Anime Like Chainsaw Man: 5 the Rubric Says You'll Love, Ranked by Critical Proximity

Fans of Chainsaw Man respond to its strongest criteria — character at 8.0, cultural weight at 8.5, animation at 8.5, world at 8.0 — and these five picks deliver the same qualities, ranked by how close their critical profile sits to it, not by vibes.

Denji wanted to touch a chest. That's the sentence MAPPA's 2022 adaptation is built around, and it's why the Chainsaw Man recommendation problem is harder than the discourse admits. You cannot solve it with "gore and demons." You solve it by looking at what the rubric says the show is actually doing — a base-desire protagonist inside a genuinely original devil cosmology, rendered by Ryu Nakayama with film-grain restraint most Jump adaptations refuse to attempt.

Where the Consensus List Goes Wrong

The standard "if you liked Chainsaw Man" list is a genre-tag search. Demons, gore, contract magic, edgy protagonist — spit out the same six titles every time. That's how you end up recommending shows that share Chainsaw Man's aesthetic signifiers but none of its critical DNA. Anime Codex scores the 2022 MAPPA cour at 7.90 against MyAnimeList's 8.43, and the gap is instructive: the crowd is rewarding the vibe, the rubric is rewarding the components. Character 8.0. Cultural 8.5. Animation 8.5. World 8.0. Story sits lower at 7.5 because twelve episodes under Hiroshi Seko's composition are largely setup — the Katana Man two-parter and Himeno's death during the Eternity Devil hotel arc are the season's structural peaks, and the finale ends mid-momentum.

So the picks below aren't matched on tags. They're matched on which of Chainsaw Man's six rubric criteria they most credibly replicate. Ranked by critical proximity — closest first.

Gachiakuta (Codex 7.40): The Closest Critical Profile on the Board

Gachiakuta is the recommendation the rubric makes loudest. Bones Film's 2025 adaptation scores 7.40 on the Codex against MyAnimeList's 8.21, and its scorecard is the single closest fit to Chainsaw Man on this list. Animation 8.3 against MAPPA's 8.5. World 8.0 flat-matching Chainsaw Man's cosmology score. Themes 7.5 — identical. Character 6.8, story 7.2 — within touching distance of the Fujimoto adaptation's 8.0 and 7.5.

What that scorecard is telling you is that Kei Urana's world of caste-thrown outcasts and living trash-vessels does what Fujimoto's devils do: builds a supernatural system on a social premise instead of a stat sheet. Denji's poverty is Rudo's poverty. The Chainsaw Devil is the Vital Instrument. Both shows earn their world scores because the metaphysics grow out of a class argument, not the other way around. If you responded to how Chainsaw Man refuses the rigid power-ranking trap common to shonen — which is the specific thing the world 8.0 is scoring — Gachiakuta is the one to start with.

Kaiju No. 8 (Codex 6.82): The Cultural Weight Pick

Kaiju No. 8 at Codex 6.82 (MyAnimeList 8.21) is on this list for one reason above the others: cultural 7.5. That's the second-highest cultural score in the group, and it lands there for the same reason Chainsaw Man's 8.5 does — Production I.G's 2024 debut was one of the year's marquee simulcast events, a manga-to-anime handoff that arrived with global marketing behind it and a merchandise footprint to match. It became a benchmark for a certain kind of hyped debut in exactly the way MAPPA's cour did in 2022.

The critical-profile match beyond cultural is thinner — story 6.8, character 6.5, themes 6.3 all sit below Chainsaw Man's numbers — but the connective tissue is real. Kafka Hibino is a working-class protagonist whose ambition is small and specific (get into the Defense Force his childhood friend already commands), which is the same shape as Denji wanting to eat jam on toast. Both shows are honest about their leads being ordinary people whose bodies get commandeered by the monstrous. If you're chasing the "hype-cycle shonen where the protagonist becomes what he hunts" beat, this is the closest 2024 got.

