There is no more iconic adventure for a fantasy anime than a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl. Who knows what lies in its depths? Treasure? Powerful monsters? Some lady chained up there for several centuries?
You can make pretty good guesses, but a dungeon’s content in a fantasy anime can occasionally surprise you. If you are looking for fantasy anime recommendations where exploring a dungeon plays a major role, check these out.
Best Dungeon Crawling Anime
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?
There are few finer fantasy anime for dungeon crawling than Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon. The series takes place in a town that is built upon a mutli-layered dungeon that adventurers can spend their whole lives delving into.
The series does well to continue to make the dungeon feel unique as the main character also grows in power and gains unique companions. It takes a lot of effort to keep something that could just be a lot of stone corridors interesting, but they’ve done it.
Delicious in Dungeon
While Delicious in Dungeon is very much a food anime, the sheer fantasy worldbuilding on display in this series really steals the show back away from the tasty dishes.
Delicious in Dungeon is framed as a story of dungeon-delving adventurers trying to rescue their lost party member after she was eaten by a red dragon inside a mysterious never-fully-explored dungeon. Low on money and to save time, they embrace the taboo of eating dungeon monsters instead of packing provisions.
While this series could have just been about cooking real food with occasionally fictional fantasy ingredients, it manifests so much more depth through how intricately the dungeon’s ecosystem is developed as well as a certain depth of plot as things progress.
This is truly a must-watch for the adventurous – foodies or otherwise.
The Dungeon of Black Company
This fantasy comedy puts a fun new spin on dungeon crawling – turning it into a business.
Every dungeon crawling anime has at least some emphasis on how profitable dungeon crawling is, but The Dungeon of Black Company takes it to a whole new level.
Motivated by wanting to return to his life of being a layabout that was taken away from him, the main character works to try to take over the black company that is mining a dangerous dungeon and forcing him to do dangerous, but ultimately advantageous work.
This series is an excellent comedy that takes a lot of pokes at Japan’s “black company” culture and exploitative labor practices. What is more impressive is that it finds a way to keep the business activities in that dungeon unique and interesting, even if you really just keep watching to see the main character be comically scummy.
Dungeon People
This list is populated by series of adventurers bravely exploring dangerous dungeons, but fantasy anime has come so far with dungeon crawling stories that we are now approaching the time when they feel the need to be twisted up.
Dungeon People follows an adventurer who reaches the eighth floor of a dangerous ten-floor dungeon. There, she accidentally breaks a wall during a fight and meets the people who act as administrators and caretakers of the dungeon.
From refilling loot chests to populating floors with level-appropriate enemies, Dungeon People explores – not dungeon crawling – but dungeon administration.
Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World
I’ll be real with you, despite the title, this series has profoundly little “harems” or “labyrinths” in it.
The other members of the harem are rushedly added near the end and it seems like it would rather focus half of every episode showing the main character wrapping up each day of adventure with new lewd adventures in the bedroom instead of showing you better adventures.
That said, the primary activity in the series is exploring dungeons. It just isn’t the most interesting thing because it often feels like they put the most effort into the sex scenes.
The Strongest Tank’s Labyrinth Raids -A Tank with a Rare 9999 Resistance Skill Got Kicked from the Hero’s Party-
The Strongest Tank’s Labyrinth Raids is pretty much about what it says in its ridiculously overly long title.
In The Strongest Tank’s Labyrinth Raids, the tank main character is kicked out of the hero’s party for, allegedly, slowing the party down. He goes home, has his abilities appraised, and finds out he is actually super strong, but didn’t realize it. Now that he can appropriately utilize his abilities, he starts exploring dungeons to find a treasure that can heal his sick sister.
While about, as the title says, the strongest tank’s labyrinth raids, this is the kind of low-effort fantasy that is best enjoyed with low expectations.
The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter
The title sounds really hopeful for a good dungeon crawler, right?
Well, no. This is another Harem in the Labyrinth in Another World affair in which the title is not greatly applicable to the content of the series.
