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Spiritual Successor in Anime & Manga.

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    A-E 
  • Aggretsuko can be considered the closest thing to an anime adaptation of Dilbert. Both franchises are workplace comedies that revolve around the hard life of office workers in different countries (the United States for Dilbert, Japan for Aggretsuko), and make satirical jabs at workplace life, the corporate world, and the politics affecting them.
  • Air Gear is a Spiritual Successor to the Jet Set Radio games. (The Korean MMORPG Street Gears Online appears to be a Spiritual Successor to both.)
  • Becoming Her Lover for the Sake of Love has many parallels with Citrus, minus the Flirty Stepsiblings aspect. In both, the Student Council President, who's pressured to become her grandfather's successor as head of the school she goes to after a member of her family(For Citrus' Mei, it's her father, for Becoming's Asako, it's her older sister) disappointed him, ends up falling for a free-spirited student who's very different from her.
  • Berserk:
    • Kentaro Miura cited several works as his influences, but the series seems to take the most from Guin Saga, Devilman, Violence Jack, The Rose of Versailles and Fist of the North Star. Kenshiro and Lady Oscar from the last two in particular respectively served as the inspiration for Guts and Griffith according to Miura himself.
    • The manga can be considered an adaptation of multiple of William Shakespeare’ plays all mixed together. The Golden Age Arc is more or less an adaptation of Macbeth with Griffith scheming and killing his way into becoming royalty after a supernatural prophecy the same as the Scottish General, with Guts carrying out the “stricken with guilt and hallucinating the people he’s murdered” part. Much of Guts’ character mirrors Othello (albeit Casca is closer appearance-wise), with both soldiers being manipulated by a friend they trust (Iago and Griffith) but said friends are ultimately hatefully jealous of them and do their best to tear the protagonist’ lives apart. Both Guts and Othello also attack the women they love, though unlike Desdemona, Casca survives. On a lighter note, arcs like the Lost Children and Elfhelm are influenced by a A Midsummer Night's Dream with Puck taking his name from that play’s mischievous fairy.
    • Berserk is also this for Conan the Barbarian (Miura having admitted so) with multiple overlapping concepts such as the Temperate Berserker with Hidden Depths who’s up against Eldritch Abomination God of Evil antagonists in a constant fight against fate. Guts is also more accurate to the literary description of Conan being a dark-haired warrior in full armour who fights Lightning Bruiser-style. Furthermore, several iconic imagery and scenes from Conan such as the Out with a Bang demoness encounter, snake monsters, pagan orgies and Blasphemous Boast all occur in Berserk in their own fashion.
    • Surprisingly Berserk is also this for Evil Dead with numerous references to the film series, particularly Army of Darkness given the Medieval European Fantasy setting and the protagonist being an half-insane demon slaying badass who’s got a mechanic hand after a Life-or-Limb Decision. The localisation of the manga even got involved with Guts saying “Groovy” upon getting said metal hand.
    • Thanks to the God Hand and their Cenobite-inspired designs, the series is often considered the best Hellraiser manga in existence.
  • If you're looking for a Grand Theft Auto manga/anime, you could do a lot worse than Black Lagoon.
  • Bleach seems to be a Spiritual Successor to YuYu Hakusho, and one can notice several similarities as they read through both works. There should honestly be a list.
  • Blue Submarine No. 6 is a Spiritual Successor to Space Battleship Yamato, except that the bad guys are the ones that move around in a refurbished battleship.
  • Bokura no Hentai is this to Wandering Son. Both are Seinen series with surprisingly cute art styles for their maturity level and each have a transgender The Cutie character who has sported a bob haircut. The former is overall darker though and is a deconstruction of the Otokonoko Genre.
  • Brave Beats is this to Tribe Cool Crew as both are similar-looking dance animes and aired in the same timeslot.
  • The Brave Series to Transformers Victory.
  • Brynhildr in the Darkness can be considered a successor to Elfen Lied, seeing as they are both written by Lynn Okamoto, contain cute supernaturally empowered girls who are mistreated in the name of science, gory fights and have harem undertones.
  • Captain Earth towards Star Driver. It helps that both series feature the same staff of people (except for character design) and concepts from the latter show are used again in the former, most prominently the usage and explanation of the term "libido". However, Captain Earth has an overall more serious tone than Star Driver did.
