The stories tell of four heroes summoned from another world – the sword, spear, bow, and shield heroes who will prevent calamity. With darkness bearing down on them, the Kingdom of Melromarc summons these heroes from modern day Japan.
For otaku Naofumi Iwatani, unfortunately he is labeled the shield hero, the weakest of the group. Worse yet, betrayal sees him labeled as a criminal and outcasted.
With hatred and vengeance consuming him, he sets forth to grow strong.
Giving people the sweet taste of vengeance that they never knew they wanted in an isekai, revenge helped this series becoming popular, but strong world building keeps it there. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like The Rising of the Shield Hero, head on down below.
Anime Like The Rising of the Shield Hero
For Fans of Motivated By Betrayal
Arifureta – From Commonplace to World’s Strongest
Otaku Hajime Nagumo and several of his classmates are summoned to a fantasy world and tasked with saving mankind. However, while his classmates are gifted with great abilities, Hajime only has transmutation skills that have no real offensive use.
He is soon betrayed by a classmate and sent into an abyss filled with monsters. Resolving to not die to the darkness, he struggles to survive and teams up with an imprisoned vampire to return to the world above.
Of all the anime recommendations for The Rising of the Shield Hero, Arifureta provides the most similar experience because their plots start and progress almost the same way.
Both The Rising of the Shield Hero and Arifureta are about boys isekai’d to a new world with a series of others, but their combat abilities are quite weak. This leads to them being betrayed, which drives them to vow revenge, struggle to get strong, meet a non-human girl that helps them do that, and eventually get their revenge on the person that betrayed them. As they adventure, you watch them add more misfits to their harem. Finally, despite being a bitter revenge-driven protagonists, they also stop to help every single person they meet, even if they often do so grumpily.
While The Rising of the Shield Hero has some edginess in the first season. That edge rounds off as the series goes on and it transforms into being less about revenge and more about general adventures. Arifureta, however, remains pretty edgy throughout.
Redo of Healer
As a boy, Keyaru awakened the power of a Hero. His specialty was healing. However, by using these powers, he experienced the trauma of the injured person as well. It eventually drove him insane, but he was forced to use his powers anyway.
After enduring torture and abuse by his fellow heroes for years, Keyaru formed a plan to get his vengeance. He was able to turn back time and restart his life with all his previous memories.
Thus his vengeance began.
Both The Rising of the Shield Hero and Redo of Healer are about adventurers betrayed by the people they trusted. This leads to their next step to be a bitter, revenge-fueled fury of training that makes them overpowered and allows them to get the sweet taste of vengeance on their lips.
Now that sounds as good as The Rising of the Shield Hero, but the crucial thing to know about Redo of Healer is that it is less “dark fantasy adventure” and more “fantasy revenge porn for edgelords.” And by porn, I mean porn. It combines very graphic violent torture with very graphic sex, which is for sure not something everyone is looking for. So, fair warning.
I’m Quitting Heroing
After using his immense power to save the world, Leo finds that there is no place for a powerful hero in a world at peace.
Being too strong to remain in human kingdoms, he seeks a job in the Demon King’s Army, which he defeated and is in need of rebuilding.
While the army has many problems, Leo’s power is boundless, but he finds that the demon king has kinder motives for world domination than he expected.
What does being a hero get you? Used and dumped by the people you save. That’s the message in these series.
Like The Rising of the Shield Hero, I’m Quitting Heroing is about a hero who was betrayed by the people he served. However, while it happened to Naofumi at the start of his adventure, it happened to Leo at the end of his.
After being betrayed, this leads the main character to ally himself with the outcasts (or the demon army he just defeated). However, while The Rising of the Shield Hero is adventure-focused, I’m Quitting Heroing starts with an overpowered main character and is more about him building up and improving the demon army he decimated before. It also doesn’t have a strong focus on revenge, but the main character definitely is a bit bitter at being forced out by the people he just saved.
The Kingdoms of Ruin
With the help of witches blessed upon humanity by the goddess, human civilization flourished for generations. However, as humanity adapted more independence from the magic of witches through innovations in science and technology, they began to violently persecute witches.
Leading the persecution and execution of witches is the ruthless Redia Empire. Adonis, a human boy, is forced to watch the brutal public execution of the kind witch who raised him and granted him access to use magic.
