Baccano! is the rare story that refuses to start at the beginning. Set across multiple eras (1711, 1930, 1931), it drops you into a New York teeming with alchemists who stumbled onto immortality, bootleggers fighting for turf, train robbers with impossible timing, and a pair of cheerful thieves who keep showing up at the worst moments. The through-line fans love: intricate ensemble plotting where every character is a lead in their own story, and the puzzle only resolves when all the timelines finally snap together. It rewards the viewer who pays attention and repays rewatches.
If You Love the Non-Linear Ensemble
Anime and manga that juggle large casts across intersecting timelines
Prohibition, Crime, and Pulp: The Films
Live-action crime films that share Baccano!'s gangster-era energy and dark wit
Games with Ensemble Chaos and Style
Games that reward reading every character and thinking through layered plots
The Train That Made Anime History
The Flying Pussyfoot sequence is Baccano!'s centrepiece: a transcontinental train with a dozen factions all pursuing different agendas, and the carnage that results when every plan collides at once. It is one of the most kinetically plotted arcs in anime, and it works because every passenger has a reason to be there. The chaos is earned.
91 Days Is the Serious Cousin
Where Baccano! leans into absurdist glee and a cast that will not stop growing, 91 Days (2016) takes a revenge thriller set in Prohibition-era Illinois and plays it completely straight. Same aesthetic, radically different emotional register. Fans who want the period and the gangster plotting with tragedy at the core should go here after Baccano!.
Immortality Is Never a Gift
Baccano! treats the elixir of immortality as a curse wrapped in a contract, and its immortals are deeply conscious of what they cannot have: a normal end. This puts it in conversation with works like Anno Dracula and The Stress of Her Regard, which also refuse to make eternal life feel like a prize. The horror is subtle here but it is real.
Baccano! Across Time
- 2003Ryohgo Narita publishes the first Baccano! light novel, set in 1711 on a ship crossing the Atlantic.
- 2007Brains Base adapts the series as a 13-episode anime (with 3 OVA episodes following in early 2008). Baccano!
- 2004Narita begins Durarara!! as a companion series set in modern Ikebukuro, sharing the same aesthetic DNA.
- 2010Durarara!! anime adapts the early volumes, bringing Narita's ensemble style to wider international notice. Durarara!!
- 201691 Days premieres, directly citing 1920s Prohibition America as its setting and taking the darkest possible angle on gangster stories. 91 Days
Prohibition chaos, immortal mobsters
Prohibition & Bootleggers
Explore the Prohibition & Bootleggers guide →There is no main character in Baccano! Every person on that train has the story.Ryohgo Narita, author interview