  • Cardfight!! Vanguard is considered a Spiritual Successor to the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise; it centres around children playing a Collectible Card Game, created by Akira Itou — Kazuki Takahashi's apprentice, who also worked on the Yu-Gi-Oh! R manga with him.
  • Cells at Work!:
    • The manga is like an edutainment spin-off of Psycho-Pass. Like the citizens of Psycho-Pass, the cells are all assigned professions from the moment they are born in order to contribute to the society, that society being the human body. The Immune System is a microscopic version of the Public Safety Bureau who hunt targets deemed a threat to either detain or execute before they can cause too much damage.
    • The manga, being about anthropomorphized blood cells, viruses, and the general inner working of the human body, is frequently described as an anime version of Osmosis Jones.
  • Claymore and Vinland Saga are often said to be the spiritual successors of the aforementioned Berserk. In fact, if you put Claymore and Vinland Saga in a blender, you'd get a serving of Berserk.
  • Subverted to hell and back with Daitarn 3, by Yoshiyuki Tomino. It has a similar name as the series that came before it, Zambot 3, and a similar design for the robot, similar weapons like a "Sun Attack" which is almost identical to Zambot's "Moon Attack", and three main characters. However, it lacks the ending that Tomino's works are infamous for. Although Zambot 3 was one of the first Deconstructions of the Super Robot genre, Daitarn was a more humorous crossover with James Bond in a Super Robot. Doesn't stop them from having team attacks in Super Robot Wars, though.
    • Speaking of Tomino, Overman King Gainer is one to Combat Mecha Xabungle.
    • The Big O could be seen as a successor to Daitarn 3, only using Batman instead of James Bond.
      • The Big O itself has a spiritual successor in Tiger & Bunny. Both are anime series by the same studio, share part of the staff, and has the look and feel of an american saturday morning cartoon. While the first sported a mecha pilot Bruce Wayne, the second depicts the results of a government/private take-over on the Justice League. Also including a cute short-haired android voiced by Akiko Yajima.
  • Many comparisions have been made between Charlotte (1977) and Little House on the Prairie, even by Animage. Both take place in the rural Americas (Canada in Charlotte's case) and focus on a farm-based family trying to keep their lives from falling apart.
  • D4DJ is basically a beatmania IIDX anime, featuring groups of characters forming DJ units and the franchise having a Rhythm Game component. While IIDX does feature characters with anime-style designs and with profiles describing each character, the lore in IIDX takes a backseat to the gameplay, whereas D4DJ's storytelling is very much front-and-center. The various works are even subtitled in the format of "___ Mix", similar to how 5-key beatmania games are numbered as "nth MIX".
  • Darker than Black shares a lot of similarities with the Russian novel Roadside Picnic, but the scale and focus are different.
  • Destiny of the Shrine Maiden has occasionally been cited as a Spiritual Successor of YamiBou, but that probably has more to do with their typical Yuri character designs.
  • It may seem like DieBuster is this to GunBuster at first, due to the parallels between the two. But then it turns out they have converging endings.
    • However, Diebuster did get its own legitimate spiritual successor in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, which later still got its own spiritual successor with Kill la Kill (see below).
    • In addition to having the same creative team, both Kill La Kill and Gurren Lagann share similar stylistic elements and cover similar themes. Where the latter is about boys growing up and learning to face the challenges of life (told though over the top Super Robot action), the former is about girls growing up and learning to grow past the expectations and pressures of society by way of Magical Girl Warriors wearing sentient school uniforms.
    • On the more comical side, Kill La Kill is one to Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. While both series have a penchant for Fanservice, the latter is very much an Affectionate Parody regarding it, while the former makes it a major plot point.
  • Durarara!! is this to Baccano!, although the two are different in tone and setting, they share the same creator, the same "massive cast with distinct plotlines on a collision course" writing style, and the same jazzy musical style.
    • They also happen to share the universe, though taking place in different countries and decades apart, only two characters from the first make a brief cameo in the second.
    • Others see it as more of a successor to Boogiepop Phantom.
  • Digimon Ghost Game borrows heavily from the earlier series Digimon Tamers, such as its discussion of What Measure Is a Non-Human? or giving the Virus Attribute Gammamon childlike innocence in the vein of his predecessor Guilmon to make their Superpowered Evil Side that much more jarring.
