The post-apocalyptic world the protagonists find themselves in. The world is wild and primeval, at best. Predators of all kinds are running around, including dinosaurs, that are a threat to the human characters and even the flora can be dangerous. And any structure of former society is submerged in the ocean, rusty and dilapidated, making them incredibly dangerous to enter and often have aged so badly that metal doors bend under a simple touch. And they easily end up destroyed because of their weak structure.
The world just prior to the apocalypse was no better. Although nothing is actually shown, the characters and news make it clear that things are not sunshine and daisies. Natural disasters are becoming more frequently and, when the apocalypse hit, the world quickly fell apart into an ice age and anyone not safe in a shelter had to fight to survive there. And even the shelters were not completely safe.
Acid Town: there is no mention of school, all of the main characters are orphans, gangs and mob bosses rule the streets, children and teenagers resort to drug selling and prostitution to feed themselves, and war planes and biohazard zones are frequently mentioned.
Planet Amoi of Ai no Kusabi is a Dystopia ruled by a Master Computer which favors the Elites which are all Artificial Humans controlling the human populace with an iron fist and humans unlucky enough to be born in the slums are not even considered human. The remaining populace are exclusively house slaves that are castrated or a Sex Slave with no rights whatsoever.
Post-apocalyptic Neo Tokyo in AKIRA. The government is corrupt as all hell, the police are brutal and triggerhappy, biker gangs roam the streets and battle it out, and the military and government are involved in psychic experimentation on kids. And that's even before one of these kids, who was a member of one of the biker gangs, gets loose and all hell breaks loose.
The animals of Animal Land view their world as this. Being completely sapient, they see killing one another for survival to be extremely cruel.
Attack on Titan gives us a world where humanity was driven to near extinction by being eaten by giants, forcing those who are left to hide in a walled citadel.
Food is scarce because there's very little space for plantations, the resident army is pretty much Titan food and the whole Power of Trust deal is harshly deconstructed. If you're a human who lives in this world, chances are that you're either going to be eaten by a Titan, see your relatives and friends get eaten by a Titan or die of hunger. Have a nice day.
And just in case roving giants weren't enough, Mikasa's backstory reveals that human traffickers (with all the ugly nastiness that implies) are also something of a threat on the village level.
Unlike some crapsack worlds, the setting of this series is gorgeous. The Titans have done nothing to despoil the lands they occupy. That just makes things worse.
But hey, at least life's pretty decent so long as you live inside the Walls and away from the Titans, right? Wrong. Both the ruling class within the city and the Military Police responsible for maintaining order are horribly corrupt and more concerned with lining their own pockets than dealing with the Titan threat. They're quite willing to sacrifice 20% of the city's population to the Titans just to avoid having to feed them. It's implied that the city has a thriving criminal underworld responsible for sex trafficking girls as young as nine-years-old. The main religion within the city is an insane cult that worships the Walls as goddesses and considers any kind of modification to them (including things such as repairs and fixed cannon emplacements) to be heresy. Oh, and the Walls themselves? Nobody has any idea where they came from, and they might not be as safe and benign as they appear to be...
Things have turned up to eleven with The Reveal of the Outside World. Namely that everything we thought we knew up to now was all lies. The human territory? It's on an island and is the last vestige of Eldia, a massive empire of Titan Shifters that (allegedly) spent 1,700 years raping and massacring the "inferior races" of the world. The closest inhabited land? Marley, an industrialized, militaristic human nation that is eternally pissed off at the Eldians, keeping the survivors relegated to ghettos, and is using the Titan serum for their own purposes. The sudden appearance of the Titans a century ago? Actually a war between Marley and Eldia. The Titans outside the Walls? Undesirables that were transformed by Marley and sent to the island. The Walls themselves? They're filled with Colossal Titans, all of which would be released if another war breaks out. To top it all off, Marley is currently warring against the other human nations.
For the most part life in the Alita universe sucks hard. The few somewhat decent places happen to use things like Mind Control in order to maintain said decency. We don't know very much about Jupiter and Venus other than the facts that the people of Venus eat babies (genetically engineered to be non-sapient) and on both planets the people have Biological Immortality, which as a result they do not allow the birth of any more children. The places that don't have this limit are in a civil war (Mars), or just happen to be hellholes that don't legally exist which results in assorted miscreants doing whatever the hell they want in said places including and definitely not limited to wiping them out, which occurred on Earth and some asteroid colonies (like the nursery colony the Guntroll team was from).
