The strongest anime characters of all time, ranked by feats

Every "strongest anime character" list eventually turns into a screaming match. Someone drops a VS Battles Wiki tier, someone else replies with "but he scales to universal," and forty comments later nobody has cited a single thing that actually happened in a manga. That's not a ranking. That's astrology for shonen fans.

So we're doing this differently. This list is anchored to canon feats, abilities and moments that are actually written into the source material, with the correct technique names and the correct origin (manga, anime, or light novel). Where the author left a character's ceiling deliberately vague, we say so instead of inventing a number. Where a fan-favorite tier claim is myth, we flag it.

To be clear up front: this is feats-anchored opinion, not gospel. Ranking characters from completely different series with different power rules is inherently fuzzy. But "fuzzy and honest about it" beats "confident and made up." Let's go.

Quick answer (the TL;DR)

If you just want the ranking:

Now the reasoning, because the reasoning is the whole point.

1. Saitama, One-Punch Man

Here's the thing people get wrong about Saitama: he's not on top because of some imagined "infinite power level." He's on top because of what the story repeatedly shows. The premise is canon, straight from ONE's web manga (redrawn by Yusuke Murata): an ordinary man trains until he can end any fight in a single punch, and the punchline is that it made him hopelessly bored. Nobody has given him a real fight.

His signature techniques are real, named moves, not fan inventions. The "Killer Move: Serious Series" (Hissatsu Maji Series) is canon, and the Serious Punch (Maji Naguri) is the one he's deployed against his biggest threats, Boros, Centichoro, Evil Natural Water, and Garou. There are variants too, like the Serious Sneeze and Serious Side Hops, which tells you everything about the tone of this series. The strongest being in anime sneezes you out of existence as a joke.

Now the honesty part, because this is exactly where most lists go off the rails. Saitama does not have stated "infinite" or "omnipotent" power. That's power-scaling myth. The author has actually contradicted himself on whether Saitama is already at his peak or still growing, ONE originally pitched him as a subversion who started maxed out, but later chapters show him improving mid-fight. So the canon-safe read is simple: no opponent has matched him, and his ceiling is deliberately left unmeasured. That ambiguity is the point of the character. It's also, paradoxically, why he tops a feats list: you cannot cite a feat that beat him, because none exists.

If you've never watched it, One-Punch Man is a 12-episode first season from Madhouse, and it's one of the easiest action shows to recommend to anyone. The fight animation rivals the shows it's parodying.

2. Rimuru Tempest, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime

Rimuru starts the series as, literally, a slime in a cave. By the top of the light novel's canon, he's an Ultimate Slime who has reached True Dragon status, and his toolkit is the kind of thing power-scalers usually make up, except here it's genuinely in the source.

A quick correction before we go further: a lot of online lists lead with "Voracity" as Rimuru's apex skill. It isn't. Voracity is an early unique skill. His real top-tier power is the ultimate skill Raphael, Lord of Wisdom (which evolved from Great Sage), later refined into the manas Ciel, plus the ultimate skill Azathoth, God of the Void. Azathoth is itself a fusion, Ciel combines Beelzebuth and Raphael, folding in the ultimate skills tied to the True Dragons Veldora and Velgrynd. If that reads like a tech tree, that's exactly what TenSura's progression is, and it's all on the page in Fuse's novels (illustrated by Mitz Vah).

Why second and not first? Because Rimuru's ceiling, unlike Saitama's, is defined, overwhelming, but defined. He has skills, resources, and limits you can actually point at, and the strongest version of him lives in the light novel, which is well ahead of the anime (Eight Bit's first season is 24 episodes, and the show is still adapting earlier arcs). On a feats list, "demonstrably enormous but bounded" loses to "no demonstrated bound." If you want a fantasy power-fantasy done with actual structure, this is the fantasy pick of the bunch.

3. Goku, Dragon Ball Super

You cannot do this list without Goku, and you also cannot do it lazily, because Dragon Ball is the most over-scaled franchise in the hobby. Let's stick to what's canon.

Goku's strongest canon state across the current source material is generally Perfected (Mastered) Ultra Instinct. The unstable "Sign" form first appeared in the Tournament of Power, and he stabilized the perfected version later, in Toyotarou's Dragon Ball Super manga, this came together in the Galactic Patrol Prisoner arc. Separately, Super Saiyan 4 was made canon-official through Dragon Ball Daima (2024–2025). Here's the nuance most posts skip: the exact ranking of Mastered Ultra Instinct versus the Daima-era forms is not settled in canon. So I'm calling MUI "one of his strongest" rather than crowning a single definitive peak, because the source doesn't crown one either.

Dragon Ball Super the anime (Toei Animation) ran 131 episodes from July 5, 2015 to March 25, 2018 on Fuji TV. Important distinction for feat-hunters: the anime ended in 2018, but the manga continues (by Toyotarou, supervised by Akira Toriyama until his death in March 2024), and that's where the latest canon feats actually land. Daima is a separate, later anime.

Why third? Honestly, scaling Goku is hard precisely because the franchise keeps redefining its own ceiling, and a lot of his "wins" come down to whoever the current arc needs him to beat. Strong, iconic, canon, but harder to pin to a clean, stable feat than the two above him.

A note on the franchise that started the arms race

It's worth pausing here, because basically every "who's stronger" argument in anime fandom descends from Dragon Ball Z. Power levels, scouters, the endless transformation ladder, DBZ codified the idea that strength is a number you can read off a device, and then spent the rest of the series proving that number meaningless (Goku's famous "it's over 9000" became a punchline precisely because power levels stopped mattering an arc later).