  • Dragon Ball:
    • The original manga was clearly inspired by the Chinese literary classic Journey to the West for some of its characters and stories right down to Goku's name which is a Japanese translation of Sun Wukong, the main protagonist of the novel.
    • Upon the Z era, the franchise is frequently considered the Shōnen spiritual adaptation of The DCU and Marvel Universe.
  • Dusk Maiden of Amnesia can be considered this to Natsu no Arashi! in animated form at least — both series were directed by Shin Oonuma and feature cute (actually, near-identical) ghost girls and a healthy dose of SHAFT-like visualsnote .
  • Hiro Mashima's EDENS ZERO draws heavily from its predecessor, Fairy Tail, following a boy with powers from a bygone age who was raised by a currently absent, non-human caretaker, quickly partnering with a girl who runs into him by circumstance and becomes his most cherished friend.

    F-L 
  • Fairy Tail is this to Mashima's earlier series Rave Master, containing a few characters with the same name and/or design, and even a few plot elements with the same name but different functions. Etherion, Oracion Seis, etc.
    • It's sometimes considered one to One Piece as well due to their similarities in art, characters, and themes.
  • Fist of the North Star is this for Mad Max 1, but with Bruce Lee.
  • The Five Star Stories by Mamoru Nagano is a Spiritual Successor to Heavy Metal L-Gaim, an anime series he worked on with Yoshiyuki Tomino.
    • There are hints in the manga that it is, in fact, in the exact same continuity — that it is a prequel of sorts, pre-dating L-Gaim by a good span of time.
  • Flag seems to be Beyond Good & Evil set in Afghanistan, with the United Nations Task Force standing in for the American military. The In-Universe Camera bits recall 84 Charlie Mopic.
  • Ghastly Prince Enma: Burning Up to Shin Mazinger — they both take famous Go Nagai's manga, revamp it for modern audience and introduce new plotlines and characters, including at last one Canon Immigrant.
  • The author of Future Diary seems to be following up with his new manga, Big Order.
  • Guilty Crown: General consensus is that this series was a partial one to Code Geass, particularly in the first few episodes, given that it shared the same "resistance group taking on oppressive entity" premise. While Shu and Lelouch have very different personalities and interests, they are both 17-year old youths accompanied by mysterious girls (Inori and C.C. respectively, who also differ from each other) and capable of using mysterious powers. However, the overarching story eventually headed in more of a different direction.
  • Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE is, for some veteran furry fans outside Japan, the closest thing to an animated adaptation, let alone a Japanese-made one, from Albedo: Erma Felna EDF (with some elements from Katmandu thrown into it, culture-wise), at least in its basic premise: An AI created by humans controlling a world populated with anthropomorphic animals involved in a planet-wide war. The main difference here is the fact in Albedo, the whole war is much bigger, as involve many solar systems, and its respective AI, the Net, is much more benevolent than the one from this show. This especially funny because the creator of Albedo, Steve Gallacci, took some inspiration from many Japanese media for the comic, Gundam included, and he also expressed his interest to adapt Albedo into animation, especially to an Anime format, rather than Western Animation.
  • Gundam Build Fighters to Angelic Layer, which features characters using personalized toy models to fight in a virtual battlefield.
  • Haruhi Suzumiya has a successor in Medaka Box before the latter got turned into a shonen-fighting series.
  • HuGtto! Pretty Cure can be considered as "The Magical Girl adaptation of, of all things, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day", since there's a Terminator Twosome plot that involves a pair of good time travelers trying to stop an evil company from securing the Bad Future's existence by sending agents to the past to confront and potentially kill a young girl who is destined to mother the last and greatest resistance fighter, all while having themes of Screw Destiny and learning how to live your own life while valuing others. To make it even more apparent, there's even a stoic robot that used to work for the evil company who does eventually learns how to become human after befriending a young child, much like how the T-800 did when he was tasked to protect a young John Connor in T2.
  • I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up is this to Roomshare, both of which are by Naoko Kodama. The former is the story of a young woman named Machi who, tired of her parents pressuring her to marry a successful young man, decides to fake a marriage with Hana, who needs a place to stay while her apartment is being renovated. In the latter, the main character, Tomoka, asks her friend Saki to move in with her, since Tomoka's fiance dumped her and she can't make the rent on the apartment she leased. When the owner asks if Tomoka and Saki are the married couple, Saki says yes.
