I have compiled a list of canon episodes that are actually significant as well as listed the reasons someone may believe them to be essential (so you can make your own judgments as you go as to whether you really think you should have to watch them or not). This is for the sake of those who might want to get into or try to convince a friend to get into Detective Conan for the story but find the insanely high episode count and 2-decade long history daunting. As hinted there, this is not a list of “must watch” episodes, but rather a list of episodes you may not want to miss depending on what aspects of the series you are trying to follow. The episodes labeled *Main Plot* are closer to that, but still not quite the same thing, because at least the occasional dose of character development here and there is “must watch” in its own way. There are tons of great “normal” cases that are self-contained throughout the series that naturally are left out, which are really the original point of the series, but if you just want to get around all of that and watch the series for just the overall story and characters, this might prove useful for that. Of course, there are still a ton of episodes, but cutting a good two-thirds of the series out should ease the pain of entry a bit.

Note this uses the original Japanese episode numbers. The Funimation English dub version (aka “Case Closed” although the more recent official subs have adopted that name as well) stopped before it ever got to anything really huge in the story anyway, so watching that would kinda defeat the purpose. Update: I went ahead and added the alternative episode numbers as well where applicable in brackets (as [INTL #]). It turns out nowadays many international licensors have adopted the same method of numbering the series that Funimation used to. That might be useful to visitors from affected regions. Plus if someone really just wants to watch the English dub that bad, this will help them, too. I still would recommend against using this list with the English dubbed version, especially considering that version was canceled ages ago. Further update: And now more recently Funimation has let the license for those early dub episodes lapse, so you can’t really watch them anywhere anyway.

The corresponding manga chapters are listed in parentheses next to the episode numbers if you are interested. The first set is the overall chapter numbers and the second is the chapters as contained within each volume, separated by a bar (|). If a manga chapter reference is followed by an asterisk (*), then there has been some story-critical change between the manga and the anime adaptation.

The movies are entirely optional, seeing as they are generally not canon and have nothing to do with any sort of plot from the series proper (update: this is becoming less true recently), but still recommended based solely on outstanding quality (most of the time). Note their placement in the list is based on minimizing spoilers for the main series. Thus they are based primarily on their release dates relative to where the original manga was at the time. This consideration is because the movies tend to have spoiler references to things from the anime that came before the release of each particular film, and sometimes after, since the movies are often clearly being targetted at fans of the original manga more than anime-only fans. So watching a movie too early can be dangerous if you don’t like spoilers.

Since the series started, and especially in the last few years, Aoyama has gotten infinitely better at weaving the story into the individual, unrelated manga cases. These days just about every canon case contains at least a bit of plot advancement, so plot advancement has become a lot more gradual and stretched out rather than happening in chunks scattered here and there. As a result, the more recent episodes pretty much all have some level of importance, except for anime original filler episodes, of course. Although, and I’ve stated as much before in the comments, as this list is about easing the barrier of entry, it is more the early episodes that really matter for trimming the fat. As you get closer and closer to completely caught up, it doesn’t really matter all that much anymore anyway. In short, this list starts to lose meaning the further you get in the series and the closer to caught up to the present you are.

Since Detective Conan has had some direct crossovers with the Magic Kaito manga over the years, yet those parts of the Detective Conan anime never had the Magic Kaito parts that gave them context animated as well, those crossovers have never really had their full and proper effect for anime-only fans. However, now that Magic Kaito has finally received an adequate anime adaptation, I have taken the liberty of working the timings of these all-important crossovers into where they fit in with their Detective Conan episode counterparts, making the crossovers whole once more. The Internet can thank me later. The only issue is that the Magic Kaito episodes are entirely out of order. But, the order really does not matter for that series as it does with Conan, as the series is entirely episodic beyond pretty much the first episode. So, you can ignore that and watch that series in any order you wish.