anime, where Rei was less volatile and Minako was rather serious about her position as the Senshi leader before gradually going back to her Sailor V personality. Ironically, the removal of Makoto's obsession with being feminine caused little complaint, but that was a reflection of more current attitudes. The series also did quite a few alterations to the plot, many of which are actually something vaguely referenced in the manga turned Up To Eleven — Princess Serenity became Usagi's Superpowered Evil Side, who is also, thanks to the Silver Crystal, a Person Of Mass Destruction (as opposed to her original Messiah nature).
  • The Sailor Moon anime itself had more than its fair share of decay. The most prominent example would be the final arc, "Stars", which had changes so big that even the original manga creator expressed open dislike for them. And try comparing the manga Dream Arc, filled with Nightmare Fuel, to the mainly humorous SuperS season.
• Excel Saga parodies this; the beginning of the first episode starts with a signed statement by Koshi Rikdo, the creator of the manga, that he won't complain about any changes made to his work. Each episode thereafter features a Cold Opening where something happens, and Rikdo states that he approves Excel Saga being made into a certain genre that that episode parodies. Sometimes at gunpoint.
  • Arguably played straight by the anime's very existence, which is tenuously accurate to the manga at best.
• Gonzo's Hellsing went for 5 episodes at which point they Overtook The Manga (probably a record at the time). The Gecko Ending had American fans demanding a sequel and Gonzo's answer was that they couldn't make a sequel because they couldn't put the plot back on track. The end result is that they had to remake the entire series all over again just to finish the plot.
• Rurouni Kenshin's "Raijuta" saga was notable for having one new character kept the same, and only keeping the sub plot the same as well. The original plot in which Raijuta tries to reform the Kenjutsu schools into schools for killing by banning the use of the shinai is discarded so you can get the more action packed story of Raijuta trying to start a revolution. The problem is that Watsuki noted that Raijuta was a failure because his attacks were nothing special; having more action just compounds this factor and the only good parts concerning Raijuta (that he wants to reform Kenjutsu into the art of killing) are removed. Yutaro's motive for strength in the original, that his father was a living merchant who sold katanas to the west, was changed to the more cliched his dead father was a great swordsman (the testament to his father's great skill was by Kenshin's standards relatively weak).
• The anime series Yu-Gi-Oh ("Yugioh: Duel Monsters") deviates from the manga quite a bit, with several filler arcs, changes to the canon arcs, and refitting the entire series to revolve around a childrens' card game, completely omitting the many earlier games played in the manga.
  • The earlier manga stories, comprising the first 7 volumes or so, were adapted into the earlier 27-episode Yu-Gi-Oh series (often called Season 0), but that too was altered heavily from the source material (notably changing Kaiba from Big Bad of a story arc to Big Bad of the whole series, and featuring a one-shot character from the manga, Miho, as part of the main cast.)
• Even before they had to apply a Gecko Ending due to its cancellation, the writers of the anime version of Mahou Sensei Negima had already altered the plot, excising such key elements as Konoka, Nodoka and Setsuna's Pactios with Negi (all made during the Kyoto arc), Negi's friend and rival Kotaro (also introduced in the Kyoto arc, whose role admittedly didn't get expanded until after it), Setsuna's true nature, and Konoka's own mage talents (both also revealed in the Kyoto Arc... we're just gonna say they severely truncated the Kyoto arc and be done with it).
  • The second anime adaption, Negima!?, intentionally discards pretty much all of the original in favour of a wacky comedy series. Your Mileage May Vary on whether it was good or not, but at least they were honest about it right off the bat.
  • The Live Action Adaptation doesn't even remotely resemble the source material outside of the basic character concepts. They didn't even bother hiring a boy as Negi let alone someone white (at least she was ten).
    • Really, pretty much all of the Negima adaptions are generally considered sub-par, until you get to the Ala Alba and Another World OV As, which are both faithful to the manga, and not too Off Model. The only real complaint fans have is that they started it in the manga's current arc.
