Anime Like Made in Abyss: 5 the Rubric Says You'll Love, Ranked by Critical Proximity

Fans of Made in Abyss respond to its strongest criteria — a 9.5 world, 9.0 themes, 9.0 animation — and these five picks deliver the same qualities, ranked by how close their critical profile sits to it, not by vibes.

Made in Abyss is not beloved because Riko is plucky and Reg is polite. It is beloved because Akihito Tsukushi built a setting whose geography is its power system, then handed Kinema Citrus and Kevin Penkin the tools to make descent feel like a moral act. That is the show. Every recommendation below is graded against that — not against a tag on a database.

Why the consensus recommendation lists get this wrong

MyAnimeList sits Made in Abyss at 8.62 and the crowd's follow-up prescriptions tend to fixate on surface features: cute kids in danger, dark-fantasy body horror, a mysterious hole in the ground. So the standard "anime like Made in Abyss" list becomes a parade of tonal cousins with no structural claim on why the 2017 Kinema Citrus production actually works. The Anime Codex 8.60 for that thirteen-episode run breaks out clearly: world 9.5, themes 9.0, animation 9.0, story 8.5, character 8.0, cultural 8.0. The order of those numbers is the argument. World-building carries this show; themes and animation reinforce it; character work, while strong, is the criterion most subordinated to plot.

That ranking is what fans are actually responding to when they say they love Made in Abyss. So this list is ordered by how close each pick's critical profile sits to that shape — not by whether the poster art looks similar. If you want a broader methodology note, the same approach powers our Vinland Saga recommendation post and the Mob Psycho companion piece.

1. Heavenly Delusion — the closest structural match on the list

Heavenly Delusion (Codex 8.26) is the pick that mirrors Made in Abyss's shape most exactly. Production I.G's 2023 thirteen-episode adaptation of Masakazu Ishiguro's manga scores world 8.7 and story 8.5 — a rubric silhouette that leans on setting and structure the way Made in Abyss's 9.5 world and 8.5 story do. The dual-timeline construction, Maru and Kiruko traversing a ruined outdoors while the walled facility children wonder what "the outside" means, is the same kind of geographical dramaturgy: the map is the theme. Body horror lands in the same register. The Hiruko attacks are staged with the same restraint-then-shock rhythm Kinema Citrus used on layer four. Themes score 8.0 here against Made in Abyss's 9.0, which is the fair gap — Heavenly Delusion is more coy about what its cruelty is for — but every other axis rhymes. This is the recommendation the rubric makes first, without hesitation.

2. Berserk (1997) — the themes and character match, if you can forgive the animation

Berserk (Codex 8.53) is where the list pivots from "structural twin" to "thematic twin." OLM's twenty-five-episode 1997 run posts character 9.0 and themes 9.0, the latter a direct match with Made in Abyss's 9.0. What Made in Abyss does with the Curse of the Abyss — literalizing the price of ambition, refusing the return trip — Berserk does with the Band of the Hawk's ascent and the Eclipse's terminal cost. Griffith's dream is the same one-way descent, dressed as a climb. Guts and Casca carry the character load the way Reg and Nanachi do: interiority earned through violence they didn't choose. The animation score of 6.5 is the honest concession — this is not a Kinema Citrus painterly rendering, and the mid-episode economy is visible — but the storyboarding on the Eclipse and the Naoki Serizawa-designed apostle work still land. Themes and character do the pulling. If those were the criteria that hooked you on Made in Abyss's Mitty sequence, this is unavoidable.

3. Vinland Saga — the highest-scoring pick, if you want the themes without the horror

Vinland Saga (Codex 8.88) is technically the strongest anime on this list, and it is placed third deliberately: its critical profile is farther from Made in Abyss's than Heavenly Delusion's or Berserk's, even though its overall number is higher. Wit Studio's twenty-four-episode 2019 season posts story 9.0, character 9.2, themes 8.8 — a character-forward silhouette where Made in Abyss is world-forward. But the thematic overlap is real. Askeladd's cynicism and Thorfinn's revenge cycle interrogate the cost of pursuit the way Riko's descent does, and the Farmland arc that follows in season two (not scored here) doubles down on the exact question Made in Abyss's fourth-layer trauma poses: what is the price of going too far, and can you turn back. You cannot, in either show. The animation score of 8.7 is closer to Kinema Citrus's 9.0 than any other pick, and the score work carries similar weight.

4. Master Keaton — the world-building deep cut

Master Keaton (Codex 7.77) is the pick the algorithm never surfaces. Madhouse's 1998 twenty-four-episode adaptation of Naoki Urasawa and Hokusei Katsushika's manga is not a horror show and not a descent story. What it shares with Made in Abyss is world 8.2 — the criterion that carries both scorecards. Taichi Hiraga-Keaton's investigations move across a Europe rendered with the same commitment to internally consistent ecology that Kinema Citrus brings to the Abyss's strata. Every episode is a stratum: a place with rules, a history, a specific human cost extracted from geography. Character 8.0 matches Made in Abyss's 8.0 exactly. The animation score of 7.0 is the honest gap. This is the pick for the viewer who loved the White Whistle lore and the relic taxonomies more than the body horror — the ecology fan, not the trauma fan.

5. Inuyashiki — the weakest pick, and here's why it's still on the list

Inuyashiki (Codex 6.35) is on this list because it belongs on this list, not because the rubric loves it. MAPPA's eleven-episode 2017 adaptation of Hiroya Oku's manga posts themes 7.0 — the single criterion where it earns its place. Ichiro Inuyashiki and Hiro Shishigami are a two-sided argument about what power costs the user, and that argument sits adjacent to the Curse of the Abyss on the moral axis. Story 6.5, character 6.0, world 5.5: this is a much weaker overall production than the four picks above, and the rubric is explicit about it. But if the specific thing that gripped you about Made in Abyss was Reg's reckoning with his own capacity for violence — the thematic core of Mitty's release — Inuyashiki is doing that same interrogation, less elegantly, in eleven episodes.

The counter-argument: none of these are Made in Abyss

The honest objection is that Made in Abyss's specific alchemy — chibi character designs against cosmic horror, Penkin's choral score, the descent conceit — is not replicable, and any recommendation list is therefore a category error. Fair. Nothing on this list produces the exact affective response of episode ten. But the rubric does not recommend affective clones. It recommends criterion neighbors, and the six-axis breakdown is specifically designed to identify which qualities a viewer is actually responding to. Heavenly Delusion's 8.7 world is not the Abyss, but it is doing the same work in the scorecard. That is what the numbers are for.

Verdict

Rank these by proximity, not by taste: Heavenly Delusion first, Berserk second, Vinland Saga third, Master Keaton fourth, Inuyashiki fifth. The rubric will not tell you which one to watch tonight, but it will tell you why you loved the Abyss in the first place — and that is a better foundation for a queue than any tag cloud.