Anime Like Vinland Saga: 10 Shows About War and Its Cost

Start here Berserk (1997)

• 25 episodes
• ends on a cliffhanger
• the manga continues

A mercenary called Guts is recruited by Griffith, the young commander of the Band of the Hawk, and spends years fighting his wars.

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What does a revenge story do once the revenge is gone? Vinland Saga takes two seasons to answer. The first, 24 episodes from 2019, is a war story about Thorfinn, a boy who fights for Askeladd, the man who killed his father, so he can earn a duel with him. The second, another 24 episodes from 2023, puts Thorfinn on a farm and asks what is left of a person whose only skill is killing. Your next show depends on which of those halves you would rather rewatch.

If you have only seen the first season, Vinland Saga Season 2 is the real answer to “what next”, and nothing below replaces it. Expect almost no battles for most of its run. For everything after that, Berserk is the closest match and the one to start with, as long as you are ready for how it ends.

Berserk (1997), for the mercenary company

Guts arrives as a lone sellsword with a sword too big for him, and he meets Griffith the way Thorfinn meets Askeladd: across a battlefield, then in a duel he loses. Griffith is prettier and more idealistic than Askeladd, and every bit as dangerous to the people who love him. The Band of the Hawk becomes a family, and the 1997 series spends most of its 25 episodes on the years they fight together, winning a war for a kingdom that looks down on them.

The fit with Vinland Saga’s first season is exact: a war fought for pay, a leader with an ambition he keeps hidden, and a young fighter who has handed his purpose to someone else. One scene, Griffith explaining to a princess by a palace fountain what he thinks a friend is while Guts overhears in the dark, does to Guts what Askeladd’s contempt does to Thorfinn. Susumu Hirasawa’s score, especially the track “Forces”, carries half the atmosphere.

The warning is serious. The series stops at the worst possible moment, in an episode that includes a graphic sexual assault, and nothing afterwards is animated in the same style. The Golden Age Arc films of 2012 and 2013 retell the same story and end at the same point; the 2016 series picks up afterwards in CG most viewers find hard going. The manga is where the story continues. Content notes: sexual violence, torture and gore throughout.

Dororo, for what violence costs other people

For the cost of violence Dororo

• 24 episodes
• complete

A warlord trades his newborn son's body to twelve demons in exchange for a prosperous domain. The son survives and starts taking it back.

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Hyakkimaru is born without skin, eyes, ears, limbs or a voice, and grows up with prosthetics and a sense for demons that lets him fight blind. Each demon he kills returns one part of him. Dororo, a sharp-tongued child thief, latches on to him on the road and does the talking, since he cannot.

The link to Vinland Saga arrives in the middle of the series. Every demon Hyakkimaru kills loosens the bargain that keeps his father’s lands fed and safe, and the people who pay are farmers who never knew a deal was made. That is Season 2’s question moved to feudal Japan: who else pays for your fighting? One small choice shows how carefully it is made. When Hyakkimaru gets his hearing back, ordinary sound is agony, and the show makes you sit in the noise with him.

MAPPA and Tezuka Productions adapted Osamu Tezuka’s 1960s manga, which was left unfinished, and wrote a real ending for it. The first half runs close to demon of the week; the second is a family tragedy. Content notes: child death, famine and a great deal of blood.

Golden Kamuy, for the soldier who came home

For the history Golden Kamuy

• 12-episode first season
• five seasons, 62 episodes, the last in 2026

A veteran of the Russo-Japanese War and an Ainu girl hunt a hoard of stolen gold whose map is tattooed on escaped convicts.

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Saichi Sugimoto came through the worst fighting of the Russo-Japanese War by refusing to die, which earned him the nickname Immortal Sugimoto. Back in Hokkaido he is panning for gold to keep a promise to a dead friend when he hears about a hoard taken from the Ainu, and about the prisoners carrying its map on their skin. Asirpa, an Ainu girl who can track anything, saves him from a bear and makes him her partner.

The setup will feel familiar after Vinland Saga: a real historical period, a man whose war never quite ended, and a trail full of killers who all want the same prize. Golden Kamuy fills that trail with Lieutenant Tsurumi, an army officer who covers a war wound in his skull with an enamel plate, and a still-living Hijikata Toshizo, the Shinsengumi commander who in real history died in 1869. Asirpa’s lessons in Ainu hunting and cooking run through all of it, and Sugimoto’s face when offered raw squirrel brain is a running highlight.

Where it parts from Vinland Saga is tone. It swings between brutal violence and comedy that is bawdy and deliberately absurd, and the first season’s bears are CG and look it. Five seasons have aired, the fifth titled Final Season. Content notes: graphic violence, animal butchery, and nudity played for laughs.

Kingdom, for the war on a bigger map

For the battles Kingdom

• 38-episode first season
• six seasons, 155 episodes
• the manga continues

A war orphan in China's Warring States period swears to become the greatest general under heaven, and ends up serving a boy king.