• Love Hina also suffers from a progressive form of this, due in part to the anime concluding well before the manga did. First the anime rushes through the early portions of the story, with the first three volumes squeezed into 6 episodes with some generous alterations such as the manner in which Shinobu is introduced; then a number of new characters (Kentaro, Mei, Moe) and new or heavily altered stories (the dream sequence in volume 8) and a few outright filler-type stories are inserted; then the main series ends just barely into events from volume 7 of the 14 volume manga, with completely anime-exclusive storyline events comprising the final episodes. The following Christmas TV special is assembled from bits of volumes 6, 7, and 9 with more generous alterations, while the spring special is a heavily abridged, slightly altered take on volume 8's Pararakelse story, and the OVA packs in volumes 11 and 12. Unfortunately this means the entire ending — books 13 and 14 — and many large portions of the story — including the final revelation and backstory explaining Keitarou's childhood promise — are nonexistent in the anime.
• The Rosario+Vampire anime and original manga start out more or less similar, but already the anime adds much more fanservice, changes some of the stories, and changes the order of events so all of the main cast can be brought in quickly. After a certain point, the manga starts focusing much more on drama and action than the comedy, which the anime doesn't follow, instead creating its own stories to focus more on the harem aspect. Because of this, we will probably never see Tsukune turning into a ghoul—at best, it seems he'll just be temporarily turned into a vampire every season finale.
• The manga adaptation of Code Geass (or rather, the one closest enough to the original to be considered an adaptation) is noticeably lighter in tone than the anime, featuring more sight gags and Super Deformed character heads in text balloons to help identify the speaker. The Humongous Mecha are completely removed, along with any mention of Sakuradite (the whole reason Britannia invaded Japan), and much more of the story takes place at the school, which now has a group of almost fascistic students (armed with guns) who act as stand-ins for the Purist Faction. Instead of bombing buildings and other acts of terrorism, the Japanese rebels express their displeasure with Japan being enslaved by committing acts of petty vandalism like spraypainting anti-Britannian graffiti on public property.
  • The last part only happens for the first portion of the manga. Soon the Black Knights come in and replace the petty rebels.
• The anime version of Gunslinger Girl is a fairly faithful adaptation of the manga, aside from a somewhat different chronology to make the plot better to follow in animated form. The one big difference though is how they handle the story of Angelica, who is heavily implied to die in hospital at the end of the first season. This makes for a strong emotional ending in its own right, so it's jarring when Angelica simply returns in full action in the sequel, which follows the rest of the manga — in which she does not die. Of course Angelica could simply have fallen asleep while watching the meteor shower, but this largely diminishes the emotional impact of the first season's ending. Oh well, it seems you can't have it all.
• The Disgaea anime has the same general plotline as the game (Two demons, one a spoiled love-phobic brat and the other a sneaky, treacherous semi-vamp, and a love-obsessed ditz of an angel, all of who look like kids despite being centuries old, try to take over the Netherworld), but the anime handles it a lot differently to the actual game. For example, Flonne waking up Laharl in a dumpster instead of Etna waking him up at the castle. The change that seems to rankle fans of the game most is the changing of Captain Gordon, Defender of Earth! and his partners to an almost Terrible Trio like comedic relief; their ship destroyed in the second episode, they spend most of the series wandering all over to get the money to repair it, getting blown away whenever they encounter Laharl, Flonne and Etna.
• Princess Tutu has quite a bit of adaptation decay in the manga (the anime came first). In the original anime, the main character is a duck who's given the power to turn into a girl, Mytho is a Prince who's come to life out of an unfinished book, the main villain is the writer of the book, and several of the characters have connections to the unfinished story as well. In the manga, the main character is a schoolgirl who only turns into a duck in one chapter (and is quickly cured of it), Mytho is simply a pure-hearted boy who had a magical power, Fakir and Rue have no connections to any Fairy Tale whatsoever, and the villain's unemotional puppet from the anime becomes the slutty villain in the manga. Most fans of the anime won't even touch the manga.