  • The 12-Episode Anime If My Favorite Pop Idol Made It to the Budokan, I Would Die is the Lighter and Softer successor to the anime film Perfect Blue. Both explore the culture and environment of the Idol Singer and the fandom that revolves around it.
  • Both the anime and game series Inazuma Eleven is this to Captain Tsubasa.
  • The 12-Episode Anime Isabelle of Paris is this to La Seine No Hoshi, which was released four years earlier. Both are set in olden-times France and center around innocent French girls who become freedom fighters and fight for the oppressed after witnessing how the elites abuse their power. Both also become entangled in the messy political scene of French society. Both are also accused of ripping off The Rose of Versailles.
  • Almost every part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure can be considered a manga/animé adaptation of something else:
  • Jujutsu Kaisen is often seen as a spiritual successor to Bleach, which in turn also makes it one to YuYu Hakusho.
  • Kamisama Kiss has a lot in common with Inuyasha. To begin with both plots revolve around an ordinary teenage girl getting control over a supernatural asshole, who is forced against his will to help her and protect her, and only later do the two start to fall in love. Tomoe, the male lead in KK, looks almost exactly like an older and more mature version of Inuyasha when he wears his hair long; he also acts like a more intelligent and slightly more mature version of Inuyasha. Nanami, the female lead in KK, looks like Kagome with brown hair and has the same personality type. Then the Time Travel Arc happens in KK and the similarities get even more pronounced.
  • Keiko Takemiya's Kaze to Ki no Uta is the spiritual successor to "The Door To Summer", a one-volume manga she wrote. They both contain similar story elements, as well as both being adapted into 60-minute OVAs.
    • Both of these series in turn are spiritual successors to In the Sunroom, a lesser known manga of hers, which also have similar story elements of the two series mentioned above.
  • People have started seeing Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple as a spiritual successor to Ranma ½. Granted, just think about it: a comic martial arts series with pretty Action Girls, which results in lots of Fanservice, a Love Dodecahedron and a Will They or Won't They? type of relationship between the protagonists. Sure, there's no Tsundere female character in here, but if it was, then it'd be called a rip off instead of a resemblant work.
  • Kiddy Grade is a Spiritual Successor to Dirty Pair: both series revolve around a team of two young female operatives for a galaxy-wide troubleshooting organization that uses incredibly advanced Phlebotinum, brute force, property damage, and good luck to right wrongs and triumph over evil.
  • Kill Me Baby might perfectly be a licensed parody of Lyrical Nanoha. The sheer premise of "stoic girl with blonde hair in twin tails and black ribbons who works as an enforcer has a cheerful, brown-haired, more mundane female friend who saw the darkness of her work and thus attempts to bring the best out of her" should rings all the bells.
  • Kiss and White Lily for My Dearest Girl, what with the "two rivals (one fiery and compassionate, the other a genius who's rather passive about everything but romance) fall in love with each other" takes a few cues from ''Special A'
  • Kuroko's Basketball, the most popular basketball series of the 2010s, is the Spiritual Successor to Slam Dunk, the successful basketball series of the 1990s.
  • Life (2002) is a succession to the mangaka's work Vitamin, as both deal with the harsh reality of bullying and how it can physically, emotionally and mentally destroy the victim. The differences are that the former is a long-running series spanning over twenty volumes, takes place in high school and the girl cuts herself and the latter is only a few chapters long, takes place in middle school and the girl becomes bulimic. How they deal with the bullying in the end differs, too.
  • Little House with an Orange Roof is considered a Japanese successor to The Brady Bunch, as both share a premise about a Blended Family Drama where a single mother with daughters become family with a single father with sons.

    M-S 
  • Made in Abyss has been called one for Puella Magi Madoka Magica by some. Both deal with a Crapsaccharine World that starts off bright and colourful before revealing how horrible it is, with the main characters being fairly young. Both also are a Genre Deconstruction.
  • Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi can be considered Studio Gainax's take on Excel♡Saga, being a Reference Overdosed (mostly) comedic series where each episode spoofs a different genre and its tropes, multiple styles are employed and there's even a dramatic, gag-free episode among all the insanity.
