Dragon Quest IV: The Chapters of the Chosen

Dragon Quest IV is one of my favorite games in the series. I'm only familiar with the Playstation and Nintendo DS version though. Akira Toriyama's artwork is even more prominent here. I'm writing this almost a year after I played the Nintendo DS game, so memory isn't all too fresh and, to be honest, there's not much to say about it after having played Dragon Quest III.

As far as gameplay goes, there isn't much to add since the games added very little with every addition to the franchise. The Nintendo DS version looks pretty neat, and people familiar later entries will find certain game elements that they should be familiar with. For example the hidden coins that let you receive a reward for delivering a certain amount to a NPC.

Ghost in the Shell

I've been complaining about the lack of science-fiction before but that was more directed at the space travel genre in anime. Ghost in the Shell would the anime franchise most people would think of when thinking about anime or manga sci-fi. Not only did the Ghost in the Shell movie by Oshii Mamoru, released in 1995, introduce many people in the west to anime, or rather showed them that it wasn't just about toys and whatnot, but it also influenced many writers and movie makers.
Ghost in the Shell also has always been one of my favorite anime franchises and I also like the original manga by Masamune Shirow a lot. Though I have some things to say about what he did to his manga series later...

Sakamoto Shinichi's Innocent

Innocent is a masterfully crafted manga by Sakamoto Shinichi first started publishing in Young Jump issue 2013 Nr. 9. Sakamoto Shinichi already made a name for himself with his earlier work Kokou no Hito.
In his new manga Innocent, he depicts a heavily fictionalized version of Charles-Henri Sanson's life as chief executioner of France, his inner struggle with his duty due to his innocent and pure heart and his family's dynasty of executioners in the 18th century, leading up to the French Revolution.

The decision to depict the history of the Sanson dynasty is interesting on it's own, because back in the day, France's main attraction might as well have been executions. Granted, that wasn't just exclusive to France but that country is most famously known for the massacres and terror during the French Revolution in which Charles-Henri Sanson's guillotines came to use like clockwork, with the most famous execution being former Louis XVI on the Place de la Concorde, making them literally part of France's pop culture.

Universal Century Gundam & Gundam Unicorn

When it comes to science-fiction, you can probably count on two hands how many anime actually elevate into the science-fiction genre. There's probably more if you add manga, but for the most part, the industry handles science-fiction as the easy cash cow that is it but rarely introduces us to great hard science fiction or speculative/theoretical science-fiction. Space operas, the setting just being in space, mecha or VR, that can all be okay, they rarely even come close to the potential they could have.
But Universal Century Gundam proposes its own version of humanity's evolution after colonizing space.