The main character does enter a hidden dungeon that only he can enter in the first episode and occasionally afterwards, but much of the series focuses on him adventuring outside of it. There is, however, a moment near the very end of the series where there is actually a need to venture further into the dungeon in an attempt to save the lady trapped inside there who gave him her powers so he could be an adventurer.
So if not about hidden dungeons, what is it about? Adventuring and doing lewd things with a harem for plot-contrived reasons, mostly. It is an ecchi harem show more than anything else, just to temper any expectations.
Magi: Labyrinth of Magic
While Magi moves away from it as its plot unfolds, much of the beginning of Magi was about the main characters looking to explore a dungeon in order to capture the wealth and power inside.
Labyrinth of Magic starts off with a dungeon arc and ends with one too, so don’t fret during the middle when they seem less focused on dungeon exploration.
Dungeons in Magi serve as a way for the very shounen-style heroes to often get increased power due to the magic relics within. So they aren’t as complex and dangerous as the legends in the show make them seem, but they are interesting for what can be discovered inside.
Shachibato
This series has a rather unique set up for a dungeon crawling anime. It takes place in a world where a goddess opened a series of gates to different dungeons.
As such, companies established themselves to explore these dungeons to harvest a specific resource and other treasures. After his father disappears, the main character takes over his father’s business.
The series is based off a smartphone game, and like is the case with many anime based off mobile games, the characters are flimsy stereotypes.
However, it is interesting watching the main character try to keep his company from floundering while also having to balance exploring dangerous dungeons. If nothing else, it is a cozier fantasy anime with light comedy.
Tower of Druaga
There are certainly objectively better anime series on here in terms of visual quality, but in terms of dungeon crawling content, Tower of Druaga is among the top-tier there.
The entire premise of the show is that at certain times of the year, a great looming tower becomes mysteriously less dangerous than usual, so groups of adventurers probe the tower – some to exterminate the weakened monsters within and other seeking the treasure rumored to be at the very top.
This series takes place almost exclusively in the dungeon with each floor meaning new dangers and new opportunities.
Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash
In the now recently over-saturated fantasy genre, Grimgar still remains a lovely hidden gem for those willing to give it a chance.
It is a series that highlights how difficult it can be to be an adventurer when you don’t have the physical ability or temperament for it, but teamwork can get you pretty far.
Much of Grimgar follows the “unwanted” members who didn’t get picked for other adventuring groups who ended up making a group of their own.
They struggle hard just to get by and even kill weak monsters. However, by the end, when they have gotten on more stable footing, they do start probing into a dungeon that puts their newly honed skills to the test.
So I’m a Spider, So What?
This series is a bit of a twist on things, in many different ways. Instead of following adventurers, it follows a girl who was reincarnated into a fantasy world, but reincarnated as a very low level cave spider creature.
Much of her time is spent in a dungeon, cowering from other creatures at first, then cowering from adventurers, but all the while gaining more combat strength and evolving.
So, in essence, this is a dungeon crawler about a creature in a dungeon rather than an adventurer delving into it.
Made in Abyss
While not as quintessentially fantasy as some other anime series on this list, what is the Abyss if not a giant dungeon waiting to be delved into?
In Made in Abyss, the main character dreams of exploring the many dangerous levels of the Abyss like her mother. Many people have tried, and many have died trying to reach the bottom. Despite the danger, she is afforded the opportunity to try when she meets a unique companion who came from deeper inside the Abyss.
A large potential caveat is that while Made in Abyss really captures the spirit of discovery and adventure that you want in a dungeon crawler anime, it is rather horrific. Instead of slaying bosses with magnificent swords and sorcery, you instead watch the degrading morals and various horrors that occur as you venture deeper.
A Nobody’s Way Up to an Exploration Hero
With pitifully weak main character dungeons that are often just rocky hallways, A Nobody’s Way Up to an Exploration Hero has rough, slow start. However, it quickly manifests the cute waifus I guess it thought it needed to succeed.
In A Nobody’s Way Up to an Exploration Hero, the main character wants to be a brave dungeon explorer like a man he saw on TV as a child. Unfortunately, he is not especially good at it and ill-equipped to do much. However, he manages to find two powerful summons that help augment his combat abilities enough to start seriously leveling up.
