During more violent times, there was the tale of a legendary manslayer, the Battousai. However, this assassin suddenly disappeared at the beginning of the Meiji Era, but his legend is still well-known.
Ten years later, unbeknownst to the people, the Battousai has abandoned his blood-stained ways and began living as a wanderer known as Kenshin, a goofball and pacifist that has vowed to never kill again.
After saving a sword dojo ran by a woman from an imposter posing as the Battousai, this wanderer stops his travel to temporarily stay.
Though a once-classic anime, Rurouni Kenshin sits tainted by the crimes of its original creator. If it had remained a classic, the art could be excused from its creator, but now that it is revived and making that creator money once again, well, people have mixed feelings about it. Regardless, if you are looking for more anime recommendations like Rurouni Kenshin, head on down below.
Anime Like Rurouni Kenshin
For Fans of Samurai
Samurai Champloo
Fuu is a young girl working as a waitress at a small tea house. Things are peaceful until one day she spills tea on a customer and is harassed by samurai.
Calling for help, a thuggish young rogue by the name of Mugen steps in only to pick a fight with another tightly wound samurai named Jin. In their fight, they end up destroying the shop and getting arrested.
After saving the two fighters from their execution, Fuu hires them as bodyguards to help her find a samurai that smells of sunflowers.
Rurouni Kenshin and Samurai Champloo have long since been two must-watch anime for those who enjoy samurai stories, despite neither following actual samurai. However, while Rurouni Kenshin is an anime about choosing peace, but still tripping over people that want to fight you, Samurai Champloo is about choosing violence.
Rurouni Kenshin is more the standard arc-based shounen action anime where the characters get entangled in various storylines, fight the bad guy for that arc, and then have a breather before the next event happens. Samurai Champloo is instead a more linear storyline about three characters on a journey. While traveling to the destination, you learn about their pasts as well as have a few fun side adventures.
Both series are remembered for their detailed sword fights as well as the unique sword styles that some characters utilize.
Dororo
In order to become indomitable on the battlefield, a samurai lord barters his son’s organs away to 48 demons and then abandons him.
However, his son doesn’t die. Instead, a medicine man saves him with primitive, but lethal prosthetics that allow him to hunt down the demons and regain his organs for an eventual battle with his father.
Part of the charm of Rurouni Kenshin is that it occasionally didn’t shy away from the harsh realities of the often glorified age of the samurai. Dororo tells a tale in the age of the samurai, but with many fantasy elements. Dororo also doesn’t sugarcoat or glorify Japan’s renowned warrior caste either. In fact, it makes samurai kind of look like a bunch of dicks.
While Rurouni Kenshin is about walking a path of peace and repentance, Dororo is more about the complicated relationship between vengeance and forgiveness. While Rurouni Kenshin has its moments, Dororo is often a more emotional tale, though not without wonderful moments of action.
Hell’s Paradise
Betrayed by his ninja clan and sentenced to death for the many lives he took while working for them, Gabimaru the Hollow accepts his fate. However, every attempt at execution has failed, leading them to call in Sagiri, a member of the Yamada Asaemon Clan of imperial executioners.
While Sagiri can carry out the task, she instead offers Gabimaru a chance to receive a full pardon for his crimes. He, along with other criminals sentenced to death, will be sent to the dangerous island of Shinsekyo to obtain the elixir of life for the shogun. However, with all previous expedition teams never being heard from again, this mysterious island is a death sentence in and of itself.
It is easiest to say that Rurouni Kenshin uses the older style of shounen storytelling whereas Hell’s Paradise is a fine example of more modern shounen storytelling. However, both series really embrace the samurai aesthetic, even if neither story is telling the standard samurai tale.
While they go about it in different ways, Rurouni Kenshin and Hell’s Paradise follow once-empty killers who are deciding to make a change in their life. However, Gabimaru is right at the beginning of his turning point while Kenshin has long-since abandoned his violent ways.