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Shin and his friend Hyou are orphan servants who spar with wooden swords every day and dream of commanding armies. Hyou is taken to the palace first, and what happens to him in the opening episode sends Shin into the service of Ei Sei, the young king of Qin who will become China’s first emperor.

This is the pick if the battles at the start of Vinland Saga were what you loved: formations, flanking, and generals who read terrain the way Askeladd reads people. Later seasons put tens of thousands of soldiers on screen and make each commander’s style legible. It also shares a question with Canute’s storyline, whether a ruler can end war by winning it, and Ei Sei’s answer is to conquer everyone.

Two warnings. The 2012 first season animates its crowds with crude CG that makes the early battles look like an old video game, and the animation improves steadily in later seasons. And Kingdom likes war more than Vinland Saga does, so its heroics can feel uncomplicated after Thorfinn. Content notes: mass battlefield death and executions.

More, briefly

For the young ruler The Heroic Legend of Arslan

• 25 episodes
• an 8-episode sequel, Dust Storm Dance
• the story is unfinished

A gentle 14-year-old prince loses his kingdom in a single battle and has to build an army from the few who stay loyal.

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Arslan is a soft, awkward royal child whom everyone expects to be useless, which will remind you of Canute early on. The knight Daryun and the strategist Narsus, who would rather be painting (badly), give it the pleasure of watching clever men plan. The manga it adapts is by Hiromu Arakawa of Fullmetal Alchemist, from Yoshiki Tanaka’s novels, so the faces may look familiar. The anime stops partway. Content: battlefield violence and slavery.

For war seen from both sides Attack on Titan

• 25-episode first season
• four seasons in total
• complete

Humanity lives inside three walls to hide from giants that eat people, until a larger giant kicks a hole in the outer one.

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If Season 2 made you think about whose side a story is on, Attack on Titan builds its entire second half around that question. Eren Yeager begins as the angriest boy in his town, and the show spends a decade testing whether his anger is justified. Wit Studio made its first three seasons, as they made Vinland Saga’s first. We have a separate guide to anime like Attack on Titan. Content: characters eaten alive, and war crimes.

For the kindness Ranking of Kings

• 23 episodes
• a 10-episode side season follows

Bojji, a deaf prince too small to lift a sword, wants to become the greatest king in the world. His only friend is a shadow.

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Wit Studio again, and the storybook art is bait: underneath sit a murderous succession fight and a court that expects Bojji to fail. Bojji and Kage, the last survivor of a clan of assassins, have the patient friendship Thorfinn spends Season 2 learning to value. The second half is darker than the first episodes suggest, and The Treasure Chest of Courage adds 10 side episodes. Content: violence, and a parent’s death early on.

For the long view To Your Eternity

• 20 episodes
• seasons of 20 and 22 follow

An immortal being arrives on Earth as an orb, takes the shape of a wolf and then a boy, and learns what being human means by losing people.

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The first episode, about a boy waiting alone in an abandoned settlement for his people to return, is as sad as television gets. After that the show becomes a question about pain and attachment stretched over lifetimes, Season 2’s question given far more time to work. The first season is the strongest, and the later ones are uneven. Content: the deaths of children and animals, and captivity.

For an adult warrior Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit

• 26 episodes
• complete as an adaptation of the first novel

Balsa, a spear-wielding bodyguard in her thirties, is hired to protect a young prince whose own father wants him dead.

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Balsa has sworn to save eight lives to make up for eight that were taken for her sake, which is as close as anime gets to the promise at the heart of Thorfinn’s second season. Production I.G’s 2007 series is patient and physical, with superb spear fights and a long middle stretch about hiding through a winter. It treats peace as something that takes work. Content: fight violence.

For the lighter touch Samurai Champloo

• 26 episodes
• complete

A wild fighter, a disciplined ronin and a teenage waitress cross Edo-period Japan looking for a samurai who smells of sunflowers.

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Shinichiro Watanabe’s road series has Vinland Saga’s travelling swordsmen and none of the weight. Mugen fights like a breakdancer, Jin like a textbook, and the soundtrack is hip-hop from Nujabes and others. It is the right show after Season 2, when you want swords without a sermon, and it finishes its story in 26 episodes. Content: sword violence.

Which to start tonight

If you have one evening, start Dororo; its first episode will tell you whether you want all 24. If you have a month, watch Berserk and then Golden Kamuy. If a finished story matters, Dororo, Moribito and Samurai Champloo all end, while Berserk, Kingdom and Arslan leave you with a manga to track down. Our anime with real endings list has more of the first kind.

After Vinland Saga, anime like Attack on Titan covers the darker war stories, and if Dororo’s demons were the draw, anime like Demon Slayer has more of them. For the quiet, grieving side of Season 2, try anime like Frieren. For the long list, open the Finder with Vinland Saga selected.