• All of the adaptations of Devilman seem to be at least somewhat decayed, with the 1972 adaptation getting the worst of it. Ironically, the 1972 anime was the original idea pitch (even if every adaptation of Devilman since then has almost always followed the manga). Go Nagai changed the tone and characters afterwards to more closely resemble a previous unfinished work of his.
• The original anime version of Fist Of The North Star gets a good deal of flack for suffering from the usual Shonen cheap animation and Filler issues, but it's pretty faithful to the manga otherwise. The 1986 animated movie, on the other hand, hits this trope hard. Essentially a condensed retelling of the first eight volumes of the manga, it glosses over many plot points and changes the roles of several side characters: Mr. Heart becomes an underling of Jagi, along with Jackal and Fox, his Theme Naming now meaningless; Toki is never seen nor is mentioned, and neither are Mamiya and Yuda, leaving Rei with not much to do after rescuing his sister Airi from Jagi, except get killed immediately after fighting Raoh during the climax of the film; and Shin is reduced to mere stage dressing and dies from a previously inflicted wound when he fights Kenshiro. The film comes to an inconclusive ending when Lin talks Raoh out of killing Kenshiro and he rides off, while Yuria disappears during the final battle, her fate left ambiguous. The Live Action Adaptation is toxic to all human life and shall not be mentioned again.
• A chronic problem with anime adapted from CLAMP manga:
  • The movie version of X 1999 is... decayed twice-over. Most of the plot and back-story is thrown out the window (along with a character or two), a character added in, and character development nonexistent. Characters are introduced, and then subsequently killed off for little to no reason. The director did outright say that he was aiming for beautiful fight sequences ... and boy, did he succeed: Amazingly lovely to look at, amazingly hard to understand, especially if you've never seen the series before. Given that it has the same director as Akira above this is perhaps unsurprising.
  • Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle adaptation by Bee Train. The world arcs were stretched out, many of CLAMP's cardinal rules were disregarded completely, and Fai was paired with Chii (which violated CLAMP's "one true soulmate" rule, as Chii is officially meant to be paired with Hideki, not to mention the fact that the manga leans heavily towards Kuro/Fai as well). Reportedly, CLAMP didn't like the Bee Train anime.
    • The Tsubasa OVAs (both Tokyo Revelations and Shunraiki) followed the manga very closely, if not exactly. Many lines were taken word for word from the manga.
  • xxxHolic is more faithful than Tsubasa, but any and all connection to Tsubasa was intentionally eliminated from the anime adaptation. This, needless to say, posed problems later on when the two manga stories became more closely intertwined.
  • Card Captor Sakura notably had very little decay, but even it had a few subplots cut and plotholes added.
  • Magic Knight Rayearth was pretty much completely transformed when it was animated, largely because it would have been nigh-impossible to fit six volumes of manga into 49 episodes of anime otherwise, though YMMV about whether or not that's a bad thing. The first season almost counts as Adaptation Expansion, as most of the changes were added character and story developments that the longer running time allowed. The second season, however, is completely different from the last three volumes of manga, most notably the addition of two new antagonists (Big Bad Lady Debonair and The Dragon Nova), the addition of a couple of subplots in which the girls spend time with the invading countries, and the inclusion of a new character to fill the position of one who was killed off in the anime. The Rayearth OVA, however, is absolutely nothing like the manga or the anime.
• Violinist of Hameln: The series, originally a dramedy, has all of its humour stripped bare. Most of the cast has their characterization retooled to a point where they aren't the same characters anymore- The main character, Hamel, goes from a secretly nice self-centered jackass to a depressed, whining hero, and his best friend, Raiel, who in the manga constantly lusts for and marries Hamel's twin sister, and becomes the father of two seems to be oddly close to him. Not to mention the studio's funds growing short as time progressed, so the series became less and less an anime and more and more a set of pictures with voice acting. The movie is a much better example of the manga's style.