Hell’s Paradise is distinctly different from Rurouni Kenshin is that it has a lot more fantasy elements to it. However, while the characters in Hell’s Paradise are fighting enemies well outside of the bounds of reality, they are still doing so with swordplay (and magic-like ninjutsu).
Samurai Deeper Kyou
There is a tale told of the battle between two men at the Battle of Sekigahara. The tale tells of a battle so fierce between Kyoushirou Mibu and Demon Eyes Kyou that a meteor fell on them and they both vanished.
Four years after the battle, a bounty hunter named Yuya Shina tracks down Kyoushirou who has become a perverted medicine man. However, it seems that Demon Eyes Kyou is also trapped within his body.
Samurai Deeper Kyou and Rurouni Kenshin came from a similar age, but Samurai Deeper Kyou never got gained the popularity that Rurouni Kenshin did – probably because it wasn’t aired on a major television network.
Both Rurouni Kenshin and Samurai Deeper Kyou tell the tale of a man that was once a vicious warrior in the past who now lives as a silly wanderer. However, they seem to be a constant magnet for powerful fighters. Furthermore, Kyou has a serious side much like Kenshin’s Battosai side, but more violent since it is actually another person in there.
Peacemaker Kurogane
After being traumatized by the murder of his parents, Ichimura Tetsunosuke has a thirst for revenge.
Fueled by it, he seeks to join the Shinsengumi, but lacks the skill. Now he trains to learn just what it means to be part of this historic group.
Both Rurouni Kenshin and Peacemaker Kurogane are samurai anime set in the age where the glory of the samurai was at its end. As such, instead of focusing on glorious battles, they often focus on aimless samurai or, in Peacemaker Kurogane’s case, the Shinsengumi.
Both series provide an interesting mix of action and comedy. When it comes to battles, it knows to keep things serious and let the battle be the star, but in between those moments, it never forgets to give you a few laughs.
Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran
Ran is a wandering female samurai during the Edo Period of Japan. Her skill with a blade is matched only by her thirst for sake. Joined by her companion, Lady Meow of the Iron Cat Fist, this is the tale of her adventures.
Although episodic and much more comedic in nature, both Ran and Rurouni Kenshin tell the tale of wandering samurai that can be both serious and comedic.
However, Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran feels like a less fleshed out Rurouni Kenshin. It also follows female characters rather than the mix that you get in Kenshin. Although, if you enjoyed the more silly moments of Kenshin, Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran is a great watch.
For Fans of Badasses Turned Silly
Gintama
After aliens invade Japan, they put a prohibition on swords. However, Gintoki Sakata still possesses the heart of a samurai.
Taking on odd jobs alongside of his friends, Gintama follows Gintoki during his chaotic life as an errand boy.
Gintama is legendary as a comedy anime, but those who stick with it long enough know that it has serious arcs and they actually have some pretty decent action to them. It is just always undermined by the large cast of silly characters.
Both Rurouni Kenshin and Gintama take place in roughly the same time period. However, while Rurouni Kenshin is more fictionalized history about a time where swords were falling out of style due to regulation, Gintama makes it a comedy by blaming it on an alien invasion.
Essentially, what Rurouni Kenshin plays as serious, Gintama plays for comedy. Both series follow men with rather dark pasts, but instead of telling about those times, they tell about the silly guys they are in the present who fight using non-lethal sword styles and kind hearts.
Seven Deadly Sins
In this feudal world, the realm is protected from those who seek to spread their evil by the Holy Knights. However, in the kingdom of Liones, a small group of Holy Knights known as the Seven Deadly Sins sought to overthrown the king only to be driven off.
Now, ten years later, the world hunts for the Seven Deadly Sins, but the Holy Knights have now turned their blades on the king and taken control of the kingdom.
Now it is up to his third daughter, Elizabeth, to find the Sins and help them take back control.
