In times past, there was a disaster called Invertia which created a new world power balance. After that, humans were born with abilities that far exceeded normal people and referred to Genestella. Ayato Amagiri joins one of the six main schools for these Genestella students called Seidoukan Academy. On his first day, he helps return a lost handkerchief only to be blasted out with a fire attack because the recipient thought he was peeping on her! She chases him down and forces him into a duel. Julis-Alexia von Riessfeld thinks that she has had her virtues stomped upon and thinks that this duel will restore them. When the battle suddenly ends due to an unforeseen attack, the two suddenly become fighting partners in what has to be the largest inter-school competition in the world! Welcome to the Asterisk War!

Right off the bat, in Qualidea Code, you have the students from the three schools working in tandem with each other yet still arguing much like how the students of the six academies in Gakusen Toshi do as well. While they do fight to take down an enemy in Qualidea Code, they fight to become stronger, supposedly, in Gakusen Toshi. Fantastic fight scenes and surprise attacks are littered throughout the two series and the only major difference being is that Qualidea Code is not a harem. However, do not let that discourage you! Fans of Qualidea Code are bound to like Gakusen Toshi Asterisk too!

Evangelion opens with cicadas crying loudly in the summer heat of Tokyo 3. It’s 2015 and aliens, for some reason, known as angels, have their eyes set on attacking Tokyo. They previously did in the second impact while left the Earth terribly crippled. Recovery is on its way, though, in 2015 with Shinji Ikari brought back to meet his father who is the head of a government organization called NERV. Gendou Ikari, his father, commands Shinji to get into a giant mecha called an Eva and fight this angel? What is going on? Suddenly this boy who knew next to nothing other than everyday life is now in charge of the fate of humanity. No one knows nothing of these angels and there in NERV, He meets Rei Ayanami, another Eva pilot as well as the brash and brazen Asuka Langley. The future of the Earth is left to these children as they will have to push past their limits to fight while surviving some of the most brutal psychological attacks.

Evangelion starts right off the bat with children, literally, children, are forced by adults to grow up in an instant and pilot mecha worth millions of dollars against a foe that they barely understand. The unknown in Qualidea Code are so unknown, that they do not even have a proper name for them in the series! Also to boot, they are still learning about their foes, the unknown and the angels as the shows go on. Asuka is essentially mirroring Tokyo while Shinji is like a mirror of Chiba. Rei is just… Rei. Loads of action as well topped with confusion as well as improvisation, Evangelion will also even make you question things you know and hopefully, Qualidea Code will as well!

Gakuen Toshi aka Academy City, Japan is on the cutting edge of science. More technologically advanced than anywhere else in the world this city is actually populated by students! More than 75% of the population are students who not only are furthering their educations, but also furthering their esper abilities. Ranked from 5, all powerful, to 0, no power, these students work to hone their abilities amongst their peers. Touma Kamijou is sadly a level zero. Save for one thing, even being level zero, his hand can cancel out any esper based attack? How strange and it’s called “Imagine Breaker.” Touma however, does not let it get him down and lives an everyday life of a student.

Till one day when he meets Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a young girl who is dressed like a nun. She is being hotly pursued by an organization because she has 103,000 forbidden grimoires loaded into her brain. Sadly, she does not seem to be the intelligent type. While being pursued, she decides to hide with Touma/Touma decides on his own to protect her. and is it from that point on that he meets not only a wild cast of allies and enemies, but also his life will never ever be the same.

The setting of Index much like Qualidea Code is one of the near future. We know that the children in Qualidea did not sleep too, too long as their parents are still around and Academy City is not that far into the future itself. Espers abound in both series as well as the protagonists being harassed and attacked by foes that they clearly know next to nothing about. Touma does not have manners as atrocious as Ichiya, but he does exist on a power scale somewhere near the top, much like where Ichiya is on the ranking scale in Qualidea Code. They both as well have very strong senses of justice and the desire to get stronger to protect those they love. Ironically too, the two characters from Kanagawa, Maihime and Hotaru, mirror Mikoto Misaka and Kuroko Shirai from Index and its spinoff To Aru Kagaku no Railgun!

