5 Best Dystopian Anime, Ranked

Highlights

• Some anime worlds are better left unexplored due to the harsh realities and bleak survival conditions depicted.
• Unique protagonists like Akira from
  Zom 100
  find excitement in dystopian worlds, despite the zombie apocalypse.
• Series like
  Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
  and
  Attack On Titan
  present troubling future realities filled with addiction and giant monster threats.

There are many fans who wish they could visit an anime world for a time. There is obviously something tempting about seeing the weird and wonderful universes of some iconic series, sampling all the adventures they would have to offer. But some worlds are better left alone.

Some anime worlds would be absolute hell to visit, and if people could, they would beg to come back to the real world as soon as possible. In these dystopian worlds, the characters are more concerned with survival than adventure, dealing with bleaker and more deadly problems than other series’. Here are five of the best dystopian anime series.

5 Zom 100

Bucket List Of The Dead

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead takes place in a world that begins to suffer from a deadly zombie apocalypse. It has all the entertaining markings of dystopian, survival, and apocalyptic fiction: a journey across barren cities and towns, a group of survivors for the audiences to connect to, and an athletic main character who gets themselves out of life or death situations with their will and physicality.

What makes Zom 100 such a unique dystopian tale is its protagonist’s attitude towards it. Akira is excited by the dystopian world he lives in. Not because he is some sort of sadist who enjoys seeing others being bitten and turned into wandering monsters, but because he saw his life as so depressing and meaningless, before the world ended he felt as if he was already in a dystopian world. What the zombie threat meant for him was that, at the very least, he gets to live in a dystopian world that is actually interesting.

Throughout the series, we see Akira balance his need to fill out his bucket list and do all the things he could never do as an overworked salaryman, with the trials and tribulations that come with living in a world infested by the living dead.

4 Danganronpa

Trigger Happy Havoc

Dystopian fiction is not typically the genre most would think of when discussing Danganronpa, be it the video game, or the anime series and specials that were spun off of it. Yet the further along viewers get into the story, the more they’ll realize it is not just the student killings within the walls of Hope’s Peak Academy that are an issue. The world itself is in a dire state of despair.

In Danganronpa, a series of highly-talented students are trapped inside what was supposed to be a prestigious high school meant to nurture their talents, and instead turned out to be the arena for a killing game. The price of freedom? Kill another student and get away with it. Get caught, and it’s game over. Literally. The longer contestants go without killing a student, the longer their time at the Academy will last. Whilst that main plot in itself is dystopian, what led such a thing to so easily happen was the state of the world before the story of Danganronpa started.

The Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History was the name of the dystopian event that ruined the world of Danganronpa. Not much is initially known about it, but it has been described as ‘an extraordinary form of social unrest’ and the breeding grounds for meaningless death. Both in and outside the “Killing School Life”, the world of Danganronpa is incredibly dark.

3 Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

Futuristic Cyber Dystopia

Another dystopian anime series based off of or set in the world of a video game franchise, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners takes its viewers all the way to the year 2076, showing a troubling techno-futuristic reality. If the events of this anime are indicative of the way the real world might be headed in five decades, then we are in for some dark times.

In this anime, the metropolis that is Night City is plagued by addiction. Its citizens, especially those of certain classes, are addicted to the cybernetic enhancements that are available if they have the money to buy them or the gall to steal them. Those who choose the latter, as well as those suffering from economic hardship, end up creating gang violence throughout the city’s poorest and most dangerous districts. To make matters worse, the giant corporations who either build, sell, or install this technology are not averse to exacerbating or joining in on the violence that comes about as a result of their products.

Edgerunners follows the grueling life of David Martinez, a poor young man living a life of turmoil who gets involved with the titular edgerunners, and he soon bears witness to the terrible situations a life of crime on the edge can get him into.

2 Neon Genesis Evangelion

The Impact Of Angels

Neon Genesis Evangelion is often affectionately called one of the best and most depressing anime ever made. It is not surprising as to why it would get that title given the types of struggles the main characters of the series go through. After all, the conditions of their world that caused these struggles is both potent and painful.

In this classic 90s anime, only fifteen years have passed since a cataclysmic event that could have destroyed the world; The Second Impact. This event occurred after the awakening of Adam, a powerful entity from a group of mythological beings known as Angels, caused a massive explosion on the South Pole. This impact resulted in the Earth’s axis being affected. In the present day, estranged and traumatized children are tasked with piloting a series of machines called EVAs, and are seen as some of the only people capable of dealing with the threat of the Angels.

The bio-machines, their teenage pilots, and the teams that help them, are the only things that can help defeat this Angel threat and prevent a Third Impact from occurring. This highly captivating and thought-provoking world is a direct criticism of the popular mecha anime of the 80s, and turns the idea of child mecha pilots on its head, framing them instead as child soldiers in a world devastated by existential conflict.

1 Attack On Titan

The Struggles With Moving Forward

To be hunted by hordes of zombies in an apocalyptic war is nothing short of living in hell on Earth. To have the same being done by hordes of giant monsters who can only be killed by destroying specific parts of their bodies is ten times worse. That is what the characters of Attack On Titan have to deal with. They live in a world where they must hide behind walls if they want to survive. They live in a land where the vast majority of people have not even traveled far enough outside of it to see the ocean with their own eyes. They live in a world where, at any moment, these giants could break down the barriers and turn their town into a pile of debris and pools of spilled blood.

Later on in the series, it is revealed that the Titan threat is not just a case of supernatural misfortune bringing cannibalistic monsters to their lands. Instead, the Titan attacks on their homeland are just one part in a series of complex historical, political, and race-based events. This reveal changes the story of Attack on Titan from battle against monstrous forces to a war that involves the entire world and ask how far someone will go to do what’s right for their people.