The story's universe also displays multiple layers of crapsack. People in the Scrapyard dream of being able to live in Tiphares, but it's eventually revealed that Tiphares is its own unique brand of terrible and many of its inhabitants want to live in orbit at Ketheres, only for Ketheres and in fact all of space to also be their own unique brand of terrible. Basically, wherever you want to be isn't really much better than where you are right now.
The Beastars world is brimming with enough speciesism to rival real-world racism, but also in the Beastars universe prey animals can be murdered (and eaten!) any time a predator loses control of their violent urges. It's a rough world for small animals, but the discrimination against predators isn't insignificant either.
The demons get screwed, too. The price that people pay to become demons, in addition to sacrificing the people closest to them, is a guaranteed trip to Hell after they die. Hell is a nightmarish vortex of damned souls that drags your spirit into it, where you suffer indescribable pain and torment until all traces of your being has been utterly consumed in a sea of eternal suffering. And thanks to Griffith/Femto taking advantage of the Skull Knight's dimension warping attack, that Hell has literally broken loose. That Hell where all demons go when they die? Everyone goes there. No exceptions. The only reason why demons have it worse than humans is that to stave off death a bit longer, they have to make gut-wrenching sacrifices that will haunt them for the rest of their lives and beyond. If you're a good person? You get sent there sooner with the next bandit raid, rampaging monster or invading army. Life in Midland sucks hard.
The Cursed Children get screwed even worse. Their mothers try to drown them upon giving birth to them, and if they do survive, then end up being treated like pariah and live isolated from the rest of humanity as a result. Those that do live alongside with humans are commonly lynched in pogrom-style attacks, and the police even participates in it! Even worse, outside of Japan, they're used as prostitutes, slaves, entertainment, products, and soldiers, and several are even subject to nightmarish experiments, and the last one's for those who are working with the Initiators. To top it off, they will ultimately turn into the very Gastrea that they're fighting. The only reason why they have it worse than regular Gastrea infectees is because they corrode somewhat slower, and when they do corrode past 50%, they have to be mercy killed to avoid being turned into a Gastrea, and doing this is absolutely gut-wrenching for everyone involved.
If you're a muggle, there is substantial evidence that your sole purpose is to be cannon fodder for whatever instance of nightmarish horror is currently roaming around. This is discounting the general misery caused by constant wars between neighboring countries, and the rampant Police Brutality and corruption. To put it this way, pretty much everyone lives a nightmarish existence topped by a nightmarish death. Life sucks hard for everyone. No exceptions.
Black Lagoon is crime-ridden and filled with criminals, psychopaths, prostitutes, mercenaries and other incredibly shady people. To give an example: during the Bloodsport Fairytale arc, Balalaika, having received the vital clue that the mysterious psychos attacking her organisation are twin children who speak Romanian, calls in the main pornographic distributor in Roanapur asking him to supply her with every child porno and/or child snuff film featuring Romanian twins. She promptly gets over 250 videos. Revy describes the world best:
"When I was a brat, crawling around in that shithole city, it seemed God and Love were always sold out when I went looking. Before I knew better, I clung to God and prayed to Him every single night — yeah, I believed in God right up until that night the cops beat the hell out of me for no reason at all. All they saw when they looked at me was another little ghetto rat. With no power and no God, what's left for a poor little Chinese bitch to rely on? It's money, of course, and guns. Fuckin' A. With these two things, the world's a great place."
The City in Blame! is immeasurably vast and completely unmonitored, with countless civilizations existing within it; most of which are run by cruel and corrupt cyborg overlords. A common goal for anyone in The 'Verse who hasn't already modified (or had modified) their bodies to the point of looking only vaguely human is obtaining access to the Net Sphere — which would serve the dual purpose of stopping the chaotic expansion of The City (which, by the end of the manga, had consumed a majority of the Solar System) and providing an on-line paradise for anyone and everyone. That's right; in this world, absolute escapismis the only hope humanity has left.
Not as dark as some settings out there, but, if you think about it, the world of Bleach. If you're a dead human, (un)life sucks.
