Rentt Faima is an adventurer who has been grinding out low-level adventuring jobs for nearly a decade. With little talent for the job, he is stuck in the low adventurer ranks, killing low-rank monsters just to make a living wage.
While doing a job in the Water Moon Dungeon, he discovers a hidden path and decides to explore it. However, at the end of the path is not treasure, but a legendary dragon that swallows him whole!
Waking up awhile later, Rentt discovers that he is very much dead. He has somehow been revived as a skeletal undead. Armed with just his sword, Rentt fights other weak monsters in the dungeon hoping to experience the Existential Evolution that monsters can go through after killing other monsters so that he may someday become a high enough ranked undead to blend back into human society.
While not the first series about undead, The Unwanted Undead Adventurer is at least doing something new with it. Furthermore, it embraces some edge while still actually being about pretty grounded combat. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like The Unwanted Undead Adventurer, head on down below.
Anime Like The Unwanted Undead Adventurer
For Fans of Undead Main Characters
Overlord
As the final hour approaches in the life cycle of the MMO Yggdrasil, Momonga, a powerful wizard and leader of the dark guild Ainz Ooal Gown, is there to see it off.
However, to his surprise, the servers don’t go down and even stranger is that all the NPC characters have come alive with their own unique personalities.
While both The Unwanted Undead Adventurer and Overlord follow undead main characters, they have different scopes. While The Unwanted Undead Adventurer tells an adventurer story, it is relatively small in scope following the main character just fighting to level up. Overlord is a much larger scoped story, following a main character leading a guild that wants to conquer.
While both are solid fantasy stories, Overlord is an isekai anime that puts a lot more emphasis on politics and and more grand magic-based battles. This is in pretty stark contrast to the smaller battles where Rentt is primarily a melee fighter.
Skeleton Knight in Another World
After falling asleep playing games, a gamer woke up in the game world, but as a skeleton. While he is equipped well, his appearance is too frightening to live the peaceful life he wants.
Yet, after meeting a beautiful elf woman, he may find himself pulled into a path of building intrigue.
Both The Unwanted Undead Adventurer and Skeleton Knight in Another World feature once-human characters who wake up as a skeletal undead. However, Skeleton Knight in Another World is an isekai, and why is he is a skeleton is framed as a mystery. Being undead is also presented in a less visceral way than in The Unwanted Undead Adventurer.
While The Unwanted Undead Adventurer focuses on Rentt growing stronger, Skeleton Knight in Another World has Arc as already one of the strongest people in that world. So instead of getting stronger, the series instead follows him getting caught up in an intrigue plot.
For Fans of Evolving Through Combat
So I’m a Spider So What?
On one normal day in high school, the lives of many students ended unexpectedly. Some were reincarnated as nobles or strong heroes. Others were reincarnated as wondrous fantasy creatures.
Unfortunately for one girl, she was reincarnated as a lowly cave spider.
No stranger to hardship given her difficult school life, she vows to not give up, and through an RPG system, grows stronger each day.
What The Unwanted Undead Adventurer is doing with its undead main character, So I’m A Spider So What is doing with its cave spider main character.
While So I’m a Spider So What is an isekai anime, the main character is reincarnated as a very weak cave spider. Like The Unwanted Undead Adventurer, the story is built around the concept that the more a creature fights and wins, the stronger it gets – ultimately leading to the evolution to a new form of that creature.
As such, both series focus on the main character always looking for new fights. However, So I’m a Spider So What focuses more on the struggle of that and also limits the contact that the main character has with others.
Berserk of Gluttony
In this world where everyone is born with a special skill, the useful skills find respect in society. Those with particularly good skills are often elevated into noble families and rise through the ranks of the Holy Knights that protect the people.
However, for people like Fate Graphite whose Gluttony skill just means he is always hungry, he struggles through each day just to stay fed.
However, one day Fate discovers the true nature of Gluttony. His skill awakens and allows him to absorb the stats and skills of everything he kills. However, the more he devours, the more he must devour or risk losing himself in a berserk starving state.
Both The Unwanted Undead Adventurer and Berserk of Gluttony work with the same basic plot. They feature incredibly weak main characters who are presented with a way to get stronger by defeating tougher enemies.
While The Unwanted Undead Adventurer is evolution-based, Berserk of Gluttony features a main character that is able to absorb the stats of those he defeats, though with the added risk of going berserk if he goes too long without a fight.
What these basic plots set up is a story of a wandering, often masked main character with frequent action and a decent bit of darkness injected within a pretty standard fantasy story of action and adventure.
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
After a run in with a robber, the 37-year-old Satoru is suddenly killed. He is reincarnated into a fantasy land, but not as a man. In fact, he is no longer even human!
He is reincarnated as a lowly slime.
After wandering, he comes across a dragon who he befriends and who gives him the new name of Rimuru. Absorbing this dragon into his slime body, promising to eventually break the seal that has bound him, gives Rimuru great magical ability.
He then continues to inadvertently befriend beleaguered fantasy creatures in the forest who are constantly threatened by humanity. Eventually, he decides to found a nation uniting these creatures in order to help them protect themselves.