  • Megalo Box is a very intentional spiritual successor to Ashita no Joe, created for the latter's 50th anniversary.
  • There has been quite a bit of adaptations of The Leatherstocking Tales in comic book and graphic novel form. The best? The Manga Shakespeare adaptation of the William Shakespeare play King Lear, where the setting is shifted to North America circa 1759 with Lear bringing Chingachgook to mind, as does Gloucester Leatherstocking and his sons the Munro sisters.
  • Maho Girls PreCure! is an anime adaptation of Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders, as both are Magical Girl series with a Power Trio that has pink, purple and green theme colors, takes place in a fantasy world and has the heroines use the power of jewels to defeat the forces of evil.
  • Maria no Danzai to Juujika no Rokunin.
    • Both protagonists dedicated their life for revenge against satanic bullies for killing their family in the most deserving and gruesome way possible.
    • The respective bullies' leaders, Kyou Shigoku and Nozomu Okaya, are both the Big Bad and The Sociopath who are way worse than the gang as they are responsible for killing the protagonists' loved one(s) as young teenagers and don't care about their group. Oh, and these two dipshits used to be friends with their own victim.
    • The manga has sexual scenes, though Juujika no Rokunin has more unhinged ones.
  • Metal Armor Dragonar was very deliberately designed as such: Sunrise executives, already worried about Continuity Lock-Out in the eighties, aimed to create a successor to Gundam that would not have any of the continuity baggage and could be a good entry point for new fans, as Gundam itself was losing steam. Ultimately, Dragonar failed to outperform the previous year's Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ and thus stayed a standalone series, but remains in history as what is effectively the first AU Gundam show long before the franchise itself would begin to try those out.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury can definitely be considered a spiritual successor of Izetta: The Last Witch, as both shows share strikingly similar themes:
    • Both feature red-haired Cute Witch protagonists who wear white, have similar names, and wield immense magical powers and are "pilots" in a sense (Izetta/Suletta).
    • Both protagonists form strong romantic bonds with a headstrong girl of royal or noble status (Fine/Miorne).
    • Both stories are placed in semi-fantasy military settings with a high focus on magic. (Izetta historical fantasy/Suletta's sci-fi fantasy).
    • Each anime was written by two writers whose previous works included Code Geass and Guilty Crown. (Hiroyuki Yoshino wrote Izetta and Ichirou Okouchi wrote Suletta.).
  • Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun is seen as this towards Ouran High School Host Club and School Rumble as they all use and parody shoujo tropes. Taken a step further with School Rumble as both this and Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun also have high school students who are secretly mangaka.
  • My Hero Academia:
    • Many fans of the Disney film Sky High (2005) have embraced My Hero Academia as an unofficial Japanese remake. Both deal with a world where superhumans are commonplace, with the main character starting off as a Badass Normal who eventually gains superpowers, and taking place in a Superhero School that has the world's equivalent to Superman as an alumnus. In fact, when a live-action My Hero Academia movie was announced, Sky High immediately started trending on Twitter.
    • Many consider it along with My Hero Academia: Vigilantes a spiritual adaptation of both Spider-Man and X-Men, helped by Word of God confirming it. Midoriya and Koichi both essentially being Peter Parker with a few changes here and there.
    • It's a softer and brighter manga adaption of the Wild Cards series. Both take place in worlds where the vast majority of the human population possess a superpower with the majority of them worthless (Deuces), some of them turning people into physical mutants (Jokers), a selected few into winners with an actually useful power who can become "heroes" (Aces) and a small percentage of the population without a power altogether (Nats/Quirkless). The only difference between them is the absence of "Black Queens" (aka the mortality rate) in My Hero Academia.
  • While the two are not all that similar plot-wise, Totoros from My Neighbor Totoro seem to be a Spiritual Successor to Papa Panda from Panda! Go Panda!
  • The anime adaptation of Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA- is this to Touken Ranbu - Hanamaru, what with both's heavy emphasis on humor and Slice of Life.
  • Hideaki Anno has admitted in interviews that Neon Genesis Evangelion was basically his go at making his own Devilman anime.
    Anno: I think I didn’t do it consciously… But after that, people made me notice: Oh, this is Devilman.
  • Ninku shares many similarities with Naruto despite coming first. Examples like the fact that Fuusuke is a wind ninja who wears orange and uses the kuatsuken (resembling Rasengan).