Sword Art Online
Being trapped in an VRMMO game, Sword Art Online really highlights the many different things the players get up to. Some start lives as merchants in towns. Some forms groups and adventure. A select few engage in player killing.
Although it highlights the number of ways the players pass their time, the main character, being a beta tester, dedicates his time to growing powerful and clearing all 100 floors of the game so that he can finally log out. These floors are much like a complex dungeon, and that was part of the initial charm of the series.
Unfortunately, as that MMO-style fantasy VRMMO game is only the focus for the first season of the show, and the dungeon crawling bit is only applicable to the first half of that first season. Sword Art Online remains a decently good fantasy series throughout, but moves away from being a dungeon crawler anime.
Log Horizon
Like Sword Art Online, Log Horizon is another anime series about players stuck in their MMO and unable to log out. Unlike Sword Art Online, it focuses on one singular game the entire series, so it is often a better experience for those interested in the MMO setting.
Like any good MMO, the one presented in Log Horizon has a number of dungeons. Log Horizon also puts an strong emphasis on strategy in battle, with its main character being a strategist. So it isn’t always just busting into a dungeon and tackling whatever comes their way, they prefer to go about it with a plan first.
Although, Log Horizon’s emphasis on strategy does occasionally mean a pause to the action and a focus on things like politics and economics, but that might actually be a selling point to some.
The Unwanted Undead Adventurer
Similar to what Grimgar did with isekai where it made the whole experience grounded in the actual realistic struggle of being an adventurer, The Unwanted Undead Adventurer – while not an isekai – takes a more grounded approach to adventuring.
The Unwanted Undead Adventurer follows a middling dungeon explorer who finds a new passage – and promptly gets eaten by a dragon.
He wakes up as an undead and discovers that, by fighting other creatures in the dungeon, he can evolve through the ranks of undead. Hoping to go from skeleton to an undead that is a little more fleshy and human-like, he levels and helps other adventurers who visit the dungeon.
While not the flashiest or most innovative fantasy anime, The Unwanted Undead Adventurer doesn’t shy away from the gritty or sinister realities of being an undead and keeps its combat firmly rooted in realistic combat abilities despite the fantasy nature of the protagonist.
Arifureta – From Commonplace to World’s Strongest
Most fantasy anime starts with characters gaining the strength necessary to conquer a difficult dungeon. Not Arifureta, though. It starts with an overly weak character getting betrayed while supporting his comrades in a dungeon, and being unceremoniously pushed to the very bottom of it.
At the bottom of a pit, you either grow stronger or you die. His bitterness fuels the process and he eventually gets strength – and a new companion – that help him move forward.
While Arifureta sees its main character out of that initial dungeon in the first few episodes, it won’t be the last dungeon you see in the series. There is, admittedly, a fair bit of time in between dungeon crawls, though.
My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1
In truth, the most “unique” part of My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1 is probably how the world is set up. In the series, most items are obtained by going into various dungeons throughout the world and killing monsters.
Each floor of every dungeon only has one enemy type, and those enemies only drop one thing. So floor one enemies drop bean sprouts, floor two enemies drop carrots, ect. It is how people make both money and get food.
So in My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1, dungeon crawling is really a profession for a lot of people, and the stronger you are, the higher you go. However, the series is more light-hearted and often more focused on food and friendship than big battles.
Solo Leveling
Solo Leveling did something quite unique the with fantasy dungeon crawling anime experience by setting it in a modern world instead of a pure fantasy one.
In Solo Leveling, gates to fantasy dungeons suddenly appeared. If not cleared in a timely manner, the dangerous creatures could flow out into our modern world. At the same time, some individuals began manifesting magic and combat aptitude. Thus, the profession of dungeon adventuring for fun, profit, and public safety was born!
The series follows a struggling adventurer of the lowest rank who, after a dungeon run turns deadly, manifests the previously unheard of ability to level up.
Do you know more fantasy anime recommendations about dungeon crawling? Let fans know in the comments section below.