  • Not the mention the complete difference in plot and OMFG that ending!
• Jojos Bizarre Adventure: The anime OVA started in the middle of the original story starting from the D'arby encounter and went from there, cutting a good chuck of story in the process (even though it consisted of the characters fighting Dio's lackeys). Even the final climax against Dio is different. Afterward they went back and animated the starting points of the series, but still made many changes. In the end, they still covered very little of the series.
  • Yeeeesh. And this is a manga where every story has a definite beginning and end. Finding the right pacing shouldn't have been a problem at all. What the hell happened?
• The anime adaptation of Chrono Crusade ended up following the manga reasonably close for about half of it...and then wildly diverged afterwards. Gonzo added more Fan Service and made an already dark story Darker And Edgier. In the process, it changed much of the cast, including slowly transforming Action Girl / Badass Normal Rosette into a weak-willed Mysterious Waif with mystical powers that is brainwashed into attacking Chrono and Well Intentioned Extremist Aion into an lusty Card Carrying Villain with no redeeming qualities or even real motivation outside of "I hate God, because I'm an evil demon!" Then they killed off the main characters. And the villain comes back to life. All in all, the two versions rest on opposite ends of the scale, with the manga being very idealistic and the anime plunging head-first into cynical Humans Are Bastards territory.
• The anime adaptation of Black Cat deviated a lot from the manga starting from episode 1. Train is shown to be a lot less carefree and badass, frequently wangsting and hardly showing his more wisecracking side that was present in the manga. His relationship with Sven is shown to be less close and have much less trust, with Sven being the one saving Train most of the time (unlike in the manga, where Sven felt the need to become stronger so he wouldn't be a burden to Train). Rinslet, instead of being a smart, capable thief that has a huge crush on Train, is downgraded to a useless Tsundere that dislikes Train and yells at pretty much all the men. (In one part, she's even shown yelling at Train that someone like him doesn't deserve to be saved by Sven — something her manga counterpart would never have done.) Creed is made out to be much more of a perverted sexual deviant than in the manga (which is saying a lot). This wouldn't be such a bad change if they didn't invent a Heel Face Turn for him, which makes very little sense considering that his slightly more mellow manga counterpart didn't even do one.
• Venus Versus Virus. The anime diverts completely from the manga, only leaving basic characterization and basic plot intact. The series ends on a Gecko Ending cliffhanger.
• Life by Keiko Suenobu is a manga about a girl who harms herself. It is adapted into a live action show, where many things have been modified. Including the whole reason for a lot of the stuff in the manga, Ayumu's self harm habits.
• Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl is about a boy who turns into a girl after he dies and is brought back to life. The anime changes tons of stuff. Such as taking out scenes, changing scenes, changing one of the three girls' illnesses slightly, changing the ending slightly, making it seem like nobody but the main character, her family and her teacher know about the aliens (and that the main character only knows about them really being aliens) and even changing the person who the main character ends up with, through the OVA even. They completely took out the curry party, changing the conversation to the haunted house instead.
  • Most notably are Yasuna and Tomari's relationship. In the anime they pretty much dislike each other most of the time, whereas in the manga they are on much better footing. They even become so close that it sometimes seems like they are in love with each other; Yasuna's responds very eagerly to Tomari dolling up, for instance.
• "Get Backers", holy crap Get Backers. The anime excluded most of the story arcs, changed Paul's backstory completely, excluded Akabane's backstory totally, and decended into filler until the last arc of the anime. Also, the manga is much more bloody and has way more fanservice.