  • Nodame Cantabile is seen as the spiritual successor to Honey and Clover. Both are about students in art schools (drama ensues, obviously), both anime adaptations were made by the same studio, with a very similar drawing style.
  • Noir was succeeded by Madlax, and Madlax, by El Cazador de la Bruja, being part of studio Bee Train's Girls with Guns trilogy.
  • NEEDLESS is basically a Spiritual Successor to s-CRY-ed.
  • One Piece:
    • It's often seen as a spiritual successor to Kochi Kame, not because of their content but by the fact that after Kochi Kame ended, One Piece has become the oldest series that is still serialized in Weekly Shounen Jump. As of 2017, it's celebrating its 20th anniversary and the only other series that premiered before the 2000 era is Hunter × Hunter, a manga that is barely present in the magazine due to its high amount of hiatus and it was even completely absent in 2015, and every other series premiered in 2012 and later. One Piece has been serialized for half as long as KochiKame's serialization and it is very clear that One Piece isn't going to end soon.
    • While many shonen manga running in Jump and other magazines are heavily influenced by Dragon Ball, One Piece, more than any other series, is seen as its generation's equivalent to that manga, having reached the same level of ubiquity and success in Japan, critically and financially. In an inverse of how it compares to Kochi Kame, it's run much, much longer than Dragon Ball but has similar content and characters.
    • One Piece is in many ways The Manga/Anime of Monkey Island: Both are wacky pirate adventures full of insane explanations and insane solutions to problems: One Piece has a swordsman who can talk when he has a sword in his mouth and a chef who can survive his leg being on fire because of their hearts (said chef can also perform plastic surgery by kicking people), while Monkey Island has you deliberately mixing medicine to put yourself in a coma, firing yourself out of a cannon three times, and triggering a volcanic eruption and point-blank range.
  • Osomatsu-san can be seen as the anime equivalent to the many Hanna-Barbera based [adult swim] originals such as Sealab 2021 or Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, being edgier, parodic, adult oriented reboots of 60s kids shows.
  • Paul's Miraculous Adventures has one in the 2005 animated movie The Toy Warrior. Both shows are about a little boy who fights a monstrous villain in a land of adorable creatures with the assistance of a magical toy. Given how Paul's Miraculous Adventures was very popular in Korea (where that film is from), it's not far off to suggest it might have been inspired by it.
  • Pokémon: Diamond and Pearl Adventure! to Dragon Ball. Wild Child young boys befriend teenage girls, fight enemies, and go on adventures.
  • Pokémon Origins is this to Pokémon Zensho. They're both adaptations of Pokémon Red and Blue, though the former uses a lot of features from on the remake. Red is depicted as a cheerful, Hot-Blooded hero with a Charmander starter and both are Truer to the Text adaptations of the game.
  • First, Junichi Sato directed Prétear, a Magical Girl series that is (very) loosely based on "Snow White", and features a redheaded heroine with a white-haired Pretty Boy and Tall, Dark, and Snarky Jerk with a Heart of Gold as her love interests, and a Dark Magical Girl enemy who believes nobody loves her. Three years later, he directed Princess Tutu, a Magical Girl series featuring a ballet-dancing redheaded heroine trapped in a fairytale-influenced world with... a white-haired Pretty Boy and Tall, Dark, and Snarky Jerk with a Heart of Gold as her love interests, and a Dark Magical Girl enemy who believes nobody loves her. While the two series are very different in tone and overall story (Pretear is a Reverse Harem that starts out light-hearted and quickly becomes dark, while Tutu has dark elements from the get-go and is full of meta about art and storytelling), the similarities are hard to ignore.
  • Princess Mononoke has been stated to be a spiritual successor to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind; both have similar themes and characters, but PM has rather more depressingly realistic overtones, and replaces the former's Happy Ending with a Bittersweet Ending.
  • Promare to both Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill, all three sharing most of the same creative team. Of the two predecessors, Gurren Lagann has the stronger influence.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica: With its overt religious symbolism, time slowing Gun Fu / Gun Kata battle, and escape from a false reality, Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion is the best anime adaptation of The Matrix since The Animatrix.
  • Puni Puni☆Poemi, from the same director as Excel♡Saga, seemed to be a deliberate attempt to cram all the insanity of Excel Saga into two episodes.