That's the original sin of power-scaling. The franchise itself abandoned hard numbers because they don't survive contact with storytelling. Modern Dragon Ball talks about states and mastery, not digits, and that's a healthier way to think about every entry on this list. If a series gives you a literal number, it's usually about to make that number irrelevant.

4. Gojo Satoru, Jujutsu Kaisen

Gojo is the cleanest character to rank on this entire list, for one reason: the manga is finished. Gege Akutami's Jujutsu Kaisen ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from March 5, 2018 to September 30, 2024, ending at 271 chapters. That means Gojo's full canon feat set is fixed. No future chapter is going to retcon him up or down. What you see is what he is.

And what he is, is precisely named. He inherited the Limitless cursed technique and possesses the Six Eyes. His neutral state is Infinity, a barrier of converging space that makes you fundamentally unable to reach him. His offensive techniques are Cursed Technique Lapse: Blue (attraction/convergence), Cursed Technique Reversal: Red (repulsion/divergence), and the combined Hollow Technique: Purple. His Domain Expansion is Unlimited Void, which floods a target with effectively infinite information and freezes them in place, the manga's famous depiction is that roughly 0.2 seconds of exposure leaves victims needing about two months of rehabilitation.

Mild spoiler ahead about Gojo's arc.

The reason he isn't higher despite arguably the most elegant kit in modern shonen: a finished manga means we also know his limits, conclusively. A defined, beaten ceiling ranks below the open-ended monsters above him. That's not a knock on the writing, Jujutsu Kaisen committing to real stakes is exactly why it's great supernatural action. It just means we're not allowed to pretend he's unkillable.

Jujutsu Kaisen the anime is MAPPA's, with a 24-episode first season (Oct 3, 2020 to Mar 27, 2021) and more on the way. If you want a series where the power system has actual rules and consequences, start here.

5. Mob (Shigeo Kageyama), Mob Psycho 100

Same author as our number one, Mob Psycho 100 is also by ONE, also originally a web manga, and Mob is the quiet inversion of Saitama. Where Saitama is bored by limitless strength, Mob is terrified of his.

Mob's power is gated behind emotional control, and that gate is the entire character. His canon states are named: 100% is what happens when one specific emotion hits its peak and overflows, and the "???%" form is the real apex, an unconscious, fully unrestrained release that only triggers under extreme stress or when his body is destroyed. That "???%" is canon, not a fan tier, and its feats are no joke: mass telekinesis on a city scale and instant mass exorcism. The horror of the character is that the strongest version of him is the version that isn't choosing anything.

He places fifth not because the feats are small, they're enormous, but because his power is conditional and self-suppressed by design. Mob spends the series actively avoiding the thing that would rank him higher. That's the point, and it's why the Bones adaptation (12 episodes for season one, July 11 to September 27, 2016) is one of the most thematically rich action shows out there. The strength is real; the kid just doesn't want it.

6. Anos Voldigoad, The Misfit of Demon King Academy

Anos is the entry that most tests the "feats not hype" rule, so let's be careful. Canonically, he's the reincarnated Demon King of Tyranny, from Shu's 2018 light novel. The single best on-page feat in his favor is a specific plot reveal: early in the story, the absurd things he pulls off were accomplished with under one-tenth of his true power, because he hadn't fully readapted to his reincarnated body (this is the Melheis fight reveal). A character casually flexing at less than ten percent and still steamrolling everyone is a legitimately strong, stated feat.

What we're not going to do is parrot the "beyond gods, basically omnipotent" descriptions that follow him around online. Those lean hard into hype and scaling, and the source doesn't lock them in the way the "less than 1/10" line is locked in. So Anos lands sixth on the strength of one excellent, concrete feat, with the asterisk that the wilder claims are interpretation. The anime adaptation (SILVER LINK) is a fun, deeply confident power fantasy, just take the fandom's tier talk with salt.

The methodology, because it matters more than the list

If you take one thing from this article, take the method, not the order. Here's the rule we followed for every single entry:

1. Name the actual in-story ability or moment. "Serious Punch," "Unlimited Void," "Raphael/Azathoth," "???%," "under one-tenth of his power." Real names from the real source.
2. Attribute it to the correct source. Manga vs anime vs light novel is not pedantry, Rimuru's and Goku's strongest feats live in their novels/manga, ahead of their anime. Citing the anime's ceiling would undersell them.
3. Refuse numbers and absolute tiers the source never states. No "universal," no "multiversal," no "infinite," unless the author actually wrote it. Usually they didn't.

VS Battles Wiki, Fandom power tiers, and the endless "ranked" listicles are interpretation. They're fun, and they're great for finding which techniques exist, but they are not canon and shouldn't be quoted as if a number is a fact. Production facts (episode counts, air dates, studios) come from MAL, AniList, and official studio pages. Power claims come from the manga and light novels or they don't get made.

It's a less flashy way to argue about strength. It's also the only way the argument means anything.

So who's actually the strongest?

By feats, Saitama, but mostly because his author refuses to give him a measurable ceiling, which is a different thing from "infinite." Rimuru and Gojo are the most legible monsters here, with toolkits you can actually itemize. Goku is iconic but hard to pin because his own franchise keeps moving the goalposts. Mob and Anos are devastating with conditions attached.

If this list makes you want to go re-watch a few of these and check the feats yourself, good, that's the right instinct. Start a watchlist, see how the power systems hold up on a rewatch, and dig into more shounen and action on MyAnimePulse. Track what you're watching, rate it on your own scale, and argue about the rankings with receipts instead of vibes.