After years of isolation and imprisonment, Adonis is freed and begins his bloody vengeance on the empire.
If you enjoyed watching Naofumi fully crushed by such a sudden and devastating betrayal, The Kingdoms of Ruin offers the same, despite not being an isekai.
Both series start off with nice and normal main characters who have to endure a vicious betrayal by the royal family in the first episode. What comes after is a protagonist fueled by a desire for revenge and left extremely bitter.
However, while The Rising of the Shield Hero is often about getting stronger and feeling superior about saving the people that looked down on him, The Kingdoms of Ruin is more about actual violent revenge. It is definitely the more graphically violent series.
Ningen Fushin – Adventurers Who Don’t Believe in Humanity Will Save the World
Nick, Tiana, Zem, and Curran are all adventurers who have been pushed away, betrayed, and trampled on by their peers.
One night, these four paths cross in a tavern where they air their grievances to each other as well as the hobbies they took up to take the sting out of the way they were treated.
After a long night of drinking, the morning brings with it a bright idea – they should make their own adventuring party!
Together, they agree to team up, with everyone watching the group finances and an agreement to never interfere with each other’s hobbies outside of their jobs. However, for four people who find it hard to trust others, they now have to adjust to working together.
Ningen Fushin isn’t an isekai anime, but it still features the same adventure-based medieval fantasy experience of one. However, what Ningen Fushin and The Rising of the Shield Hero share most is being about the outcasts that no one else wanted to adventure with.
Both series feature characters that were betrayed and left with bitterness and serious trust issues because of it. However, the outcasts that make up the main party all find some sort of rehabilitation when adventuring together, learning to trust again.
So while they both start about bitter characters, they start to manifest a more pleasant party atmosphere as the series goes on.
For Fans of Champion of the Beast People
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.
You will find that all of the most popular isekai anime are easy recommendations for each other. This is, like in this case, because they offer rich, interesting, and well-built fantasy worlds where the quality of the world makes the adventure more interesting.
However, aside from just both being very popular isekai anime, The Rising of the Shield Hero and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime actually do have a few more core similarities. Both are about main characters in a new world as something perceived as quite weak, like shield user or a slime. However, while they are outcasted from traditional human society, they find their place among the beast people, making them into allies and building an increasingly grand adventure with them.
Tsukimichi – Moonlit Fantasy
Makoto Misumi is just an ordinary boy, but one night after learning his parents were from another world and guaranteed their travel to Japan by agreeing to give up what they care about most one day, he is transported to another world.
Unfortunately, the goddess of that world finds him ugly and in all ways repulsive.
She flings him to the corner of the world with her only gift being the ability to understand, speak, and write monster languages. With gifts from his previous worlds’ god, Tsukuyomi, and enhanced abilities from growing up in a non-magical world, Makoto sets out to make a life for himself.
Tsukimichi is a bit like The Rising of the Shield Hero if The Rising of the Shield Hero was a comedy.
Although Tsukimichi doesn’t follows a shield user, it does follow a main character outcasted by other humans because he apparently looks so repulsively ugly. However, as he is overpowered and can speak beast languages, he immediately becomes the champion of the beast people – even though he doesn’t want to be.
Like The Rising of the Shield Hero, Tsukimichi follows a main character who allies themselves with beast people and uses his skills for them. While it has some interesting adventures and flashy battles, Tsukimichi will always be a more comedic isekai than a grand adventure.
Beast Tamer
Rein is a beast tamer and member of the Hero’s Party. However, because beast taming is rather weak magic, he is used as more of a errand boy for them instead.
That all changes when they finally fire him and he is set adrift. Kicked out of the party, he ends up meeting a girl from one of the strongest species of beast people and tames her.
Together, they become magnificent adventurers while the Hero’s Party begins to realize that their previous success was all due to Rein’s support.
While not an isekai, like The Rising of the Shield Hero, Beast Tamer is about a main character who falls out with his previous adventuring party, but finds more fulfillment with his new beast people companions.
While The Rising of the Shield Hero is about a shield user that turns out to be OP, Beast Tamer is about a monster tamer who turns out to be the most overpowered monster tamer in the world, thus allowing him to tame beast girls.