The closest thing to Heaven is Soul Society, where, if you don't have any spiritual power, you get to spend your life in poverty (and, if you're unlucky, in miserable conditions) and to be executed as necessary cannon fodder if needed; if you have spiritual power, the best chance you've got is becoming a Shinigami, that is, devoting your whole life to the Gotei 13, a badly-organized military organization, bending to the whims of noble families, fighting Eldritch Abominations in traumatizing situations and, if you're really unlucky, being subjected to experiments by the local Mad Scientist. Prepare to be governed by a Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering, which hardly allows for fair trials and has protecting their authority as their main interest - not even a Captain rank offers you a safe way to contradict their sentences if you don't find them fair. Speak ill of the Gotei 13, and you're liable to end up in the Detention Unit.
Option two is becoming a Hollow, an Eldritch Abomination that eats human souls - which can be done by being partially eaten by a Hollow. You get to spend some time as a mindless beast and chase your loved ones till they die too, until you start eating other Hollows - or are eaten by one of them. If you're lucky, your soul might just have strength enough to overcome all other Hollow souls in an Adjucha (advanced Hollow) - in which case, you get to spend your life in a desert wasteland where it's always night, eating other Hollows to avoid being eaten by them. Forever.
Option three is actually going to Hell and go insane from the endless suffering as you're crushed again, again and again by the guardians of the place, until you give upand become ash.
And not even the human world is that good of a place, as you're always in danger of being eaten by a Hollow or being caught in the endless fights between Shinigami and Quincies... And if you try to fight back, beware of Soul Society becoming aware of your powers and deciding to put you in their "must watch" list... or of the Mad Scientist noticing you and putting you on his experiment list.
And all of this doesn't even take into account the damage caused by the two Big Bads.
It is a mutable variant, however, as the protagonist's actions have been slowly causing positive impact on Soul Society and Hueco Mundo.
The aforementioned Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering? Due to the Gotei 13 being under new management, namely Shunsui, he's not afraid to tell that council to stick it where the sun doesn't shine. Most of the important characters have become a lot less stuck up over time, and the Gotei has even learned to bend its own rules to pay a debt of grattitude to the protagonist. This is offset because the new enemy's Badass Army has been cutting a swathe through all 3 worlds, meaning innocent civilians are being executed just to stop the whole system coming apart. And the Mad Scientist actually complains about how this all could have been avoided if the former big cheese had shown a bit of spine a millenium or two ago.
Blue Drop: If you're a Magical Girl, you're a Child Soldier bomb disposal unit. If you're a schoolgirl, you're little more than a sex slave. If you're a guy, you're used as a lab-rat for transgender experiments if you're lucky. If you're not so lucky as to be part of an experiment, you're an animal, a third-class citizen treated like freed Africans in Antebellum America — not a slave, but only just. If you're one of the Arume, alien lesbians who made Earth like this, then you're living with the knowledge that your species is extinct and living on borrowed time, the only option for survival being a cultural change none of them have the courage to make. Both sides are ravaged by and living in the ruins of a war that was literally entirely pointless because of that lack of courage.
The Blue are later revealed to not be alien, but rather created by the Earth itselfin response to humanity's overpopulation and pollution. The ending has both the Blue and Second Earth destroyed, Yuiji and Marlene together, and the surviving humans finally free to live in peace with mother nature... then you realize that humanity has essentially been blasted back to the stone age and only the able-bodied people will get to live.
Bokurano (the manga at least), which takes place in a Multiverse Half Empty with, without giving anything away, about as hopeless a scenario as anyone can imagine. As well as his effectiveness in savaging modern day life, his work focuses on the individual effort of people to stay noble in the face of such circumstances.
Even the Lighter and Softer anime isn't a great place to live: Cosmic Horror Story elements aside, the kids go through quitealotofperfectlymundanesuffering. The anime pulls off its bittersweet ending (as opposed to the wholly tragic ending of the manga) not because of the small softenings made to the kids' situation, but because it shows off the fact that, even in the most crapsack of worlds, there's still some good and kind people out there.
The world of Casshern Sins is a decaying mess; all the robots are rusting, and presumably something equivalent is happening to any humans. Only the protagonist is unaffected by the ruin, but he's the one that caused it in the first place; and he's amnesiac, so he can't work out why 99% of the population wants to kill and eat him.
The world is constantly threatened by powerful beings known as Devils, who are the Anthropomorphic Personification of a particular fear, gaining power the more people fear them. Even when killed, Devils cannot be completely destroyed; they will eventually just spawn back on Earth to terrorize humanity again. It's gotten to the point where death by devils has become the leading cause of mortality in the world and people are straight up abandoning Tokyo because attacks happen so frequently there.
