Anime Like Mob Psycho 100: 12 Shows About Power and Growing Up

Shigeo Kageyama could level the city and would rather join the bodybuilding club. That is the joke and the thesis of Mob Psycho 100, and it is why the show’s most famous fights end with someone declining to fight. The animation is the other half: Bones let the drawings melt, smear, and go to paint-on-glass whenever Mob hits 100%, and nothing else on television looked like it.

Three seasons of 12, 13, and 12 episodes cover the whole manga, so there is no more Mob coming. The twelve shows below each keep one of its parts: the kid who wants to be ordinary, the con-man mentor, the spirits, the gags, or the animators showing off. The first four get the most words because they keep the most.

One-Punch Man, same author, opposite joke

The obvious one One-Punch Man

• 12-episode first season
• 36 across three
• manga continues

A hero so strong that every fight ends in one hit, and who is bored out of his mind about it.

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ONE wrote both, and they are the same idea from opposite ends. Mob has too much power and refuses to use it; Saitama has too much power and cannot find anything worth using it on. The first season, animated by Madhouse in 2015, is the one everyone means when they say it: the fight with the meteor, the fight with the Deep Sea King in the rain, and Genos being thrown through buildings every week. Mumen Rider, the hero with a bicycle, is Mob Psycho’s heart wearing a different costume.

Watch the first season and then decide. The second and third seasons were made by a different studio at a different level and the drop is visible. Expect gore played for laughs and a lot of shouting; the tenderness is there but it is rationed compared with Mob.

Dandadan, for the spectacle and the sweetness

For the animation Dandadan

• 12-episode first season
• a 12-episode second season exists
• manga continues

A girl who believes in ghosts and a boy who believes in aliens bet on who is right. Both are.

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Momo gets abducted by aliens, Okarun gets possessed by a ghost called Turbo Granny, and the first episode is a sprint. Science Saru animate it the way Bones animated Mob: constantly changing style, rubbery bodies, and a willingness to go abstract in the middle of a punch. The pair at the centre are teenagers who like each other and cannot say so, which is the Mob-and-Tsubomi thread with the volume turned up.

This is the pick if Mob’s fights were what you replayed and you want something that is still airing. The first episode contains an alien abduction scene played as sexual assault, for laughs, and the show’s humour keeps returning to that register; it is the main reason people bounce off. Under the crudeness it is unusually kind, and the arc about a possessed girl and her mother is as sad as anything in Mob.

Hinamatsuri, for the psychic who would rather not

For the deadpan Hinamatsuri

• 12 episodes
• manga complete

A telekinetic girl drops out of the sky into a yakuza's flat and refuses to do anything useful with her powers.

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Hina can throw a car with her mind and mostly uses it to avoid homework. Nitta, the gangster she lands on, becomes her exhausted father figure, and the show is about him being outmanoeuvred by a child with no interest in being special. It is the closest match here for Mob’s specific comedy: psychic power as an inconvenience, and adults who are worse people than the kid.

The B-plot about Anzu, another psychic who ends up homeless and learns to be grateful for a bowl of rice, is where the show finds its Mob-sized heart. Twelve episodes, no ending, and the finished manga goes a long way further. Some jokes about the bar hostess subplot are aimed at a teenager and have aged badly.

Ping Pong the Animation, for the argument about talent

For the question underneath Ping Pong the Animation

• 11 episodes
• complete

Two childhood friends, one gifted and bored, one hungry and ordinary, and a table tennis season that decides who they are.

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Smile has the talent and does not want it. Peco wants it and lost it. Masaaki Yuasa draws them in scratchy lines that split the screen into panels, and the finale is a match animated like a musical number. The connection to Mob is the question the show refuses to let go of: what do you owe a gift you never asked for?

Pick it if you rewatch Mob for Reigen’s speech in season one, the one about being a good person mattering more than being a strong one. Eleven episodes, an ending, and no supernatural anything. The art will put some people off in the first five minutes; give it two episodes.

Which one, in a line each

More, briefly

For the spectacle, darker Chainsaw Man

• 12 episodes
• a film continues it
• manga continues

A boy with a chainsaw dog for a heart, hired to kill devils, whose main ambition is to touch a woman.

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Mob is a boy learning restraint; Denji has none and sees no reason to want any. He has been selling his organs to pay off a dead father’s debts, and when his devil dog Pochita becomes his heart he joins a government devil-hunting unit mostly because the job comes with bread, jam, and Makima, a boss he cannot read. What carries over is the ordinary kid with an absurd power and fights that keep curdling into jokes. The biggest difference is warmth: Chainsaw Man is deliberately cold, and nobody like Reigen is coming to help. Twelve episodes, continued by the 2025 film Reze Arc, with the manga still running. Extremely violent, with body horror throughout.

For Bones at full tilt Blood Blockade Battlefront

• 12 episodes
• a 12-episode second season exists

New York has been swallowed by a bubble full of monsters, and a boy with magic eyes joins the agency that keeps the lid on.