If there had to be a show in mind while watching Qualidea Code, it was Eureka Seven. Out in the sticks, Renton Thurston lives. He wants to grow up rapidly and join the Gekkostate, a group of mercenaries that travel the world. While lifting on trapar waves of energy, which looks much like surfing, he dreams of getting out of the middle of nowhere. His dream comes true one day when a mecha in the form of the Nirvash typeZERO, comes crashing down on his property. Inside, he finds Eureka, a young girl, and she needs help with the Nirvash because it’s not responding well recently. He helps her and the next thing he knows, he’s part of Gekkostate! Traveling across the globe, Gekkostate comes across more than it wants to and ends up encountering strange sentient lifeforms?! What is going on??

Eureka Seven and Qualidea Code both start almost right off from the beginning by working in pairs. Now while it is mostly Renton and Eureka working as a team in Eureka Seven, the cities all have representative pairs that work together for their cities and schools. The enemy art actually, and how little is known about them both, are also core issues to the series. We really know very little about the unknown in Qualidea Code while the Scub Coral (Coralians) are a long and drawn out process. Even towards the end of the series, it is still difficult to grasp exactly what is happening until it is all laid out in front of us. These two series would be in the same genres if you just switched out the supernatural power aspect from Qualidea Code and replaced it with the Mecha genre from Eureka Seven. Both are good, though, yet slightly just enough so that you do not feel like you are watching the same series.

Clans exist in this unique hyper-realistic world where a King in said clan is able to recruit new members and has access to unique superpowers. Honor, above all else, is treasured and a King’s responsibility. One day a video is released that shows a red Clansman killing someone. Suddenly, Isana Yashiro, the student, is accused of murder and is being hunted down viciously. Isana is not the only one with problems as now the Red King Mikoto Suou is losing face and fast as the hunt continues for Isana. However, not all is what is seems as there are other things in the wings to be revealed. What started as something small is about to become something big.

When looking at the similarities between K and Qualidea Code, there are quite a few. The whole clan system creates three different groups who do not necessarily get along well. They do work together sometimes when necessary. Also much like the powerful students of Qualidea Code, the characters of K possess supernatural powers that they are not going to hold back on nor do. Both series also lend to not telling you everything as the story goes on. It seems like both are going to make you deduce the answer before they outright say it. Don’t take our word for it though, fans of K are sure to find similar aspects that they like in Qualidea Code!

Pulling into the final station is Koutetsujou no Kabaneri (KnK from here on out.). Humanity is in what seems like a post-apocalyptic setting that has regressed to a feudal Japan. Humanity lives behind walls that are absolutely massive and travel from city to city on trains called Hayajiro. Bullet and supposedly enemy-proof, these trains exist in order to keep the Kabane out. Kabane are monsters, zombie-like in nature that with one bite, can turn you into a fellow Kabane. The only way to kill them is to pierce their hearts which are surrounded by a cage of iron making them ridiculously hard to kill.

Ikoma is a Hayajiro engineer working on not only repairing trains as they come into Aragane station but also on a gun that will allow him to shoot kabana through the heart. One day after a train pulls in, he meets a mysterious girl named Mumei and then later that same day, an explosion rocks their station letting in Kabane. What is going on? Ikoma rushes into the danger and his life is forever changed.

To start with, both in Qualidea Code and KnK, humanity travels by trains in a set post-apocalyptic world. The foes, aka Kabane, are so dangerous that knowledge about them is sparse. Humanity should align together under the banner of human, but yet do not, and rather those who should be allies, can be enemies or exacerbate the situations that the main characters find themselves in. Spoiler, not really, though, Ikoma and Mumei are both Kabaneri or Half Kabane and half human.

Much like the espers of Qualidea Code, they are the ones that have to do the fighting more often than not! The black cloud as well, seen in the later half, is exactly like the massive unknown that the students of Kanagawa, Chiba, and Tokyo come together to fight with disastrous results. In KnK as well, they barely struggle to fight against the black clouds as they are so strong and difficult to beat. Check out the trailer below and hop on the Koutetsujou for an adventure of a lifetime.