Public Safety, the organization that hunts Devils, is well-funded and seemingly-professional, but it has an extremely high turnover rate simply due to the nature of the job. Most members are there either because they're seeking revenge on devils, they're desperately in need of money, or they're not given a choice. They're also led by a Devil herself, who seeks to subjugate both humans and Devils to create her perfect world.
The Devils have also brought on a Cold War between the world's powers, who are locked in a Lensman Arms Race using contracts with devils and attempts to create demonic super soldiers. All of this isn't done for its own sake, but because using conventional weapons quite literally empowers the devils that represent fears of them. The President of the United States made a contract with the Gun Devil, offering it one year of life from every American citizen in a last ditch effort to stop The Control Devil (Makima), and in an ensuing fight that killed millions of people, it failed. She's now contracted with the Japanese Prime Minister, so now any damage she takes will result in a random Japanese citizen taking the hit.
There's also the existential ramifications of the Chainsaw Man himself. He's feared by other devils because he can erase them from existence, along with whatever fears they represent. Makima lists a few things that have ceased to exist thanks to the Chainsaw Man, like the Mt. Hio eruption, Arnolone Syndrome, humanity's sixth sense, nuclear weapons, Nazism, the AIDS virus and all of World War II. Reality in this universe can and has been altered by the whims of one being and nobody will ever know it even happened.
Claymore is in much the same boat as Berserk above.
As far as ravenous, human-eating monsters are concerned (there are lots of them and they are pretty much unstoppable for normal humans), but normal people tend to be, on average, significantly nicer than they are in Berserk. Just by a bit. But then the heroines find out that everyone on their island, demons, Awakened Beings, and Claymores alike, are being manipulated so that they can become perfect weapons to fight the truly horrific monsters on the mainland.
However, there are the Seven Ghosts of Pieta which are trying to change the continent, either by killing an Eldritch Abomination greater than the others (Priscilla for Clare), or is leading a full-scale rebellion against the Organization (Miria). So far ...both seem to be succeeding.
Miria's rebellion is a complete success, the means of making Awakened Beings and Yoma is destroyed, and the only thing left is the last Abyssal One like Cassandra as well as Priscilla.
Then there's the Chinese Federation, an overpopulated union of states where starvation is more common than food whose puppet ruler is still a child propped up by corrupt eunuchs.
Finally, there's the European Union (E.U. for short), a loosely-maintained and hardly-defended union similar to the Chinese Federation but with better living accommodations. Even though their role in the main plot is rather minor, they actually make it out to be a relatively nice place with equal rights and everything... until Britannia conquers most of it. All this while the Diabolus ex Machina constantly torments the Anti-Hero protagonist and everyone else. The E.U. itself is shown to be fairly crapsack (if in a more Crapsaccharine way) in the OVACode Geass: Akito the Exiled, in which it is revealed that the Japanese are also being discriminated against there and that the ruling class are almost as despicable as in Britannia.
Death Note gives us a world where, at any moment, you can be killed - either because a megalomaniac has decided to make an example of you, you've gotten in the way of the people trying to stop said megalomaniac, you (knowingly or not) offended a devotee of said megalomanic and they now want revenge, your friend/lover/family/coworker/etc. decided to stab you in the back because they're jealous, you don't conform (in some way(s)) to the expectations of said megalomaniac, or a supernatural being needs to add some time onto its lifespan. Crime is rampant, even more so than in our world, to the point Light can find hundreds of targets for his Death Note in a week. The detectives with the best chance at stopping Light are, in the order we meet them, a sugar-obsessed eccentric with very little separating him from Light, a freaking Mafioso, and a boy with no real sense of morals. And two of them end up dead before it's over. And when all is said and done and one of these things kills you, you cease to exist.
The Great Kanto Desert in Desert Punk is also one of these. It is a place where caring for your fellow man and helping others out of the goodness of one's heart is openly mocked (especially by the main protagonist) and the lifestyle most mercenaries follow is to only look out for number one (none as much as the main protagonist). The narrator doesn't make things any better, stating every few episodes how the humans are all idiots who will never learn from the past, and are doomed to repeat it, which they more or less do. Add to that the nearly tyrannical Oasis Government who controls all of the West Kanto region and an army of old-world robots which were the cause of the original apocalypse and you have an extremely depressing and all-around crapsack atmosphere (especially due to the selfish, vile, and disgusting attitude of the main protagonist).
