I'm looking for anime that truly feels epic and like a lifelong

Watch the entire UC timeline starting from 0079.

Mushishi
It has the same spooky supernatural atmosphere as SSY, but it's more of a collection of short stories as the MC travels to different villages to solve mushi problems. Time is non-linear so there are a lot of timeskips and backtracks over months, years, and lifetimes as various events happen to the characters.

LOGH
Massive scale space wars that involve billions of people. There's a lot of talk about how to move troops, how public opinion can change, and how politics evolve over multiple stages. At the battle scale, the commanders mention quite often that it takes hours or days to re-position troops, even though only a few seconds pass on the video player. The series follows Reinhard through the decades as he rises to power and struggles to maintain that power. There's also a few episodes that develop a thousand year history of religion, art, and politics that lead up to the current date.

>>124299
Moribito has the same feel, especially when they go down to the history archives and travel to lost villages to try to figure out how to save the world.

I also started Fantastic Children, which has some deep historical elements.

And of course there are the various lost technology movies, like Laputa.

On a different note, there is the six volume series Rin: Daughters of Mnemosyne. Same main characters in each episode, but they are immortal, and different episodes are generations apart. R-rated though.

>>124299
There are also the relativistic effects in a couple space mecha anime. (One day they ought to do an anime adaption of "The Forever War".)

>>124325
>Rin
That's been on my list for a while. I might have to watch it now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZExHkk6XdAI

>>124299

Will probably get flak and you probably already watched these two, but Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Gurren Lagann are good. One's a long journey, the other's a journey shown across the years.

Baccano! takes place across three different timelines and shows how they all fit into each other. It's a fantastic watch. I don't think it fits what you want though.

Monster is another good one. I'd also say Eureka Seven is decent with the way Eureka changes every cour.

I feel like doing what >>124308 would also be good. All of the main Gundam series are 50 episodes long, so you could probably get a lot out of them. I personally haven't watched any main series Gundam fully (watched the trilogy movies, half of Reconguista) besides Iron-Blooded Orphans, which is getting a second season, so I can't really vouch for their quality. But if you like mecha, there's plenty of long journeys for you to watch there.

I kind of want to suggest Zipang, but I don't know if it falls in line with what you want exactly. It's about a crew from the JSDF that gets teleported back in time (with the ship) during the middle of World War II before Pearl Harbor. They have inner conflicts about whether they should rewrite history or not and such. It's quite interesting. Sadly, it doesn't fully adapt the manga, but I feel like if it did, it could've been something special.

>>124299
Dragonball.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q9iKlfUrjY

Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It is an epic in the old sense of the word.

Fist of the North Star
Code Geass