While initially excited to begin his adult life, Akira Tendou ends up employed at an exploitative company that breaks his spirit and saps his energy. Unable to quit and contemplating suicide, he dreads each new day of going to work.
That is, until one day when he leaves for the office only to discover that a zombie apocalypse is in full swing.
Realizing that the world as we know it is now over, Akira is overjoyed! He creates a bucket list of all the things he wanted to do but never had the time or energy for as a working adult. Now, he enjoys the apocalypse to the fullest before he becomes a zombie like everyone else.
This series probably hits a lot of people a little too personally these days, but that is also part of what makes it amazing. Who hasn’t wished for an apocalypse to free them from their circumstances, after all? If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, head on down below.
Anime Like Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead
For Fans of Zombie Apocalypses
High School of the Dead
It happened suddenly. The dead rose and threw Japan into chaos.
In the high school of Takashi Kimuro, the situation forced him to kill his bitten best friend and protect the man’s girlfriend, Rei.
As they narrowly escape the school with a few others, they find the real survival just beginning.
Both Zom 100 and High School of the Dead are series about the first days of the zombie apocalypse. However, while both series have some horrific looking zombies, they differ in several key areas.
High School of the Dead often accentuates the horror and terror of the situation whereas Zom 100, while looking scary, actually keeps the main characters rather fear-free in the situation.
While High School of the Dead does make time for fun and relaxation later on in the series, it is telling a more serious tale of survival.
However, the most important difference between High School of the Dead and Zom 100 is ecchi. While Zom 100 can be comically lewd, High School of the Dead is an ecchi anime. They’re not trying to be funny with it in most instances, they are trying to titillate you, which makes for some odd tone shifts as they frequently go from horror to ecchi.
School-Live
Yuki Takeya is in love with school life. She loves it so much that she joined the School Living Club with three other girls, their supervising teacher, and the club dog Taroumaru. This club makes the most of living at school.
However, Yuki’s blissful school life is all a delusion.
The real purpose of the School Living Club is to prevent Yuki’s fragile reality from shattering. In reality, these girls are surviving the zombie apocalypse by barricading themselves within the school.
Both Zom 100 and School-Live are zombie apocalypse survival anime. Furthermore, they are also zombie apocalypse anime that have the characters often enjoying their time in the apocalypse. While Zom 100 has the characters frequently going out and doing various things, School-Live adopts a more slice of life approach since the girls are sort of stuck in their school for the long-term.
While School-Live is often moe cuteness, it doesn’t forget the horror of the situation. There are times where the story shifts from slice of life to emotional horror.
For Fans of Crushed By Societal Norms
Call of the Night
After rejecting a confession from a girl at school because he doesn’t understand love, Kou stops going to school and starts wandering the night with insomnia.
One night, he encounters a mysterious girl who believes people that stay awake at night are dissatisfied with the way they spent their days.
Following her into the night, she brings him back to her place and suddenly starts to suck his blood. Discovering her true nature, Kou now seeks to be a vampire, but to become one, you need to make a vampire fall in love with you.
Although Call of the Night is not a zombie apocalypse story and follows a high schooler, it works with some similar ideas to Zom 100.
Both series follow main characters crushed monotony and normalcy without being able to blissfully embrace it like everyone else seems to. However, one day, they are lifted up from that monotony by a supernatural event. In Zom 100, it is a zombie apocalypse, in Call of the Night, it is meeting and befriending a vampire girl.
From there, they embrace a more free style of living, although Call of the Night isn’t quite as rule-free since the world didn’t end.
Life Lessons With Uramichi Oniisan
On the set of children’s show “Together with Mama,” 31-year-old Omota Uramichi is upbeat and cheerful to the children, but they are all ultimately put off as they get a taste of his adult angst and darkness that comes out in his cheerful voice.
Yet, failed gymnastic coach Uramichi isn’t the only one who is feeling the burden of a life passing him by. Others on the show suffer similar adult darkness.
I firmly believe that if a zombie apocalypse happened in Uramichi Oniisan, it would quickly turn into a version of Zom 100 for the main character. Much of the dark comedy of Uramichi Oniisan comes from how crushed by adult life the titular character is, made even darker since he works with children and some of that depression leaks out his mouth sometimes.
If you found Akira’s life before the apocalypse a little too relatable, Uramichi Oniisan is a dark comedy you can relate to and commiserate with.
For Fans of Intense Comedy
Grand Blue
Iori Kitahara is excited to travel to the seaside town of Izu for his first year of college. He moves into his uncle’s scuba shop, Grand Blue, but things don’t go according to plan.
Inside the shop is a bunch of naked and drunk upperclassman who get him drunk. After his cousin walks in, his college life starts to derail, but his work getting it back on track doesn’t go quite as planned either.
What could an anime about freedom in a zombie apocalypse and an anime about a college diving club possible have in common? It’s all in the style of comedy.
Think of Grand Blue as a whole club full of Akira’s and Kencho’s with a Shizuka that keeps having to deal with their shenanigans. Clothes will fly off, drinks will be passionately chugged, and fun comedic shenanigans will be enjoyed.
