The Popular Dystopian Anime Finally Coming To Netflix

Overlord‘s plot stems from a highly interactive video game titled YGGDRASIL, which allows its players to form collaborative guilds. After more than a decade, the creators announce that the game will be coming to an end and will shut off its servers at the stroke of midnight on an allotted date. As Netflix subscribers will soon find out, the anime series takes a sudden twist in the first episode when lead character Momonga is sucked into a realm where he exists as his game avatar and is forced to search for others who have suffered the same fate.

The series ran for four seasons in Japan, from 2015 to 2022. Over the course of 52 episodes, Overlord follows Momonga and others as they simultaneously try to adjust to their new reality while attempting to find a way to escape it. It’s not clear yet whether or not Netflix will have access to all seasons of this anime favorite, but viewers will be able to enjoy at least the first season in two weeks when it debuts.

For those who watch Overlord on Netflix and are left wanting more of the anime show, there is a bevy of novels and manga out there that serve as the foundation for the series. Overlord was first published as a serialization of online stories in 2010 before it was transformed into a series of light novels in 2012. The first entry, The Undead King, debuted in Japan that year with an English translation offered for the first time in 2016.

Fifteen more followed, the last of which was published in Japan in 2022. Overlord was also a popular manga series, with 19 publications between 2015 and 2023. The source material for the soon-to-be-streaming show on Netflix is vast and has grown to attract a number of anime and manga fans to its growing base.

The Overlord series was created by Madhouse, Inc., a Japanese animation studio that was founded in 1972. Over the last 50+ years, the studio has created scores of anime films and series, some of which can be found streaming on Netflix. One recent addition to the service has been Monster, which ran for more than 70 episodes in the early 2000s.

Audiences can also explore other anime offerings on Netflix, including Akuma Kun, Good Night World, Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, and Mononoke. The library of titles is being rivaled by Disney+, which recently announced that they have access to the Macross series that has been unavailable to U.S. audiences until recently.

In the new streaming war for anime content, for once, it’s the audience that wins.