10 Most Powerful Anime Characters Who Travel Through Time

Time travel is a slippery thing. It’s dangerous to meddle with, yet at the same time, it has great potential for good, preventing tragedies before they happen and setting right what once went wrong.

To wield such power correctly requires a hero with cleverness, a keen eye, and the guts to risk erasing their own futures to do the right thing. These are some of the most powerful anime characters whose characters revolve around themes of time travel, although their journeys are all very different.

10 Takemichi Hanagaki (Tokyo Revengers)

A washed-up 26-year-old with no hope for the future, Takemichi thinks it’s just par for the course when his former girlfriend Hina dies at the hands of the Tokyo Manji Gang. However, after an accident, he wakes up in the body of his 14-year-old self and realizes he’s been given a chance to change the future. He infiltrates the gang to make sure that they never kill Hina.

Takemichi can switch between his young and adult selves in Tokyo Revengers by shaking hands with Hina’s brother, Naoto, who assists Takemichi as an adult by figuring out which exact events he needs to change to fix the future. He can only travel exactly 12 years back, though, meaning he only gets one chance to act on each significant date.

9 Narrator (Tatami Galaxy)

The unnamed narrator of Tatami Galaxy, one of the best time travel anime, is a young man entering his final year at Kyoto University and realizing that he has wasted his college days. Feeling frustrated and unfulfilled, he thinks back on what he could have done differently in past years and finds himself thrown into a time loop that lets him explore all the possibilities.

He tries joining different clubs, meeting new people, and approaching romance in various ways, all in a fruitless effort to achieve the “rose-colored campus life” he dreams of. It takes several loops for him to realize that such a thing does not exist and that his quest for perfection has led him to ignore how satisfying it can be to simply enjoy life for what it is.

8 Yukiteru Amano & Yuno Gasai (Future Diary)

The cast of Future Diary are players in a deadly 12-way game to determine who will take the place of their world’s dying God. Their weapons are Diaries, cell phones that predict the future in various ways. Yukiteru’s Diary predicts everything but his own actions, and Yuno’s predicts nothing but Yukiteru’s actions, so they team up and become one unstoppable unit.

Predicting the future is only the beginning. As the game goes on, Yukiteru and Yuno’s struggles to keep each other alive and win the game turn fiercer, and the boundaries of time and space itself are broken. Yuno is revealed to have traveled from another timeline where Yukiteru died in order to have him in this one, and when Yukiteru learns that there are multiple timelines, he resolves to protect Yuno in all of them.

7 Rintaro Okabe (Steins;Gate)

Rintaro’s approach to time travel is unique and one of the craziest things that ever happened on Steins;Gate, in that instead of visiting the past himself, he simply texts and emails it. A mad scientist who studies time travel, he experiences a shift in reality that tips him off that his research might have merits. Events he attended never happened, messages he sent one day arrived five days earlier, and people he saw murdered are alive again.

Trying to get a handle on this phenomenon, Rintaro experiments further. He builds machines that can send messages into the past and compiles several theories about what could be giving them that power.

6 Makoto Konno (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time)

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the film that put director Mamoru Hosoda on the map, follows Makoto, who survives a train accident by spontaneously traveling back in time. Realizing she can do it again, she uses it for everything from avoiding embarrassing situations at school to reliving a fun experience as many times as she wants, with no regard for how it affects others.

However, when she meets another time traveler, she learns that her ability is not only not unique to her, but finite as well. Now the consequences of Makoto’s choices start to catch up with her, and she must use her remaining “time-leaps” wisely to fix what she has inadvertently broken.

5 Naho Takamiya (Orange)

Naho is another time traveler who doesn’t move through time herself, but rather sends other things into the past. On her first day of school, 16-year-old Naho wakes up to find a letter from her future self. It tells her that she will fall in love with transfer student Kakeru, but that she has to watch him carefully or else she’ll lose him forever.

As Naho gets to know Kakeru, she realizes that his smile may hide deep depression. She must follow the directions from her future self in order to save Kakeru from his inner demons.

4 Shunsuke Otosaka (Charlotte)

The young heroes of Charlotte all possess special abilities that make them the target of government scientists. One of the most powerful, and similar to characters seen in some of the best anime like Invincible, is Shunsuke, who possesses the power of Time Leap. It allows Shunsuke to travel back in time, but at a price: every time he uses it, he loses some of his vision, until he goes completely blind and loses the ability permanently.

Shunsuke repeatedly goes back in time to build a refuge for super-powered teens. Once his vision is gone, it falls to his younger brother Yuu, the show’s main protagonist, to take Time Leap and finish what Shunsuke started.

3 Taki Tachibana & Mitsuha Miyamizu (Your Name)

Mitsuha, unsatisfied with her rural village, wishes to be reborn as a city boy in her next life. She soon gets her wish in this lifetime: she begins to frequently swap bodies with Taki, who lives a hectic life in distant Tokyo. In figuring out how to live each other’s lives, they become friends and start to fall in love.

When the body-switching suddenly stops, Taki decides to find Mitsuha himself. But on reaching Mitsuha’s home, he finds only a crater: Mitsuha and her whole village were killed in a disaster three years ago, and they have not only been swapping bodies but time periods too. Now, he and Mitsuha must use their power to save the village and ensure that they can find each other in the future.

2 Subaru Natsuki (Re:Zero – Starting Life In Another World)

Reclusive gamer Subaru isn’t sure how he went from making a routine snack run to wandering a fantasy marketplace, but he had better figure out the rules of this new world fast. No sooner does he find an ally than they are both murdered, and he respawns at the same point where he started.

Using the ability he comes to call “Return by Death,” Subaru explores the fantasy realm and gathers friends and allies. No matter how hard he trains, he never becomes very strong in melee combat or magic, so he relies on the knowledge he gains from his many respawns to finesse his way through obstacles.

1 Satoru Fujinuma (ERASED)

Satoru calls his ability “Revival.” Every so often, he’ll be sent back in time a few minutes, and relive it over and over until he solves whatever problem Revival is warning him about. He considers it a hindrance, until the night his mother is murdered, he is framed for it, and Revival sends him back the furthest in time yet: to the body of his 11-year-old self.

Satoru quickly realizes the problem he’s meant to solve. When he was this age, three of his classmates were murdered by a serial killer, and the same person must be responsible for his mother’s death later on. To save everyone’s lives, Satoru must look at his childhood nightmare from an adult’s perspective and stop the killer.