  • RahXephon's creator has said it's a Spiritual Successor of 1970s super robot series Raideen the Brave.
  • Madö King Granzört to Mashin Hero Wataru, both by Red and Sunrise.
  • Revolutionary Girl Utena to The Rose of Versailles.
  • Sailor Moon can be the closest thing to a shojo anime adaptation of Back to the Future due to their heathy balance of comedy, drama and adventure and both featuring a teenage Kid Hero in a larger-then-life adventure, except the Time Travel and Cool Car elements are replaced with the Magical Girl Warrior aspect. As a matter of fact, one viewer who noticed the comparisons made an AMV inspired by it.
  • Sakamoto Days can be seen as one to The Way of the Househusband, both telling the story of a legendary Yakuza/hitman who retired from their crime life after falling in love with and marrying a normal woman.
  • Samurai Champloo is a Spiritual Successor to Cowboy Bebop, both series being created by Shinichiro Watanabe.
  • Samurai Flamenco is a Genre-Busting, deconstructing-reconstructing, wild ride of a show. It uses so many genres and tropes that it can be compared to a diverse range of works that cross culture, genre, and time, like: The Dark Knight, Tiger & Bunny, Kick-Ass, and Don Quixote; as well as Sentai and Magical Girl shows.
  • Serial Experiments Lain is the spiritual successor to Key the Metal Idol.
  • Six Thousand The Deep Sea Of Madness is considered one to Event Horizon. In both stories, a crew is trapped in a deeply isolated space (in the first, a deep sea facility 6000 meters underwater; in the latter, an abandoned, missing spaceship), and have to deal with strange, eldritch horrors haunting them. Both are noticeable for similar tones of horror, which leans dark, but still somewhat over-the-top.
  • Soul Eater is sometimes considered to be the spiritual successor of Fullmetal Alchemist. Note that Soul Eater's writer Atsushi Okubo has worked as Hiromu Arakawa's assistant.
  • Space Carrier Blue Noah to Space Battleship Yamato, by the same producer.
  • Space☆Dandy is sometimes viewed as a an amazing adaptation/sequel to Spaceballs, due to having a similar style of snarky, self- aware humor. There is an animated Spaceballs series, but it's widely viewed as a disgraceful and cheap rehash of the original film, while Space Dandy is praised for doing what that show should've done, making its own unique voice from the similar base of "epic Space Opera parody".
  • Space Patrol Luluco can be considered a Studio TRIGGER version of TYPE-MOON's Carnival Phantasm: both shows are comedies based on taking several different independent properties owned by the company (Inferno Cop, Kill la Kill for TRIGGER and Tsukihime, Fate for TYPE-MOON) and crossing them over with comedic results, along with being a sort of Self-Parody of the companies producing the anime.
  • Spirited Away: The plot can be a Japanese successor to the first The Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel as they both are about innocent young girls who get thrown into a magical world where they meet and helps all kinds of strange characters, and both Dorothy and Chihiro at one point are forced to work for a wicked witch and have to look for a good witch with a group of misfits who need the good witch’s help.
  • Spotted Flower is one to Genshiken, both by the same author and focusing on the otaku culture, although there are subtle hints pointing that the former might be a true Sequel to the later, with the two of the main characters grown-up and married.
  • The Summer You Were There
    • The series is often compared to Your Lie in April. Both involve terminally ill girls named Kaori who want to encourage their artistically inclined classmates- Kousei from April is a musician while Shizuku from Summer is a writer- to continue with their crafts. Each series has the terminally ill girl leave a letter posthumously confessing her love to her love interest.
    • The series also has some noticeable similarities with A Silent Voice, since each stars a suicidal former bully who falls in love and tries to make amends with their victim, although in the case of this series, the bullying victim and love interest- Ruri and Kaori, respectively- are separate characters.
  • Summer Wars is getting a reputation for being the best Digimon film ever. Having the same director and basic plot as one of the most popular actual Digimon films probably helps on that front.
  • Sword Art Online to .hack. Both series center around virtual reality MMORPGs that are more dangerous than a video game ought to be, with SAO killing players who die in-game and .hack//'s "The World" housing dangerous AI experiments. Both also have video game adaptations that simulate MMO gameplay in a single-player Action RPG.

