9 Action Anime Where They Fight With Summoned Familiars

Why do your fighting when you can summon a creature – or person – to do your fighting for you?

Most popular in shows like Pokemon or Digimon, this is not a foreign concept in anime, but it comes in many forms.

What they all have in common is that the characters have ability to summon other creatures via some sort of bond that are able to fight. It allows a series to put in more flash as these familiars can often perform action way above the characters that summon them.

If you are looking for anime recommendations where battles are fought by these summoned familiars, then give these a try.

Best Anime Where They Fight With Summoned Familiars

Fate / Stay

An integral part of the Fate / Stay series is that each participant has a sort of battle partner called a Servant. They are bound to one person or family to serve them in the Holy Grail Wars.

These servants are often historical or mythical figures, plucked from their era when summoned. Of course, you will note some differences that are typically explained if you stick with the Fate / Stay series long enough.

The Servants all come with incredible abilities, but unfortunately, if the Servants lose their battles, their Masters are often not long for the world afterward.

While Fate / Stay Night is the main branch, it has many, many offshoot series, and a good portion of them deal in summoned familiars as well. As such, this is a staple for the fan interested in battle anime with summoned familiars as well as fans of historical and mythical figures alike.

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure

While Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency, the first two seasons of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, focus on a sort of energy-based martial art called Hamon, Stardust Crusaders, the third season, introduces Stands.

Stands are a sort of physical manifestation of a person’s soul, and each come with unique, often battle-based abilities. From Stardust Crusaders onwards, Stands are the major element in all of the fights in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

In each season the Stands grow in power, and each season they often grow broken in the scale of their powers. That’s just one more drop in the large bucket of “bizarre” that is Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

Ajin

While the Ajin aren’t as interesting as some other summoned creatures on this list, visually at least, they come with serious powers.

Not only can Ajin decimate humans and fight other Ajin, but they also provide serious benefits to their hosts that keep them alive.

Fairy Gone

In Fairy Gone, faeries posses animals, and when an organ is taken from that animal and put in a human, the fairies can be summoned as a tool of war.

In the series, the war they were used in is over and now those with fairy abilities are outcasted and wreaking general havoc. As you would expect, it takes fairy soldiers to fight fairy soldiers.

Shaman King

In a similar vein to Pokemon, Shaman King is about Shamans who can summon spirits to fight for them.

These shamans in the series are engaged in a sort of free-for-all tournament that happens every 500 years. The one who wins gets to become the king and can control the Great Spirit, something that holds the power to remake the world as they please.

Persona 5 / Persona 4 / Persona 3 The Animation

Persona is all about kids summoning Personas to fight for them. These creatures are the inner personification of their soul and come with magnificent power. Typically, a person able to call a Persona only gets one, but each main character in each Persona series is capable of calling multiple different Personas.

Persona 4 and Persona 5 are full anime adaptions while Persona 3 is sadly just a movie trilogy. While the anime adaptations are fine, Persona’s fan base is built by the games, long life-consuming JRPGs though they may be.

Baka and Test

This series might have been just your standard school comedy about a class of misfits trying to become the top ranking class, but they added a little spice to the formula.

Not only is academic performance important on this quest, but their academics affect how powerful their summoned avatars are that they use to settle disputes.

It adds a little bit of action and strategy to the mix that actually ends up working really well, which has caused this to be quite the well-liked school life series.

Kiba

In Kiba, a boy is dragged to another world by a spirit.

In this alternate world, some are able to produce shards from their bodies in order to cast elemental attacks. However, they can also produce special shards that can summon spirits to fight.

The rarest of these shards summon powerful key spirits and there are those who seek to gather them for great power.

It can be said that Kiba is a bit like a less marketable Pokemon, because it is extremely similar. The monsters just aren’t particularly creative. You know, like modern Pokemon generations, but not puns of extremely mundane objects.

Zatch Bell

Zatch Bell is a rather underrated shounen series, but has fairly similar battle premise to Pokemon or Digimon. The main character becomes battle partner with a doll-like creature known as a Mamudo who is actually a demon that is fighting in a tournament where the last one standing is decided to be the king of their people.

Instead of interesting looking monster creatures like in Pokemon or Digimon, the dolls in Zatch Bell are all some form of humanoid, more akin to Shaman King.

While not summoned by the human, the Mamudo in Zatch Bell do require human partners to battle and act very much like other familiars found on this list.

Do you have more anime recommendations for those that like summoned creatures in anime? Let fans know in the comments section below.