Half the time, Akira's efforts amount to nothing, if he even gets the chance to fight the Monster of the Week. Humanity's reaching the end of its rope, demons can possess people with little to no effort, and humanity believes signs of said possessions can be seen in people that don't follow the lock-step. Hence, by the final volume in the series, Witch Hunts are carried out... except half the time the actual possessed people take part to hide their true nature. And the end result? Our hero loses faith in humans and kills a lot of people.
The end result of things getting worse is the world of Violence Jack, where society has completely broken down After the End and the remnants of humanity are divided between the strong and the weak. The evil warlords and biker gangs that rule this world are by far the worst villains that Go Nagai has created since Amon from Devilman, and mainly like to torture, rape and murder people in horrific ways.
But wait, there's more! It turns out all iterations of the Devilman 'verse are interrelated because the entity known as God has put the whole setting in a perpetual time loop to torture Satan with the death of the one he loves over and over and over again.
The world of Devils' Line isn't a nice place to live in for humans and devils alike. The humans are seemingly living their own lives in the first half. However, after the Ikebukuro incident that exposes the Devils, most of the humans end up becoming scared and become xenophobic against them. The devils have a pretty horrible life too, as they need to control their bloodlust. What's worse is that when one of them marries a human and accidentally sees blood, they can't help but hurt their human spouse. After the Ikebukuro incident, it only gets worse from there for the devils themselves.
There is D.Gray-Man, wherein there is doom. If you are an exorcist, you are screwed. If you are a human, you are screwed. If you are an akuma, you are screwed. If you are a Noah, you are not necessarily screwed, but the exorcists are actively seeking to kill you. AND, to top it all off, if you are dead, you are not necessarily safe.
Dorohedoro takes place in a world divided between the Wretched Hive city of Hole in the human world and the realm of the magic-users, who go to Hole to practice on defenseless muggles (generally in the form of warping their bodies). Not that the magic-users' realm is wonderful: if you can't do magic you may as well be a muggle and if you do you may find yourself the target of the powerful mob boss En and his family or giant all-powerful, remorseless demons. To top it off, dying won't even free you from the crapsack: hell is the only option after death.
Dororo: Osamu Tezuka had a distinctly unromantic view of the Sengoku period, and it shows. It's a war torn, famine and disease-ridden hellhole littered with the ruins of burned out villages and corpses of defeated soldiers and murdered civilians... and then he introduced 48 demons to it!
The Future that Trunks came from in a ravaged post-apocalyptic wreck where two powerful Androids go around killing anyone who opposes them, and have already killed the most powerful heroes of Earth. What makes it worse is that the Dragon Balls are gone because Kami, who shares a soul with Piccolo, one of the aforementioned heroes, is dead. In Dragon Ball Super Future Trunks' timeline actually gets worse. After surviving nearly two decades of terror and death under the androids, humanity is brought to the brink of extinction once again. Unlike the androids, who kept humanity alive for their own entertainment, Goku Black doesn't play around. In a year's time, he trashes the world worse than the androids to the point that Trunks is forced to eat pet food to survive. And things actually gets even worse when it's revealed that Goku Black and Future Zamasu murdered all the gods in the 12 universes, leaving them as the only higher power. So the humans don't even have a god to pray to.
In the main timeline Earth is implied to be one of the few places other than the afterlife exempt from this. The galaxy at large is a Crapsack World, because its most politically powerful resident, Frieza, is an Axe-CrazyEvil Overlord who correctly believes that he is the strongest being in the universe. So you have someone who is his own Death Star and who's been running around the galaxy for decades doing whatever he likes because there's nothing anyone can possibly do to stop him or even scratch him. Until Goku goes Super Saiyan. Also the denizens of the universe have to be worried about the God of Destruction Beerus, who will blow up your planet if your food is bad or you anger him, and blow half your planet up if your food is too greasy.
Universe 9 in Super takes it up a notch. The world we are familiar with, that's the 7th universe. It's also the second lowest on mortal ranking. Universe 9 is the lowest ranked universe with an even lower quality of life and a general sense of violence to it.
Ergo Proxy. 85% of the world's population has been wiped out. The environment outside the dystopia-style domes is completely destroyed and most people who set foot there are killed from infection. People on Earth are unable to reproduce. What's more, the Ridiculously Human Robots are all going insane, and the... things... directly ruling the Earth will all die when the permanent cloud cover dissipates and they get exposed to UV radiation.
