summoning as the villain's endgame

[BWTraveller]

Don't really know a good title so I'll go with that; I'm just interested to know of any series (anime, manga or LN) in which the villains are ultimately trying to summon an evil god or godlike being. Particularly ones where they at least partly succeed. And while not necessary, big bonus if the summon requires a host body. "Freeing" the being from some manner of prison (Sealed Evil in a Can) is also completely fine.

Best example I know that ticks all the boxes is Shrine of the Morning Mist. Haven't read much of the manga (since the translation was discontinued), but in the anime the villains are trying to bring back an ancient forgotten god(dess) of darkness named Yagarena. They eventually do succeed, summoning Yagarena and using the main heroine as a host body.

[Cosmic Eagle]

Any Lovecraft based story. Japan really loves those

[kari-no-sugata II]

I dunno if it's exactly what you're looking for, but...

Slayers Next anime (or the equivalent LNs): big bad of the series wants to call forth the power of the Lord of Nightmares and destroy the planet (return everything to chaos). The big bad actually succeeds but didn't read the fine print - the power and will of the Lord of Nightmares is the same thing so calling forth her power also called forth the will of the Lord of Nightmares. Which means that the power doesn't simply run amok and destroy everything. Leading to my favourite scene in the penultimate episode of any series - the big bad crapping himself in fear. (Normally the penultimate episode ends with the "darkest hour" for the heroes).

Bakuretsu Hunter (aka Sorcerer Hunters). Big bad is trying to resurrect the "god of destruction", who happens to be the MC reincarnated.

A major story arc in the Bastard!! manga involves the big bad of the arc resurrecting the "god of destruction".

[BWTraveller]

Thx. Slayers Next is a little different but I'd say it fits well enough. The villain wasn't actually trying to bring the Lord of Nightmares into the world, he just wanted to make Lina cast the Giga Slave and then force it to go out of control so it'd negate all existence. Neither he nor anyone else had the faintest clue that the spell didn't just borrow power from the Golden Lord but actually summoned her personally. Great series though.

One other thing, what made me ask about this: I was looking stuff up on the Toshinden fighting game series and read about how one part of the series focuses on a guy trying to find a child with a pure heart in order to use the tournament to summon some sort of war god or something.

[AnimeFangirl]

It's been ages since I read it, but wasn't 3x3 Eyes about bad guys trying to summon a demon called Kaiyan Wang or something?

[kari-no-sugata II]

Originally Posted by BWTraveller

Thx. Slayers Next is a little different but I'd say it fits well enough. The villain wasn't actually trying to bring the Lord of Nightmares into the world, he just wanted to make Lina cast the Giga Slave and then force it to go out of control so it'd negate all existence. Neither he nor anyone else had the faintest clue that the spell didn't just borrow power from the Golden Lord but actually summoned her personally. Great series though.

Yep, great series. Quite innovative plot line where the big bad is actually trying to make the protagonist stronger and get access to super secret information...

One other thing, what made me ask about this: I was looking stuff up on the Toshinden fighting game series and read about how one part of the series focuses on a guy trying to find a child with a pure heart in order to use the tournament to summon some sort of war god or something.

Hmm. A pure straight summoning of a high level entity seems quite rare - unsealing/resurrecting seems much more common. The most straight forward pure summoning example I can think of is in "Orion" but that's not on the villain's side but the protagonist's side.

There is a manwha called "Kubera" where one of the major antagonists (a non-human called Sagara) is trying to summon/resurrect a being called Ananta (the king of the clan Sagara belongs to) who died 500 years ago. Since neither are human and their species has a different "afterlife" it's more like a summon than a resurrection and is referred to as summoning in-world. Though after a failed summoning attempt it seems they need a good vessel to get it to work for real. However, while Sagara is definitely evil, Ananta is not, so while the summoning is a villain's endgame it's rather unconventional. (If the summoning worked exactly as Sagara hopes then it wouldn't be that harmful but there's indications that it's actually likely to go catastrophically wrong...). Side note: in this series, humans can straight up summon gods but this is very risky/costly/failure-prone

Originally Posted by AnimeFangirl

It's been ages since I read it, but wasn't 3x3 Eyes about bad guys trying to summon a demon called Kaiyan Wang or something?

Kinda. It's more like resurrecting than summoning though. The three eyed race have a way to become human - by transferring their power to another three eyed. There's a special artefact that does that but requires 3x three eyed (hence the series name). So the main antagonist is trying to get the artefact plus two three eyed to transfer power to his master to help him recover. Or something like that.

[BWTraveller]

Resurrection is also fine. Not that much difference really.

[0cean]

Wasn't that the goal of the villain in Full Metal Alchemist? Ending was somewhat rushed, so I'm not sure what exactly the point was. In a sense that's also what ends up happening in Berserk and technically Evangelion fits this description, too.

In Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei the protagonist does the summoning, if memory serves well.

Does it count when the protagonist is summoned from a different world with that intention? Then a couple of isekai shows would fit, like Isekai Maou to Shoukan Shoujo no Dorei Majutsu.


There's also a couple of games with plots like that. Mostly RPGs that are in need of some last boss.