Vampires, fishmen, supersonic monkeys – They are all normal residents living alongside humans in Hellsalem’s Lot, formerly known as New York City.
When a gate between Earth and the Beyond popped up there three years ago, old NYC became dominated by monsters, and now Libra, a secret organization, is tasked with keeping it in order.
After hobbyist photographer Leonardo Watch obtains the All-Seeing Eyes of the Gods, he finds himself recruited into Libra.
Full of big action carried out by even bigger character, this series lets a crazy city carry the story. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Blood Blockade Battlefront, head on down below.
Anime Like Blood Blockade Battlefront
For Fans of Super-Powered Problem Solvers
Bungou Stray Dogs
The orphanage that Atsushi Nakajima has been living at has been recently plagued by a tiger that only he can see. Blaming him for the incident, they kick him out.
Now homeless, he wanders the streets until he meets the eccentric Osamu Dazai and saves him from drowning.
As it turns out, Dazai is a supernatural detective and agrees to help him solve the mystery.
Bungou Stray Dogs is easily one of the most similar anime experience in Blood Blockade Battlefront. Both series take place in a city and follow an agency that is tasked with dealing with the more supernatural mysteries that the police can’t really handle. However, while Blood Blockade Battlefront is closed off due to all the supernatural beings, Bungou Stray Dogs and its many characters with super-powered abilities treats everything like another day in any city.
Both Blood Blockade Battlefront and Bungou Stray Dogs are most memorable for their eccentric cast of characters, each with their own unique abilities and personality quirks. They get along in a comically contentious way, but always come together when it is time to fight.
High Card
In the Kingdom of Fourland, the royal family possessed a powerful deck of 52 cards. Each card has the ability to grant its wielder a special power, but after an attempted theft, the cards were scattered throughout the kingdom.
In order to get them back without a panic, the Kingdom developed a secret group of players armed with cards called High Card to retrieve these missing items of power.
Secretly ran out of the Pinochle luxury car maker’s sales office, High Card, including its newest member, Finn, are consistently thrust into a frenzy of super powered battles.
While Libra is tasked with solving problems too powerful for the police to handle, High Card’s organization is a bit different. It is a government-sanctioned secret organization tasked with collecting powerful cards that give people supernatural abilities. So while the organizations are different, both stories are stuffed full of characters with unique abilities.
Although both series have an interesting narrative unfolding and follow a new recruit to the organization, High Card gets a little caught up in grand battles and doesn’t offer as much exploration of the actual plot as Blood Blockade Battlefront. However, if you like big action sequences done by cool characters with a diverse array of powers, High Card has that in abundance.
The Marginal Service
After his history of reckless behavior led to his partners’ death, Brian Nightraider is dismissed from the police force. In his self-pitying slump, he is invited to join the Marginal Service, a secret unit of the United Nations tasked with handing Borderlanders from another world in the human world.
While many Borderlanders live peacefully, a terrorist organization of Borderlanders has started a drug trafficking ring and it is up to the Marginal Service to take them down.
Both Blood Blockade Battlefront and The Marginal Service are fully about a new recruit in an organization that is tasked with solving problems in the city. While The Marginal Service has less superpowers than Blood Blockade Battlefront, it still loves big action sequences.
Aside from both being about problem-solving organizations staffed by dysfunctional weirdos, what Blood Blockade Battlefront and The Marginal Service both share is a passion for occasional silliness. The Marginal Service sometimes does itself a disservice by undercutting serious moments with silliness, but it is still pretty enjoyable. Furthermore, The Marginal Service has a big passion for western movie references in many scenes.
Gatchaman Crowds
One day, Hajime Ichinose is given a small book called a NOTE. It turns out that this is a device that allows her to transform into a Gatchaman, one of the legendary protectors of her city.
Meeting other Gatchamen, they stress upon her the importance of staying secret and invite her into their base of operations and task her with helping them keep the city safe.