In Fire Punch not only the world is frozen over and the population is still rapidly decreasing, the remaining survivors are divided between soldiers and slaves, and by slaves meaning you're either a Living Battery or a Breeding Slave.
If you're an Average Joe or Jane, you're a (literally) dirt-poor peasant scraping by on your meager provisions. You'll be constantly on the lookout for roving brigands and vicious biker gangs who, if you're lucky, will savagely beat you and steal all of your possessions, effectively sentencing you to death in the desert wasteland. If unlucky, you'll likely wind up murdered, either for your stuff or just for their sick amusement; and possibly raped if you're female. Also, you must worry about power-mad martial artists enslaving you and your loved ones and slaughtering you on a whim as they set out to establish themselves or their empire. And just to make things worse, this isn't one of those nuclear After the End series that forgot about fallout; if you don't starve and aren't murdered, you might end up with radiation sickness.
If you happen to practice one of the superpowered martial arts disciplines of the series, odds are you'll fare little better. If you're a low-level villain/lackey, you'll undoubtedly fall to the head-detonating protagonist, Kenshiro, or possibly to another "good guy" after you kick one dog too many. If a low-level hero, you must constantly battle thugs, and there's no telling when one of the previously mentioned power-mad martial artists (who will be light years beyond your ability) will carve a swath of destruction through your homeland, either killing, enslaving, or imprisoning you. If a high-level villain, odds are even greater that you'll be killed by Kenshiro, though there is a rare chance of being killed by another high-profile martial artist (such as Rei or Toki). Finally, Kenshiro himself has arguably the worst fate of any character in the series: he loses his father, all three of his brothers (granted, he kills one of them, the evil Jagi); his best friend Shin, who was corrupted by Jagi; his two other martial artist allies Rei and Shuu and most of his other friends throughout the series. And worse, the "off into the sunset" ending with him and his lover, Yuria, is rendered bittersweet when it's revealed that Yuria is dying of radiation poisoning and has a limited time left to live.
There is one brighter possibility in all of this: the environment has begun to recover slightly by the end of the series. And you have to figure most of the bandits are dead by that point. Though from what was seen in the New Fist of the North Star OVAs, set years later, the world hasn't really decided to clean itself up just yet.
In the manga, the Colonel reveals that the world before the nuclear war is this. He served his country of Japan faithfully for years. However, he was summoned to a meeting where he discovers that his corrupt superior the general is having an orgy along with corrupt politicians and corrupt corporate executive officers, who effectively rule the world and he has to serve them. Oh, and the nuclear war, it was apparently an accident triggered by the politicians and the corporate heads. Too bad those corrupt leaders blew themselves up along with lots of other people.
The world during Fort of Apocalypse. If not already apparent by the Plague Zombies reaching the secluded prison, when the main characters bust out and drive to Tokyo, the city is completely overrun and in shambles.
For perspective, the former most sympathetic character, the Woobie lead, was last seen massacring orphans in a desperate attempt to bring his dead parents back to life. His father killed his mother, and then his father was killed by the mob. The second most sympathetic character is a full-blown terrorist Mad Bomber.
The female lead is an Ax-CrazyYandere who, upon being told by the protagonist that he loved her, drugged him and tied him to a chair so he'd never leave. He got out, but he's still with her. Yay!
Other candidates for said battle royal include a blind girl who was gangraped by her own worshipers after her parents were assassinated, a four-year-old whose parents died in the massacre of said cult, an honest cop who finds out halfway through the ordeal that his son is dying, and a woman running an orphanage who gets to watch all of her orphans be massacred right in front of her.
It's also implied that God and/or his assistant manipulated the participants lives to make them as miserable, crazy, and desperate as possible. At least partially for their own amusement.
Basically it's a whole Crapsack Universe in Galaxy Express 999, with only a few bright spots here and there. But the majority of planets Tetsuro and Maetel visit are either run by corrupt governments, on the brink of destruction, inhabited by oblivious and arrogant people, stricken by severe poverty or some unholy combination of the above.
Gantz, for innumerable reasons. People are forced against their will to fight against aliens to the death in a game, for no apparent reason at all. People die by the bucketload, even all of the main characters. It gets worse when it's clear that not all the aliens are even aggressive, and that many of the humans are terriblepeople. It is eventually revealed that all of the fighting and dying was just a training exercise for the apocalyptic arrival of an alien race of giants who decimate the planet.