Although That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime is an isekai, it follows a main character who is reincarnated as a slime. Similar to Rentt’s new life as an undead, Rimuru starts pretty weak, but does get a much larger power infusion early on.
While both series focus on non-human creatures who constantly gain new evolutions through combat, That Time I Reincarnated as a Slime is much larger in scale. He goes from lowly slime to leader of a nation pretty quickly, which is fairly different from the smaller adventure story that The Unwanted Undead Adventurer explores.
Reincarnated as a Sword
After his death, a man is reincarnated into a new world. However, his body is not that of a human, but rather he is a legendary sword that, after leveling up his skills, becomes stuck firmly in the middle of a dangerous forest.
Begging for a wielder to come to him, he watches a slave caravan attacked by a two-headed bear. A young catgirl named Fran flees and happens across him with the pair teaming up to slay the bear and break her enslavement.
Both The Unwanted Undead Adventurer and Reincarnated as a Sword tell small, very straightforward stories of main characters that are looking to level up.
While Reincarnated as a Sword is an isekai with a sword as the main character, both the sword and his wielder are on a quest to fight stronger enemies and level up. Furthermore, it also has an element of evolution to that world as well.
What The Unwanted Undead Adventurer and Reincarnated as a Sword share is a dedication to action. Looking for the next fight is usually the only sort of plot they have.
For Fans of Adventure in a Lore-Rich World
The Faraway Paladin
Born into a new world, Will awakens as a baby that has been taken in by three undead guardians of a long-dead city.
As he is raised, he is taught magic and swordsmanship, but also learns of the world that surrounds him. A world that was once ravaged by a powerful warrior that the three undead guardians only just managed to seal away.
As they are bound to that city, they can’t say for sure what became of the world or humanity after their death and undeath, but they prepare young Will for when he will eventually have to venture out into the world.
There are fantasy anime that are big and flashy, and then there are series like The Unwanted Undead Adventurer and The Faraway Paladin that are not. However, both tell good stories in interesting worlds regardless of a lack of marketable flashy action.
Both The Unwanted Undead Adventurer and The Faraway Paladin are what can best be described as grounded fantasy. They focus on building the world and follow main characters who are competent, but aren’t casting apocalyptic magic or using a sword strike after jumping the height of a skyscraper. They focus on combat fundamentals and strategy to beat the enemies they encounter as they adventure.
However, while The Unwanted Undead Adventurer is makes it plot surrounding Rentt wanting to level up and evolve, The Faraway Paladin is more focused on exploring the world and usually the main character just sort of wanders into the next adventure.
Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash
Thrown into a foreign land with no memory of their previous life, a group of strangers must try and survive in a brutal world filled with dangerous monsters.
While the strong quickly band together, the weak are left to make a patchwork group of their own. Slowly but surely this group becomes fighters, finally earning enough to survive each day.
If you enjoyed the more grounded approach to fantasy that The Unwanted Undead Adventurer put on display while still highlighting the darkness of the situation, Grimgar offers the same, but in a lightly isekai experience.
Both series focus on weaker adventurers that often grind their days out. It is just that Rentt’s days of grind end in the first episode as he gets eaten by a dragon and comes back as an undead who gains skill and strength much quicker. Grimgar focuses more on the struggle of new adventurers who don’t know the world and don’t know how to fight.
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?
In the fantasy city of Orario, there is a massive labyrinth underneath it. For brave adventurers, glory and fortune can be found within. In order to tackle the challenging monsters inside, adventures join guilds of strong gods and goddesses.
However, for newbie adventurer Bell Cranel, no good guild will have him, except for Hestia, a goddess with no followers. Together they team up to grow strong and find glory.
Both The Unwanted Undead Adventurer and Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon are set in standard fantasy worlds that have a big emphasis on adventuring guilds. However, while The Unwanted Undead Adventurer’s primary hook is the condition of the main character, Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon focuses more on a unique deity-based guild system.
Regardless, both series are very much action adventure fantasy anime where the main character is always going towards the next big battle. While Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon is definitely a little more flashy with its action, it still sits among the more grounded end of the combat spectrum like The Unwanted Undead Adventure.
Goblin Slayer
A young priestess fresh out of the temple is excited to start her life as an adventurer. On her first day, she joins an adventuring party to go slay some goblins.
However, like so many young adventure parties before them, they underestimate the goblins. It ends with two dead, one viciously raped, and the priestess saved from fate by a man whose only mission in life is to slay all the goblins.
Both The Unwanted Undead Adventure and Goblin Slayer are more grounded action adventure fantasy anime that have a dash of darkness to them. In The Unwanted Undead Adventure, the darkness comes from the depiction of the undead while Goblin Slayer presents weak monsters like goblins as an actual menacing threat that will rape and slaughter unprepared adventurers.
In both series, you follow more quiet main characters and their companions as they are constantly looking for their next fight. However, while The Unwanted Undead Adventure has an element of strategy, Goblin Slayer is definitely a lot more focused on it.
Do you have more anime recommendations like The Unwanted Undead Adventure? Let fans know in the comments section below.