Both Gatchman Crowds and Blood Blockade Battlefront are about our normal world integrating unhappily with beings from somewhere else. It is the fusing of two dimensions in Blood Blockade Battlefront while Gatchaman Crowds is about aliens.
Both series follow a new recruit to an organization that covertly deals with problems caused by these otherworlders using a whole array of unique abilities.
However, the biggest difference is that while both enjoy high energy action, Blood Blockade Battlefront is a bit more detailed in the narrative. Gatchaman Crowds often feels like it just wants to get to the next fight, which is okay since the fights are pretty cool.
Hamatora
In this world, a small number of people have manifested the power to create small miracles. In Yokohama, two miracle users create a detective agency and use their powers to help people.
However, one day they realize that the jobs they are receiving have a series of strange connections to a serial killer that their police friend is searching for.
Hamatora and Blood Blockade Battlefront actually share almost all the same fundamental themes.
Instead of being set in a city that melds humanity with supernatural beings, Hamatora is about humanity manifesting various powers. However, both series follows agencies of super-powered individuals who are tasked with handling events caused by the more powerful unruly individuals in the city. While mostly episodic, they manifest an overall plot over time as their cases start to tie together to something bigger.
Both series enjoy big, energetic, and colorful action carried out by an eccentric cast of characters all while balancing out serious action with silly comedy in an enjoyable way. However, Blood Blockade Battlefront has a narrative that is pretty easy to get into. Hamatora often feels a little less approachable as it focuses more on aesthetics than storytelling.
Concrete Revolutio
In an alternate future, Earth has been inhabited by a series of beings once thought fictional.
This horrific reality is something that people just can’t accept so the government keeps it a secret and establishes the Super Population Research Laboratory. The organization is used to keep track of unique individuals and prevent them from causing trouble.
Both Blood Blockade Battlefront and Concrete Revolutio are about cities where humans and those with supernatural abilities live side-by-side in a sort of fragile peace. Although they each have a focus on the organizations meant to keep that peace, Concrete Revolutio has the main character hunted down by the organization he founded.
Although Blood Blockade Battlefront and Concrete Revolutio like unique characters, interesting powers, and energetic and colorful action sequences, the differences lie in the approachabiltiy of the narrative. To be blunt, Concrete Revolutio has some poorly framed time skips, which means you sometimes don’t realize that there was a time skip if not paying attention to small details. This can make the narrative very confusing if you are not paying super close attention.
Space Patrol Luluco
Living in the rather abnormal Ogikubo, the only Space Immigration Zone on Earth and a melting pot of aliens and humans, bubbly Luluco just wants to be normal.
However, when her father accidentally eats a powerful sleep capsule that freezes him solid and she also accidentally breaks him, she rushes over the Space Patrol to take his place in the office.
There, the chief Over Justice hires her as an undercover agent to sniff out crime at her school.
Both Blood Blockade Battlefront and Space Patrol Luluco are about areas where humanity and other beings live in relative harmony. To keep things that way, there are agencies that handle the various issues that arise.
While both series follow new recruits into these problem-solving organizations, Space Patrol Luluco is often a bit more silly than the still-silly but occasionally gritty and serious Blood Blockade Battlefront.
However, both series have a big passion for high-energy grand action scenes and very comically strange characters. Space Patrol Luluco is just distinctly less serious about it.
For Fans of Urban Fantasy
Durarara
Tokyo’s downtown district of Ikebukuro is awash in strange rumors, everything from colorless color gangs to a headless rider roaming town populate the rumors.
For Mikado Ryuugamine who just moved there from the countryside, he is but one witness to the district’s slew of strange events.
Both Blood Blockade Battlefront and Durarara are immediately similar as great urban fantasy anime, but Blood Blockade Battlefront wears its supernatural elements right on its sleeve. At first, Durarara seems like a pretty normal neighborhood with some mysterious problems. However, the longer it goes on, the more supernatural it becomes.