    T-Z 
  • Tamayura is the spiritual successor to Kamichu!. Not only is the show about a tightly-knit group of teenage girls, with the mood, art style and theme practically lifted from its illustrious predecessor, but it also takes place in Takehara, an old town not far from Kamichu!'s Onomichi and similar to Onomichi in many respects. Still, an argument could me made for Sketchbook as an influence, considering the age of the characters and the art theme (not to mention the opening).
  • Tōka Gettan is a Spiritual Successor of sorts to Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito and Moonlight Lady. One episode of Tōka Gettan was essentially a YamiBou episode. The games they were adapted from were unrelated, though.
  • Trigun:
    • The series is often considered this for Space Adventure Cobra both being about a red garbed blonde-haired space outlaw with an Arm Cannon. Trigun however is ultimately more serious, poignant and introspective, having a more layered and deconstructive take on sci-fi adventure that Cobra plays dead straight.
    • Trigun is frequently considered Devil May Cry IN SPACE! both franchises focusing on the Red Oni, Blue Oni Cain and Abel dynamic of twin humanoid brothers. One brother (Vash/Dante) is a playful trickster gunslinger in a red coat who rejects his non-human nature, the other brother (Knives/Vergil) is regal and aloof, fights with blades and wholly embraces his non-human nature. Even their close and tragic relationship with their respective mothers (albeit adoptive mother in Vash and Knives’ case) is near perfectly mirrored. The sticking point however is that Trigun actually came a couple of years before Devil May Cry 1 so the inspiration was the other way around (despite Hideki Kamiya denying so). Regardless, later adaptations of Trigun such as Trigun Stampede take cues from Devil May Cry, Knives for instance getting a redesign to include a blue motif and Flechette Storm power akin to Vergil. It also helps that Johnny Yong Bosch voices in both franchises.
  • The 12-Episode Anime is in many ways a spiritual successor to the OVA.
  • Wandering Son is similar to the 1990s film Ma Vie En Rose. They're both about the struggles of feminine brown-haired children who identify as female despite being male-assigned-at-birth. Later on, they befriend characters who may be trans boys.
  • Wangan Midnight to Shakotan Boogie. Both are the explorations on contemporary car cultures during their publication times, written by the same author.
    • At the exact same time, Spiritual Antithesis is also in play. While sharing both racing themes, Wangan Midnight focuses more on street racing while Shakotan Boogie puts more emphasis on Running Gag and Shakotan-styled cars. Wangan Midnight also took the races on the expressways while Shakotan Boogie focus the races on touge and city streets.
    • And now, Wangan Midnight and its C1 Runner sequel were succeeded by Ginkai no Speed Star, which has a completely fresh new plot with automotive mechanics as its main focus, though it was set in the same universe and had the Wangan Midnight Final Chapters as its subtitle.
  • Wave!! Let's Go Surfing!! is a very deliberate spiritual successor to Free!, with surfing instead of swimming.
  • WorldEnd: What Do You Do at the End of the World? Are You Busy? Will You Save Us? has often been compared to the NieR series in terms of overall themes and plot. Both take place in post-apocalyptic fantasy worlds where humanity has devolved into the monsters that now threaten the nonhuman remnants of civilization. Similarly, the reveal about the origins of the Beasts and Shades causes a major existential crisis in the main character of each series. Furthermore, the final antagonist of both series is a Beast/Shade version of the protagonist.
  • Xam'd: Lost Memories is an obvious Spiritual Successor to Eureka SeveN.
  • Your Lie in April is seen as a successor to Nodame Cantabile due to also being a series about music that has a prodigious yet cynical male pianist whose life changes when he meets a talented and wild female musician.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V is an Animated Adaptation of both Sliders as a show that deals heavily with The Multiverse and Kingdom Hearts in that said multiverse is a love-letter to a particular franchise (the Disney Animated Canon for Kingdom Hearts and Yu-Gi-Oh! for ARC-V.)
  • Yuri!!! on Ice to the Japan Animator Expo short ENDLESS NIGHT, both of which were directed by Sayo Yamamoto. ENDLESS NIGHT's primary focus (figure skating), core concepts, and some of its imagery (most notably that of two men pair skating together) are all transferred into Yuri!!! on Ice.

Alternative Title(s): Anime And Manga

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