The biggest difference is that sometimes, in Grand Blue, they do actually go diving.
Dorohedoro
Hole is a disorderly district where death and mutilation are common. The residents of Hole are the dregs of society and the test subjects of the magic users that live separate from it. As such, these residents are constantly tested on or just murdered by these mages.
In Hole is Kaiman, a man with a head cursed to be that of a lizard, but with an immunity to magic. He spends his time set on hunting down these magic users in one small bit of justice for the people that live in Hole.
You know how Zom 100 is often comical despite taking place in what is essentially a horror scenario? Dorohedoro isn’t as much of a “horror scenario,” but it is a pretty grim world, yet it also enjoys comedy. However, because of how it uses that comedy, it immediately becomes dark comedy.
If you don’t mind people being silly in serious situations and a bunch of dark jokes, Dorohedoro is, like Zom 100, a great horror comedy anime.
Golden Kamuy
After surviving the brutal Russo-Japanese war, Sugimoto gained the nickname “the immortal”. However, he now seeks the promise of gold to the north in Hokkaido in order to provide for the blind wife and infant son of his comrade who died in the war.
Yet, during his hunt, he hears the tale of a hidden stash of gold belonging to criminals with a map made out of human skin. Dismissing it as a tale at first, he soon finds that the man who told him the story has those very same map-like tattoos.
Now on a race with a native Ainu girl whose father was murdered for the gold, they try to make it to the stash before the criminals.
To be candid, Zom 100 and Golden Kamuy are two wildly different series in setting and plot. However, what they share most is a similar stance on comedy as well as balancing comedy with actual serious events.
Both series have plots they follow, Golden Kamuy’s being the more serious sort of affair, but they also frequently inject the most intensely silly and weird comedy into those events. It doesn’t disrupt the plot, but it endears the characters to you.
Both series are seinen anime aimed at people who want more adult stories, but aren’t afraid to be a bit juvenile with the comedy sometimes.
Essentially, if you like the style of comedy in Zom 100, Golden Kamuy employs the same style. It just differs in pretty much everything else aside from some similarly quirky characters.
For Fans of Enjoying the Apocalypse
Girls’ Last Tour
With all civilization dead, only Chito and Yuuri remain. Together they decide to hop on their motorbike and wander aimlessly looking for their next meal and fuel.
Despite a bleak existence, they remain each other’s light in this dead world.
While it can be said that Zom 100 and Girls’ Last Tour are about the main characters wandering the apocalypse and very freely doing what they want, the series are two different experiences.
Zom 100 is in the early days of the apocalypse where the jury is still out as to if humanity can recover. Girls’ Last Tour, well, humanity is over. There is seemingly like five people alive in the entire world, thus “the last tour” part.
Both series are about the main characters finding those nice moments in either a dangerous or empty world. Girls’ Last Tour emphasizes small joys in a bleak situation more whereas Zom 100 more so highlights the freedom of it all.
Heavenly Delusion
After a disaster fifteen years ago caused society to collapse, the survivors struggle to eek out an existence. Alongside trying to scrounge together food, clean water, and electricity, these survivors are also plagued by the appearance of man-eating monsters.
Two young survivors, Maru and Kiruko, wander the wasteland and make money off Maru’s ability to kill these man-eaters with a touch. Together, they are searching for a place called Heaven that they both hope will hold the answers to the tragic burdens that they hold in their heart.
While Zom 100 takes place in the early days on an apocalypse, Heavenly Delusion is set well after the initial chaos. Humanity has scraped together isolated communities, but people are still able to wander unemployed and do what they want as long as they can withstand the danger.
While Heavenly Delusion is motivated by the characters searching for something, they aren’t doing so with any particular urgency since most of the time they don’t know a concrete destination. They wander and have fun doing it, much like how Zom 100 becomes about doing small activities or having small goals that force the characters to travel.
7 Seeds
With extinction-level meteors heading towards Earth, the government attempted to preserve humanity with the 7 Seeds Program.
In this program, several teams of young people were established, frozen, and to be woken up in the future after the planet is livable again.
However, the world these children wake up in is wild and dangerous where they appear to be the only humans left.
It is hard to see the similarities between Zom 100 and 7 Seeds at first aside from both series taking place during or after an apocalypse. While 7 Seeds often prioritizes fundamental and desperate survival, as the series goes on, you find that the main group of characters differs from the other groups presented.
While other groups are focused on the basics of food, water, and shelter, the main group thrives because they also acknowledge another fundamental basic need – fun.
Essentially, Group Summer B in 7 Seeds enjoys the survival philosophy of Akira and Kencho in Zom 100 while every other group has Shizuka’s spartan survival philosophy.
Alongside all that, both Zom 100 and 7 Seeds do well to balance pleasant moments with dramatic moments. While Zom 100 goes from intensely silly comedy to occasionally bleak apocalypse drama, 7 Seeds goes from fun adventures to emotionally devastating tales of failed human survival.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead? Let fans know in the comments section below.