Unlike Hellsalem’s Lot, Ikebukuro in Durarara is a pretty normal neighborhood in Tokyo, it just happens to have a few supernatural beings lurking in the shadows. The charm of both series is exploring the stories of the various eccentric characters in the city and watching the addictingly grand and energetic action sequences. However, action is a little more sparse in Durarara as it focuses on exploring its various mysteries through its narrative.
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.
Blood Blockade Battlefront and Dorohedoro take place in cities with access to another dimension. As the beings from the other dimension frequently come to the city, it has turned both places in to somewhat dystopian slums where people carve out a life, but have to deal with frequent danger.
While both series feature characters that deal with people who cause problems in the city, Dorohedoro follows just one guy that is hunting people who hurt others, and doing so bloodily. That is really the biggest difference between these two. Both series enjoy eccentric characters, gritty cities, and cool action, but Dorohedoro is vastly more gruesome about it.
Cop Craft
15 years ago, a gate opened over the Pacific to a fantasy world. In the present day, San Teresa City hosts two million immigrants from the other world and those from our world live side by side.
As with any city, crime has started to run rampant, but justice is handed out by a police force combined of cops from our world and knights from the other. This is the tale of one such team.
Both Blood Blockade Battlefront and Cop Craft take place in a secluded city where normal humans live beside beings that came over from another world. Of course, they can’t live completely peacefully together, so the plots follow the characters charged with preventing chaos.
As Libra is not really official police, Blood Blockade Battlefront never has a “police drama” sort of element to it. However, Cop Craft is, like the name suggests, about a buddy cop duo of police officers that are dealing with the various crimes in the city.
Cop Craft is a little more subdued compared to Blood Blockade Battlefront. The characters are more normal and the action doesn’t go as big since one partner is just a normal human cop and the other is a tsundere knight in Cop Craft. However, they both enjoy a few episodic mysteries and an intriguing overall plot that unravels.
BNA – Brand New Animal
Throughout history, humanity has always been at odds with the beastmen – a race that can change their shape into beasts. The beastmen have all but gone into hiding after extreme discrimination, but Anima City was built to be a self-governing safe haven where they can live without fear.
During the towns’ 10th anniversary, Michiru, a human that has recently turned into a tanuki, visits the city in an attempt to find a cure for her sudden transformation. Unfortunately, there is a explosion in the square, and she gets caught up in the event.
Together with the white wolf Shirou, the pair look into the explosion and find that there is indeed more to Michiru’s beastification.
Like Hellsalem’s Lot in Blood Blockade Battlefront, BNA focuses on the events in a city that is shut off from the rest of the world due to the fact that it houses creatures just trying to live their life. However, while Blood Blockade Battlefront has more variety in its supernatural residents, BNA is all about a city full of animal people.
Both Blood Blockade Battlefront and BNA focus on new people in the city who get involved with a person or agency that solve problems in it while trying to solve their own personal mystery. What unfolds is a largely episodic adventure of dealing with problems that build towards the main characters solving their issues by the end.
K
In this world, there are those referred to as Kings. They were individuals bestowed with great supernatural power and they use it to recruit others to their clan. To protect those members is a King’s great duty.
However, after a murder of a Red clan member, a student is accused of homicide. During the man hunt, the city devolves into full-on war among the Kings.
Both K and Blood Blockade Battlefront are urban fantasy anime about the clashing of super-powered individuals in a city. However, while Blood Blockade Battlefront is about an agency tasked with stopping destructive problems, K is more about a gang war between super-powered gangs after an event tips the balance.
While both series set up interesting overall mysteries and love their creative characters, K offers a much larger cast of creative characters, but lacks a little more of the depth that Blood Blockade Battlefront offers in its plot.
Dead Mount Death Play
In a fantasy world, a legendary hero has set himself to finally slaying the Corpse God, an evil necromancer. When the dust settles from their battle, the hero is victorious, but even he senses something unusual about his victory.
Meanwhile, the Corpse God wakes up in an alley in modern Tokyo, possessing the body of Polka Shinomiya, the second son of a wealthy family who just had his throat slit by an assassin.