Fire Force (Codex 6.68): The Animation Pick, Full Stop

Fire Force is on this list because of one number: animation 8.5. That is dead-level with Chainsaw Man's animation 8.5, and it's the highest craft score in this group. David Production's 2019 debut cour is where you go if what carried you through MAPPA's Katana Man fight and Power's transformations was pure movement — the choreography of flame, the willingness to hold a shot, the fight-scene grammar borrowed from Ohkubo's Soul Eater lineage.

The rest of the scorecard is where the distance shows. Codex 6.68 overall against MyAnimeList's 7.72, with story 6.5, character 6.0, themes 6.0, world 7.0. The Special Fire Force Company 8 ensemble never reaches the Denji-Power-Aki triangle's density, and the Evangelist plotting is slower to pay off than Fujimoto's Gun Devil seeding. But if you want the specific sensation of a fight scene that looks like it cost something, Fire Force delivers it more consistently across 24 episodes than most shonen deliver across a hundred.

D.Gray-man (Codex 6.81): The World-Building Pick with a Long Runway

D.Gray-man at Codex 6.81 (MyAnimeList 8.00) is the deep cut here, and the pick to make if what you loved about Chainsaw Man was the cosmology. World 7.5, themes 7.2 — the two highest non-cultural numbers on its scorecard. TMS Entertainment's 2006 adaptation runs 103 episodes, and it uses them to build an Akuma-and-Innocence system that operates on the same principle as Fujimoto's devils: the supernatural is grief-shaped. Akuma are made from the souls of the dead called back by mourners. That's a thematic engine, not a power system, and it's why the world score sits where it does.

The story 6.8 and character 6.5 are honest — Allen Walker is a less transgressive lead than Denji, and Hoshino's plotting sprawls in ways Seko's tight twelve never has to. This is the same trade the rubric grades against long-running shonen consistently, and it's worth reading against how the Codex handles a My Hero Academia-scale runtime before you commit. But the horror-inflected shonen instinct that Chainsaw Man weaponises — mundane grief, physical cost, supernatural pact — D.Gray-man was doing sixteen years earlier.

Black Clover (Codex 6.52): The Character Pick That Pays for Runtime

Black Clover at Codex 6.52 (MyAnimeList 8.14) is the furthest pick on the list from Chainsaw Man's critical profile, and it earns its slot on one criterion: character 6.8, the highest in its own scorecard. Studio Pierrot's 2017 adaptation is 170 episodes, and the Asta-Yuno rivalry that anchors it is doing structurally what Denji's arc does — a bottom-of-the-social-ladder protagonist whose ambition is small enough to be legible (become Wizard King) and whose power comes from a contract that shouldn't work.

The rest of the scorecard is where the distance is greatest. Animation 6.0 is nearly two and a half points below Chainsaw Man's 8.5, and if you came to MAPPA's cour for Nakayama's grounded weight, Pierrot's television-budget flatness will read as a downgrade. Story 6.5, world 6.4, themes 6.7 — all mid-tier. This is the pick for the viewer whose Chainsaw Man attachment is specifically to Denji as a character type, and who is willing to trade craft for volume.

The Counter-Argument: You Should Just Read the Manga

The honest opposing view is that no anime recommendation solves the Chainsaw Man problem because the Chainsaw Man problem is that Part 2 exists on the page and the anime is twelve episodes of setup. The 2025 Reze Arc film exists; the Assassins arc adaptation is announced. Wait, and you get the real thing.

The rubric's answer is that the Codex 7.90 is scoring what aired in 2022, not what's promised. The character 8.0 and cultural 8.5 are already banked. Recommending against them because a sequel is coming is the same mistake as scoring a show on its manga — it's the trap the Codex flags on discourse-heavy adaptations repeatedly. These five picks aren't a substitute for Part 2. They're a substitute for what the 2022 cour already did well.

The rubric doesn't recommend by tag or by mood. It recommends by criterion overlap. Gachiakuta is the closest neighbour Chainsaw Man has on the current shonen map; Kaiju No. 8, Fire Force, D.Gray-man, and Black Clover each carry one of the criteria that made MAPPA's cour a 7.90. Start at the top of the list. The rubric has already done the sorting.