Deathnote is only good for the fact that it tends to invite parody, and thus provides much entertainment if you look up "deathnote" on DeviantArt or another arts website.

Enjoyed Deathnote well enough, but felt it became repetitive and predictable (though still clever) after the first season/arc.

And I mistakenly left out a rather significant entry for the series category:

Haibane Renmei








Thanks for the references.

A weird one for me (but I did enjoy it!) is Higurashi - When They Cry, but it's more of a mystery spread over Question and Answer arcs.

If I don't have to suggest actiony stuff I also throw in Welcome to the NHK! which is fairly bizarre and about people with problems.

Scr-y-ed. 'Nuff said.
This is a really good series. I found it at a library and got all of the disc and watched it in about two weeks. It's pretty short though, but very action-y. I actually don't watch much anime these days and just read the manga. Talk to me if you want some good manga. There's an anime based on a manga I'm reading now called Fairy Tail. Good stuff.

Strong second for Baccano!, Eureka Seven, Ghost in the Shell (Don't forget the movies) and Welcome to the NHK.

Adding Canaan, Diebuster, Full Metal Panic (And sequel), Gunbuster and Yozakura Quartet.

I used to think that anime was pretty good, but then I read the novels. They're like 20 times better. ...apart from the art.

I've seen the manga, but not the novels and I'd really like to one day see the games they originally were. But alas, I live in the middle of nowhereland...

In the mean time, I still enjoy it because it's creepy!

The novels are the games, they're not really games in any way.

If you ask Serella she can tell you where to get Umineko no Naku Koro Ni, which is even better (though the anime is even worse, all the voice acting is awful, even Koizumi from Haruhi he can't pull off Battler...)

Hmm.. I heard there were novels (i.e. books!) on top of the games (not really games, but on PC/PS*/DS)

And I do enjoy Umineko no Naku Koro Ni!

This is only a minor derail..

Hay guyz. I don't watch a lot of anime but I'd like to try watching a fighting and/or intrigue-based anime that has a good plot, moves quickly without dragging, isn't about robots, and isn't >9000 episodes long (I ain't got that kind of time or dedication). English dub is preferable, but I can deal with subtitles if it's for something good. Any suggestions?

Ghost in the Shell, Stand Alone Complex.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_alone_complex

Very very very well done. It does require some concentration however to follow the conversation as there are a lot of references to philosophers. Deals with the not-too-distant future and the ramifications of our increasingly wired society on the self. And explosions.

Only anime I recommend. For the record I didn't understand/hated Akira.

Edit: Also Steamboy the movie was fun.

GITS had a whole bunch of robots. They weren't giant flying human-shaped robots, mind you.

Cowboy Bebop. It even has a tolerable English dub. Sadly it's only 26 episodes, so I've finished it and moved on to Samurai Champloo now.

The good thing about Samurai Champloo is that ,unlike Bleach, and Naruto, and Bleach-esque, Naruto-esque animes, it doesn't go on forever.

P.S.
Start reading Manga! I suggest reading Claymore!

Tried the first episode of GITS and did not care for it, the voice acting and writing (or at least the translation/dub I was watching) was really terrible and the characters kept blatantly addressing the viewer about plot points that I wasn't sure why I was supposed to care about.

I always got the impression that Cowboy Bebop was like an anime Star Trek, is that wrong?

Yeah, pretty wrong. There's almost no pseudo-science, no aliens, no exploration of the cosmos. Hell, most of the series is spent on Mars.

It's more like an anime Starsky and Hutch, with a healthy dose of Tarantino thrown in.

I imagine that's partly a dub issue, although if you're looking for good dubs they're honestly extremely rare...and partly that GITS has this weird quality of asking you to kind of absorb the setting and its premises without actually explaining any of it to you. I was pretty confused the first few episodes but once I figured it all out you can see just how much thought was put into it, it really is pretty deep.

EDIT: OH. And while we're talking about "intrigue"...Planetes is an excellent sci-fi anime, although it's very much science fiction and not science fantasy in that it's set in the year 2070 with minor moon colonisation and very little other than extrapolation of global trends. It starts out being about a bunch of rubbish collectors (in space: more important job than it sounds) and the relationships between some of the characters in the context of the future society, but eventually a few other interesting agendas come into it. I don't know how the dub was though.

Thirding Eureka 7 (who I believe I suggested to Vhaas in the first place), adding another voice for Geass, another for GITS, and for Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. All fun stuff.

In addition, The Big O is always a great watch.

I support Eureka 7!