While both Rurouni Kenshin and Seven Deadly Sins are shounen action anime, and therefor share quite a few basic similarities, they do take place in wildly different settings.
While Rurouni Kenshin is historical fiction set in the Meiji era, Seven Deadly Sins is action fantasy set in a more medieval-style fantasy world. As such, while Rurouni Kenshin is steeped in swordplay, Seven Deadly Sins has all sorts of different powers from magic to weapons.
What Rurouni Kenshin and Seven Deadly Sins share the most is a type of main character. Both Kenshin and Meliodas have wildly violent and dark pasts, but the present version of these characters you see in the story are silly and cheerful, but still quite powerful.
Noragami
There will be times where you may happen across an odd phone number written in red. If you call it, you will get in touch with a young man who introduces himself as the Yato God.
This Yato God is a minor deity and the self-proclaimed God of Delivery. He dreams of having millions of worshipers, but there isn’t a single shrine dedicated to his name. He spends his time doing odd jobs for spare yen until the day his weapon partner deserts him.
Just as things are looking down, he happens across a young school girl that saves him from a car accident by taking the hit for him. She survives, but her soul becomes loose. Together they set out to find a way to tighten her soul back up.
While Rurouni Kenshin wears Kenshin’s past right on its sleeve, Noragami does wait awhile to introduce Yato’s past in Noragami. As such, saying exactly why Kenshin and Yato are similar is a sort of spoiler, so let’s just leave it at “they have similar backstories.”
While Noragami follows a small-time deity, his human friend, and his sentient weapon in modern Japan, like Rurouni Kenshin, it tells a story of a guy who left his bloody past behind to live a more peaceful life helping people.
Of course, when things do get serious, both main characters have some powerful combat abilities.
For Fans of Walking The Path of Peace
Vinland Saga
Ravaging every land they touch, Vikings have become renowned for their thirst and talent for violence.
Thorfinn, a son of a great Viking warrior, spends his childhood on the battlefield in order to reap his vengeance on his father’s murderer. A man who murdered his family in front of him, plucked him from his home, and now commands him in a band of warriors.
While Vinland Saga and Rurouni Kenshin differ in the time period they are set in, both series are essentially about finding a peaceful way to live with the weight of all the slaughter the main characters committed in their younger years.
While Rurouni Kenshin is about a samurai in the Meiji Era, an age when the samurai fell from importance, Vinland Saga is about the Viking Age in England and Scandinavia. Just like samurai are glorified, so too is being a viking warrior in that world. While you have to watch the Samurai X OVAs to see Kenshin’s bloody past, Vinland Saga spends the first season detailing Thorfinn’s vicious youth.
Regardless, both series are about vicious fighters that attempt to hang up their blades and choose a more peaceful path.
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.
Although Trigun is a space western and Rurouni Kenshin is a Meiji-set samurai anime, there is no denying how similar the main characters are. While Vash was never what you would call “bad,” he, like Kenshin has a dark past which they cover up with a silly personality.
Most similarly, both Kenshin and Vash try to walk the path of peace that doesn’t involve killing people. Of course, that draws a whole bunch of people that want to kill them.
What Kenshin is to swordplay, Trigun is to gunplay.
Black Cat
Completing every job with accuracy, Train is an infamous assassin under the moniker Black Cat. However, one night he stumbles upon Saya, a bounty hunter with a positive outlook on life.
Her positivity begins to affect him and he begins to rethink his life, choosing to become an honest bounty hunter instead of an assassin.
Both Rurouni Kenshin and Black Cat tell stories about talented assassins considered the best of their age who, after certain events, decide to stop killing. However, instead of becoming a wanderer like Kenshin, Train becomes a bounty hunter.
While both series are big on action, Black Cat is a little more “super powered” than Rurouni Kneshin with the fighting. They also differ greatly in their settings.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Rurouni Kenshin? Let fans know in the comments section below.
