[quote=SouloftheAbyss]
Are there any manga/anime you have read/seen that you think are underrated?
[/quote]

Kino's Journey. It is a fantastic anime and more people need to know about it.

It's kind of like a collection of cautionary tales, as a young girl named Kino and her talking motorcycle, Hermes, travel to various "countries" together with no real end goal - they just travel to travel. Now, I put "countries" in quotes because, while they call them countries, each one is really only about the size of a small village, and yet, they're all so diverse that they all feel like completely different worlds. I feel like I can't even easily describe what the overall setting of this anime is like, because some of the countries Kino visits are so technologically advanced that robots have replaced all the work that humans normally do, while others are so primitive that they feel much more like a medieval time period. 

The one thing that links all the countries together, though, is that there's always something [i]seriously wrong[/i] with them. Sometimes they give you an uneasy vibe right off the bat, and sometimes they don't, but either way the horror of the town presents itself eventually. As Kino explores and learns more about the place, it's usually made very clear how that society became the way it is now, and the weirdest part is, that it usually doesn't feel that far from reality. You can, often times, imagine something similar happening in the real world, given the right circumstances. Stranger yet, Kino almost never attempts to [i]solve[/i] the problems she sees, or change the way the countries are established, like you'd expect her to with a setup like this. She learns about the town and you, as the viewer, learn and explore with her, and then... she leaves. And you're just left with the memories of what you saw, giving you something to think about. And, despite using the word "horror" earlier (as some of the problems with these countries can be pretty terrifying), it really doesn't feel like a horror anime. More accurately, it just shows you some scary things in a brutally honest way that leaves you thinking "Oh... that's a thing... ok..." and kind of leaves you feeling sort of empty and depressed in an extremely satisfying way that I just can't explain. The best way I can describe this anime is a "journey into human nature".

The main characters themselves are also quite interesting. Kino, while I described her as a "young girl", probably isn't the sort of girl you imagined when I said that. She doesn't come off as very feminine most of the time (in fact, when I first watched it, it took me a few episodes to even realize she was a girl), but I don't want to call her very tomboy-ish either, because it doesn't feel like they place any emphasis on her more masculine (or, I suppose more accurately, androgynous) nature being present in a female body. It kind of just feels like they took the personality you would expect from a stoic, quiet, almost lone-wolf-type adult male character and just put that in a 13-year-old girl's body, all without ever acknowledging the difference. Oh, and she's a pretty badass gunslinger, too. 

Also Hermes, her motorcycle, is just adorable. He's kind of the only source of comic relief in the show but wow does he do his job perfectly. A lot of that probably stems from the fact that he just doesn't at all have the personality that you would expect a talking motorbike to have. Somehow you'd expect a motorcycle to be kind of rough-and-tough, right? Well Hermes is adorably childish. :lol He really does sound like a little kid. Also what's bizarre about his design is that, normally, you'd expect a sentient vehicle to be at least somewhat anthropomorphized, yes? Like, he would have a face or at least something kind of resembling one, you know? Well he doesn't. He is a perfectly normal-looking bike. Additionally, he can't steer himself or control his movements in any way, as he still needs a rider to do that, and he still runs on gasoline just like any other engine of his kind. He's just a motorcycle... that talks. And nothing else. In fact, when I first started watching it, I had assumed that Hermes' voice was actually just a figment of Kino's imagination, but then she met other people who responded to Hermes and clearly acknowledged his sentience and I was like "Oh... that's a thing." But yeah his unexpected level of normalcy kind of makes him even cuter if you ask me. :lol

Also the whole series is only 13 episodes, so it doesn't take long to get through.

Edit: Wow I typed a lot. Oops.