After having a face-off with the assassin, this new Polka ends up allying with her to try and find out who tried to kill previous Polka as well as to explore this strange new magic-less world.
Blood Blockade Battlefront takes place in a city where most people are supernatural beings and thus are a little more eccentric than the standard human. Dead Mount Death Play takes place in a city with one supernatural character who gets entangled in a group of unexpectedly even more eccentric assassins.
If you like your characters creatively designed with unique abilities and quirky personalities, then Dead Mount Death Play also offers that in a dark and brutal urban fantasy setting. It is uniquely interesting to see a main character with actual magic in Dead Mount Death Play not seem like the most overpowered or weirdest character in a room when confronted by some of the assassins.
For Fans of Jazzy, Slick Action
Cowboy Bebop
In the distant future, humanity has, for the most part, abandoned Earth and colonized several different planets in the solar system.
In order to keep peace in the galaxy, the Inter Solar System police was established, but they often rely on the aid of bounty hunters, referred to as “cowboys,” to bring criminals on the run to justice.
This is the story of Spike Spiegel and Jet Black, a pair of cowboys that end up with a rag-tag crew of other misfits as they travel the galaxy trying to keep food on the table and their own dark pasts at bay.
With a shared love of jazzy soundtracks and classically cool, but flawed characters, it is hard not to think of Cowboy Bebop when Blood Blockade Battlefront breaks out the action scenes.
What endears both of these series to audiences is not so much the plot of either series. Both are episodic and their overall character plots aren’t anything too special. However, you remember both Cowboy Bebop and Blood Blockade Battlefront for how cool and memorable the characters are in any one moment.
That said, the supernatural city full of weird people and weird problems in Blood Blockade Battlefront is a bit of a different experience from the traveling, chronically poor space bounty hunter stories presented in Cowboy Bebop.
Great Pretender
After life turned him down the path of crime, Makoto Edamura cockily thinks himself the best swindler in Japan. However, after trying to swindle a tourist only for the tourist to swap it back, he finds the police on his trail.
Making his escape, he runs into this tourist again, a move that would take him all the way across the sea to Los Angeles. There, he learns that this tourist was in fact a man called Laurent Thierry, a successful confidence man, who wants to recruit him onto his team.
While the supernatural city setting in Blood Blockade Battlefront is very different from the reality-grounded modern setting of Great Pretender, both series have a love for addictingly cool characters.
Both Blood Blockade Battlefront and Great Pretender may differ in their focus, but both series follow groups of eccentric characters doing wild and occasionally over-the-top things. In Blood Blockade Battlefront, they are often solving a wide array of supernatural issues while Great Pretender is about planning and playing out magnificent heists.
Baccano
In the early 1930s, the transcontinental train, Flying Pussyfoot, starts a legendary journey across the country that will leave behind a trail of blood.
During this same period, the ambitious scientist Szilarf and his unwilling assistant Ennis investigate missing bottles of immortality elixir in New York. This can be traced back to 1711 where the alchemists creating this elixir learn the real price of being immortal.
Among these mysterious events, a Mafia war heats up.
Follow this intricate tale of alchemy, immortality, and survival as it weaves together many seemingly unrelated events.
As both Blood Blockade Battlefront and Baccano take place in fictionalized American locations, they both share a distinctly more western feel to the setting and the characters. However, while Blood Blockade Battlefront wears its supernatural elements on its sleeve, Baccano hides supernatural under it admittedly much more dense narrative.
While both Blood Blockade Battlefront and Baccano tell their stories non-linearly, Baccano does so in a way where the story is not so easily grasped. However, if you don’t mind spending a little more time unraveling what is actually going on, Baccano’s jazzy action and eccentric characters offer a similar experience to Blood Blockade Battlefront, just without at much obvious weirdness.
Trigun
Vash the Stampede is a heinous criminal with a huge bounty on his head after destroying an entire city. Known as the “Human Typhoon,” he brings destruction wherever he goes.