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Bones, the studio behind Mob, doing colour and speed instead of paint and smear. Leonardo Watch is a photographer with no fighting ability who was handed the All-Seeing Eyes of the Gods at the cost of his little sister’s sight, and he ends up running errands for Libra, a secret society led by the enormous and unfailingly polite Klaus. As with Mob, the hero is the weakest person in the room and the most decent. The plot is loose; the set pieces are the point. Twelve episodes with a story of their own, then the 12-episode & Beyond, which is more episodic.

For the art Mononoke

• 12 episodes
• three films continue it

A medicine seller exorcises spirits in Edo Japan, drawn like a woodblock print that has come alive.

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Five short horror stories in the most striking style on this page. The Medicine Seller, who never gives a name, cannot draw his sword until he learns a spirit’s form, truth and reason, so every story is an interrogation of the living; the first opens with a pregnant woman begging for a room at a full inn. It shares Mob’s idea that spirits are problems caused by people, and handles it with none of the jokes and none of the growing up. Each story ends within its own episodes, and the films carry on with a new look. Slow and strange; watch one episode before committing.

For the drawing Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

• 12 episodes
• manga continues

Three schoolgirls start an animation club, and the show animates their daydreams as they have them.

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Yuasa again. If you cared about how Mob was drawn, this is a show about why drawings move. Asakusa fills sketchbooks with imaginary machines, Mizusaki is a teenage model who secretly wants to animate how people move, and Kanamori, tall and relentless, runs the club’s money with Reigen’s hustle and a spreadsheet. When they plan a scene, the show turns into their pencil drawings and they walk around inside them. There are no powers and no fights; the tension is deadlines and budgets. Twelve episodes that reach a satisfying stopping point, from a manga that keeps going.

For the kid alone March comes in like a lion

• 22-episode first season
• 44 across two
• manga continues

A teenage professional shogi player lives alone in a flat in Tokyo, until a family of three sisters adopts him at dinnertime.

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Mob’s loneliness with the spectacle removed and the kindness kept. Rei Kiriyama turned professional in middle school, lives in a bare flat by the river, and gets fed by the Kawamoto sisters, Akari, Hinata and little Momo, who treat him as family before he knows how to accept it. What it shares with Mob is a gifted boy who suspects his gift has cost him everyone. It is heavier: depression is central, and the second season spends a long arc on bullying. Shaft’s visuals are as inventive as Bones’s. Two seasons of 22 episodes each, and the manga is still running, so it stops rather than ends.

For the mentor, inverted Barakamon

• 12 episodes
• manga complete

A calligrapher punches a critic, gets exiled to a tiny island, and is adopted by its children.

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Reigen is a fraud who becomes a good teacher. Handa is a real artist who has to learn from a seven-year-old. Seishū Handa punches an elderly exhibition director who calls his work textbook-perfect and dull, and his father sends him to the Gotō Islands off Nagasaki to cool off, where Naru and the village children treat his house as a playground. The overlap with Mob is growing up by spending time around people who do not care how talented you are. There is no action at all, and the comedy is gentle village farce. Twelve episodes that end warmly, from a manga that has finished.

For the gags Nichijou: My Ordinary Life

• 26 episodes
• complete

Three schoolgirls, a robot, a professor aged eight, and the most over-animated sketch comedy ever made.

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If Mob’s sight gags and reaction faces were your favourite part, this is nothing but those, made by Kyoto Animation with a blockbuster’s budget. A headmaster wrestles a deer, a dropped piece of toast becomes a disaster epic, and Nano, a robot built by an eight-year-old genius, wants to pass as a normal schoolgirl despite the wind-up key in her back. Nano’s wish is Mob’s wish, played for laughs. The difference is that there is no story and nothing at stake, and the pace can exhaust you in a long sitting. Twenty-six episodes of sketches with nothing to finish; watch a few at a time.

For the weird Dorohedoro

• 12 episodes
• manga complete

A man with a lizard head hunts the sorcerer who cursed him, in a slum where magic is a form of pollution.

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Ugly, funny, and affectionate about its monsters in the way Mob is affectionate about its spirits. Caiman has a lizard’s head and no memory, and his method of finding the sorcerer responsible is to put captured sorcerers’ heads in his mouth, where a man living in his throat decides whether this is the one. Between hunts he eats gyoza at Nikaido’s restaurant, the Hungry Bug, and the sorcerers hunting him back turn out to be a likeable workplace comedy of their own. Where Mob grows up, Caiman just gets bloodier. Twelve episodes cover an early stretch of a manga that has finished, so there is no ending. CG that takes an episode to accept.

If the action was the point

Nothing above will replace a proper shōnen fight series, and you should not pretend the “deeper theme” was your reason if the fights were. Our Jujutsu Kaisen guide covers modern action with real stakes, and the Haikyu!! guide covers competition without powers. If what you want is a show that is actually finished, like Mob, the completed anime guide is sorted by that.

Open the Finder with Mob Psycho 100 selected for the catalogue’s own list. The percentage measures shared tags, so a 90% match with no sense of humour is possible; Yuki’s line under the card is the better guide.