While both series are technically about a guy and his harem, Beast Tamer is more typically “harem” than the “just so happens to be a party of all girls” harem that is The Rising of the Shield Hero.
For Fans of Shield Users
Absolute Duo
Individuals who can materialize weapons from their soul are called “Blazers,” and they attend Kouryou Academy High School in order to harness their abilities. However, each student needs a partner.
Tooru Kokonoe hopes to attain the power of a Blazer after the death of his sister, but at the opening ceremony, he is forced to duel against the person sitting next to him with the loser being expelled.
As Tooru prepares to give the match his all, it is not a weapon that manifests from his soul, but a shield, an irregularity which catches the attention of a foreign student named Julie Sigtuna.
While Absolute Duo and The Rising of a Shield Hero have very different plots and worlds, they are both about main characters that fight using shields.
In both anime, you have a main characters that can only use a shield and they need someone else to act as a weapon. That companion just happens to be a female sword user. They learn to fight together and you watch as their bond as a unit grow more concrete.
However, Absolute Duo remains a duo while The Rising of a Shield Hero has his list of battle companions grow over time into what looks suspiciously like a harem.
Tower of Druaga
Every few years when the sky-god Anu extends his protection, the monsters in the Tower of Druaga weaken and adventurers go forth for fame and fortune, trying to reach the top.
Like many adventurers, Jil is young and ready to make the push towards the top. While inexperienced in the Tower, his combat skills have the promise for him to go the distance.
Both The Rising of a Shield Hero and Tower of Druaga are about shield users, but Jil’s shield is both a shield and a sword.
What really binds these two series together is that both main characters are outcasted by their worlds, but they still have things they want to do in it. As such, they manage to form a party of less desirable adventurers to achieve their goals.
Bofuri – I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense
After receiving an invitation from a friend, Kaede Honjou starts playing the VRMMO game New World Online as a character named Maple.
However, in her desire to not get hurt, she puts all her stats in Vitality. This makes her move very slowly, unable to use magic, and get attacked by even the smallest creatures.
HIt does allow her impenetrable defense and her gear she finds while wandering grants her a one-hit counter skill.
And so, her adventures begin.
Do you like shield users that absolutely stomp more traditional adventurers? Both The Rising of the Shield Hero and Bofuri follow shield users whose OP powers come from their defensive skills. While both also use companions that are more offense-focused, eventually they become so overpowered that their defense is the best offense as well.
Of course, the big difference between The Rising of the Shield Hero and Bofuri is the tone. The Rising of the Shield Hero has lighter moments, but overall it is a serious adventure anime and Naofumi spends a good chunk of it as a bitter ball of rage. By comparison, Bofuri is a light-hearted, more comedic adventure that is prone to moments of seriousness, but is otherwise quite cute.
For Fans of Struggling to Grow Strong
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. However, in order to tackle the challenging monsters inside, adventurers join guilds of strong gods and goddesses.
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.
In both The Rising of a Shield Hero and Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon, the main characters are outcasts in society because they are perceived as weak. Neither being the type to give up, a good chunk of each series is dedicated to them training and slowly growing stronger as they meet (or buy) new companions to adventure with, each of those companions also some form of outcast.
While Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon isn’t an isekai anime, it is a fantasy anime with similar depth to the world building and has amassed quite a few seasons at this point, just like The Rising of the Shield Hero. This means that they have both become longer anime series that you can really get lost in for awhile.
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.
Do you like watching your isekai protagonists actually struggle instead of be wildly overpowered immediately? That is what both The Rising of the Shield Hero and Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash offer.
The Rising of the Shield Hero does focus on the struggle, but over time, it leaves that behind as he levels up his abilities. As Grimgar never really got a second season, it is fully about the struggle to become strong.
Alongside actually showing the grind to get stronger, both The Rising of the Shield Hero and Grimgar follow the outcast adventurer group that no one wanted and no one believed in. However, Grimgar never has them become the OP adventurer group like The Rising of the Shield Hero.
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.
Both The Rising of the Shield Hero and So I’m a Spider, So What are isekai that are about the struggle. The main characters start off so weak they are almost useless, but over the course of the first season, you watch them grow competent if not become overpowered.
However, while both series are isekai that do some unique things, So I’m a Spider So What is a bit more unique since it features a spider as the main character who needs to hunt other creatures to level up.