• Sayuri and Mai are much more explicit in their Romantic Two Girl Friendship in the Toei anime adaptation of Kanon. Unfortunately, this is also the version where Mai's plot gets squashed and condensed, so when it's revealed that the monsters Mai battles at the school are manifestations of her own inner power but neither that power nor the fact that it left Mai ostracized her whole life with only Yuuichi and her now-dead mother knowing and accepting the truth is never explained. Mai's left without a reason to care about Yuuichi at all, making her last-ditch plea to keep Yuuichi from moving away by pretending the field they play in is being attacked by monsters look somewhat deranged. It all seems to imply that she literally drove herself crazy because she couldn't handle losing a childhood crush, and her relationship with Sayuri was one more aspect of self-denial. Considering she's also the closest thing in the series to an Action Girl, there are so, SO many Unfortunate Implications.
  • You must also remember that not only is none of the above canon, but that this series is overall seen as an unfortunate attempt to try and present a classic VN.
• The first anime adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist Overtook The Manga extremely fast, resulting in radically different characterization (a lot of characters got their roles severely downplayed, their backstories left out or completely changed), which is somewhat understandable, considering the fact that their back stories had not yet been created in the manga. While a couple of original characters were added and some extras got ascended, it features less emphasis on alchemy itself, a few filler episodes in the beginning, and exchanged the Gallows Humor for a much darker tone. Granted, adapting a work built around a rock solid Myth Arc that spans twenty-something volumes with only a handful of chapters out was no easy task. Since the anime is more popular than the manga, at least in the West, this has lead to a pretty spectacular case of Broken Base. Series creator Hiromu Arakawa may have asked the anime staff to go their own way with the story so the anime won't spoil the manga.
• Eyeshield 21's anime adaptation is notably of lower quality than the manga.
• The .hack franchise features many different stories encompassing anime, manga and video games. Most .hack series are done very well, but something went wrong when comedy manga .hack//Legend of the Twilight was adapted into an animated series. The anime version of Legend of the Twilight removes several dimensions from everybody's personality, and fills the resulting gap with not-so-subtle incest subtext.
• The Linebarrels Of Iron anime suffers from some of this. Some characters personalities were changed (some more than others), the beginning was changed quite a bit, some characters have different roles than in the manga, more slapstick and comedy is added in, and storylines are changed or removed.
• The Ikkitousen manga heads towards Knight Of Cerebus Territory later on with several characters in the series killed off, but the anime held dear to the cast, keeping them all alive, and adds a few more to the collection. One surprising thing was that in this version. Diao Chan, instead of being the elegant deceptive women, is an Sword Crazy chick with a semi bipolar streak, and her relationship with Ryofu is absolutely platonic.
• The Spiral anime cut out a number of scenes from the manga, many of which explained important plot points. For example, in the anime, there's no explanation for how Ayumu knows that Blade Children are all missing a rib, whereas in the manga, they show his sister-in-law discovering this. They also cut out a great deal of character development regarding Ayumu's relationship to his brother and his sister-in-law. And in the very first episode of the anime, a minor character is the victim of attempted murder, and they never explain what happened to her after that (a Wall Banger since she'd have been an important witness, unless she never woke up), whereas in the manga, the murder attempt succeeded.
• The anime of Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro is a strange case, where it both added a considerable number of filler episodes and cut things out of canon stories. It also completely changed the nature of the murder of Yako's father—in the manga, it was solved in the second chapter and was more-or-less straightforward, while in the anime, it became a series-long mystery—and created its own ending, not adapting the Sicks arc.
• How has nobody mentioned L from Death Note? In the original manga, despite his antics, he's an amoral Manipulative Bastard at heart, one who's almost as bad as Light. As his fangirls went crazy over the cute mannerisms, his characterisation got more and more mangled. The anime adaptation, while very close to the original, added a bunch of extra Foe Yay. The live action adaptations removed his edge almost entirely, playing up the exaggerated movements and sugar consumption. L in the animanga eats cake and fruit almost exclusively; movie L is constantly surrounded by colourful candy. Eventually, in the novelisation of the third movie, L spends half his time moping about his dead best friend Light, despite Word Of God telling us that L never really considered Light a friend, and in fact has no friends.

Adaptation Decay

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