However, when two insurance agents finally meet him, they find out that Vash is not quite the villain that the bounty paints him as. Instead, they find a silly buffoon who tries his best to avoid killing while looking for his brother, despite trouble constantly finding him.
Blood Blockade Battlefront and Trigun share the same author, though unlike other series both by the same author, Yasushiro Nightow does apparently enjoy some variety in the worlds he creates. This means that the supernatural urban fantasy of Blood Blockade Battlefront is a pretty different experience from the interstellar sci-fi Cowboy Western presented in Trigun.
However, what these series share is in the smaller details. Both Trigun and Blood Blockade Battlefront enjoy wildly eccentric characters with unique powers, slapstick humor melded with unexpectedly emotional tragedy, and high-energy action sequences set to an equally exciting soundtrack.
Akudama Drive
The region of Kansai is overrun by powerful criminals known as Akudama.
One night, after picking up 500 yen dropped by an Akudama, an Ordinary Girl finds herself wrapped up in a huge plot to foil a public execution.
Now with a bomb collar around her neck, she and other Akudama must complete tasks given by a mysterious Black Cat.
Blood Blockade Battlefront follows an agency tasked with keeping some sort of order in a city of wildly powerful individuals. By contrast, Akudama Drive is about a group of wildly powerful criminals wrecking havoc. If they were in the same world, they would be fighting each other.
Both Blood Blockade Battlefront and Akudama Drive present stories that take place in a chaotic city that seems like it would be a terrible place to actually live. However, while Blood Blockade Battlefront is fully supernatural, Akudama Drive is going for a more dystopian cyberpunk setting where criminals are super powerful and the police are super brutal.
If you enjoyed how “big” the fight scenes and action in Blood Blockade Battlefront go and how eccentric every character is, Akudama Drive is that plus more. The action is just as grand and wild, but the characters are even more eccentric.
Dimension W
In the future, humans have discovered the fourth dimension, or Dimension W, which is supposedly a source of infinite energy. Harnessing this energy in coils, the New Telsa Energy corporation has now set up a monopoly on its sale.
Ex-soldier Kyouma Mabuchi is skeptical of this energy and still drives a gas-powered car for his job to hunt down illegal coils.
Both Blood Blockade Battlefront and Dimension W focus on cities or worlds that are presently interacting with another dimension. While that manifests as a city full of supernatural beings in Blood Blockade Battlefront, Dimension W goes a more sci-fi route about use using another dimension as an energy source.
While Blood Blockade Battlefront has a more episodic story and Dimension W goes more linear, both series are about unraveling a conspiracy as well as dealing with past events that have shaped the current state of the all very eccentric characters.
Outside of action, both Blood Blockade Battlefront and Dimension W set up a delightfully comedic dynamic between their characters where they are all kind of lovable jerks. However, when it comes to moments of action, they make the characters slick and dripping with cool. It is those light moments that make the back stories extra painful.
Michiko and Hatchin
For the fourth time, hardened criminal Michiko breaks out of a South American prison in order to search for a man from her past.
This search leads her to the young Hana, a girl trapped under the thumb of her abusive foster family and daughter of the man Michiko is looking for.
Breaking her out to lure out her father, the unlikely pair set off on their search, only to be embroiled in everything from betrayal to gang warfare.
Both Blood Blockade Battlefront and Michiko and Hatchin take place in fictional locations in the Americas. Blood Blockade Battlefront taking place in New York City while Michiko and Hatchin being about a road trip through a fictionalized version of South America.
While Blood Blockade Battlefront is distinctly supernatural, Michiko and Hatchin is grounded in reality, but makes reality seem like everywhere is a crime-riddled slum. However, what they share is their quirky characters and their high-energy action. While Michiko and Hatchin is bound by the restraints of reality, it still manages to make the action feel as big and energetic as the supernatural slugouts in Blood Blockade Battlefront.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Blood Blockade Battlefront? Let fans know in the comments section below.