Alongside weak starting main characters, both series have that element of “other isekai’d individuals” who are given a much more preferable start, but actually become the weaker ones as the series goes on.
For Fans of Darker Fantasy Worlds
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.
While Goblin Slayer isn’t an isekai, it is a dark fantasy anime like The Rising of the Shield Hero where the main character is a man fueled by revenge. Essentially, Goblin Slayer is like The Rising of the Shield Hero if you took out all the finer details and left in all the rage.
Both series feature main characters that suffered a trauma, and their revenge is defined by that event. However, while The Rising of the Shield Hero has Naofumi slay many enemies and have many different adventures, Goblin Slayer is all about what it says a in the title – a guy that slays goblins obsessively.
Both series love brutality and while Goblin Slayer has a more narrow focus on just goblins, it does put all its effort into making fighting goblins feel unique each time.
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.
Although not an isekai, Berserk of Gluttony – like The Rising of the Shield Hero – gives the main character a unique power that helps it set itself apart from all the other darker, edgier fantasy series out there.
While Naofumi fights with a shield in The Rising of the Shield Hero and the darkness comes from his bitter betrayal, Berserk of Gluttony focuses on a main character that needs to kill things to not go into a berserk rage over time. The darkness in this series comes from not just the particularly double-edged nature of his power, but also from the fact that the “good guys,” in this case the Holy Knights, are not just protecting the people, but bullying the weak.
So both series present the outcasts to be the real heroes and the “good guys” to actually be the worst sort of people.
Re-Zero
When Subaru Natsuki goes out for a midnight snack run, he suddenly finds himself transported to another world. As a bewildered teen in a land of swords and magic, he wanders around and ends up attacked by thugs.
After being saved by a mysterious woman, he agrees to help her get back something that was stolen. Unfortunately, it ends in both their deaths. With his dying breath, he finds that he possesses the power of revival, escaping his death by the repeating the last few hours.
While both isekai anime, The Rising of the Shield Hero actually treats its main character quite nicely – outside of the betrayal, anyway. Re-Zero, on the other hand, has a main character that has to frequently experience his own death and is often submerged fully in the mental trauma of that.
The Rising of the Shield Hero and Re-Zero are both fairly popular isekai, both of which were made popular by not so much the characters, but the depth of detail in the world. Both series present interesting new takes on isekai stories by creating a main characters with unique powers, and then putting them in terrible situations.
If you like isekai that has a lot of dark moments, but also balances it out with a little comedy and cute waifus on occasion, Re-Zero is also that.
Overlord
As the final hour approaches 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 popular isekai anime, The Rising of the Shield Hero and Overlord don’t start off too similar to each other, but grow to be more similar over time.
The Rising of the Shield Hero starts off dark as the main character is betrayed and focused on revenge. Alternatively, Overlord starts off rather light as the main character is brought to life in a real version of his MMO as his evil MMO character and tries to stop his minions from doing evil things. However, both series grow more similar as they grow to be more about the politics of the world. Neither series completely abandons adventure, but as it goes on, it starts to become about shaping the politics of countries.
Furthermore, while The Rising of the Shield Hero gets a little lighter and less revenge-focused over time, Overlord actually gets darker over time as the main character becomes more and more like his evil avatar.
I’m Standing on a Million Lives
Bored with the world that surrounds him, loner Yotsuya Yusuke is one day transported to a new world with two girls from his class.
There, he finds out that they have been playing a game with ten increasingly difficult rounds. After beating each round, they get to pose a question to the game master before heading back home.
On this, the third round, Yusuke finds himself excited for the first time in a long time, only for his battle class to be rolled as a weak farmer.
Together with his teammates, they struggle to survive and move forward or face certain death.
While I’m Standing on a Million Lives is a less traditional version of isekai, it also tells a darker isekai tale like The Rising of the Shield Hero.
Both series focus on pretty normal guys who are made more bitter when they discover the reality of their situation. However, that bitterness and their intellect fuels them to thrive despite neither possessing a battle class that is particularly good at fighting.
While both series have the main characters accompanied by female companions that are more traditionally useful in battle, I’m Standing on a Million Lives often has the main character be less nice to them.
Do you have more anime recommendations like The Rising of the Shield Hero? Let fans know in the comments section below.