Genma Wars takes place in a world similar to Planet of the Apes, only instead of humanoid simians, its ruled by the Mah Tribe, a race of extra-dimensional demons that enslaved mankind ages ago.
Humans are treated at the very best as slaves (if they are female, young and beautiful, its clear what kind they are) and at worst, they are literally cattle - human organs are sold in the market and children are said to taste delicious. There are resistance groups that oppose the Mah, but they do it by pillaging the human slaves' crops and robbing them of tribute, making the human's lives even harder. The demons themselves are governed by an authoritarian Evil Overlord, who loves to rape human girls and is very quick to punish his underlingsfor even questioning him. This world is so crapsacky to a level that the Evil Overlord responsible for making everybody's lives so hard is also very miserable himself - he was left in charge of watching Earth, which he considered a pitiful little planet with nothing to offer, so he purposefully breeds with human females to create hybrid children to create war and destruction with the purpose to amuse him.
When the heroes get sent back in time to prevent the disaster that caused the demons' rise to power, they found out the world wasn't much better than the one they came from. The modern times were a dystopian nightmare where people are kept miserable by a powerful, and corrupt elite revealed to be disguised demons that infiltrated positions of power to manipulate the media and the government. There is a island known as Special District, whose inhabitants are exempt from the laws and can get away with murdering children if they show their badges to the police. Said island serves as HQ for the demons to engineer a nuclear war so they can rebuild civilization in their image. At the end of the series, the heroes fail in preventing the nuclear destruction of breaking out and the word being destroyed, though it just barely avoid it from being a complete Downer Ending.
The world of Getter Robo Armageddon turns into this partway through the series after the Getter Bomb, a hydrogen bomb that goes off on Shin Dragon's head as it fires a Getter Beam, saturates the world in Getter Energy, allowing the Eldritch Abomination known as the Invaders to run rampant through the world.
The Greatest Magicmaster's Retirement Plan: The majority of the planet's surface is under the control of Fiends while humans are forced to live in a smaller territory under a barrier, and the majority of humanity was wiped out when the Fiends first emerged. While humans are mostly united in fighting the Fiends, there is still a lot of competition between the countries beneath the surface, which can lead to the governments getting desperate with unethical experiments.
The Universal Century of the Mobile Suit Gundam. The One Year War which causes the deaths of half the population of the Solar System is between the Earth Federation, a corrupt, incompetent, and racist government unable to properly defend the solar system vs the Principality of Zeon, who started the war by gassing a colony full of millions of people and dropping it on the Earth. Even after the One Year War was over, war constantly sprung up due to the weakness (and/or the malice) of the Earth Federation, and totally evil bastards as faction leaders are incredibly common. You can seriously argue that the solar system would have been better off if both sides had wiped each other out.
War isn't the only horrible thing on Earth. It's mentionned in Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn that the air is polluted 40 times than the acceptable norm.
This even applies in G Gundam, where they established the Gundam Fight specifically to avoid war. While the wealthy and powerful escaped to space colonies, the people left behind on Earth have to endure their cities and landscape being torn up every four years, and Gundam Fighters are specifically absolved from causing property damage because most governments have just stopped caring about Earth. Several nations hire thugs or assassins as Fighters, or use coercion and blackmail to get them. And when someone tried to improve the system a tad, it winds up creating the Big Bad.
Gundam SEED starts off similar to UC calendar series, where most of the conflict stems from political and ideological reasons, but soon goes off the deep end and degenerates into hell on earth. The Earth is going through an energy crisis due to nuclear power jammers that have been integrated by ZAFT, almost the entire world is controlled by one side or the other through draconian military regimes, much of Earth is in ruins due to the war, and both sides are equally willing to use WMDs on their enemies and ALLIES equally. In addition, the main source of scientific progress has come from a series of genetic experiments that spawned a worldwide terrorist ideology and recently reached the utter abandonment of the value of life in order to pursue a goal that would give birth to Kira Yamato and Rau LeCreuset. And the leaders of both sides are monsters to boot.
The setting of Gundam 00 is a crapsack world as well, with most people living in poverty, suffering, and endless warfare while the rich people relying on the giant solar panel system don't give a fuck about them. In the first season, political games among the three greedy, corrupt global superpowers still exist, and the second season is basically all the corrupt politicians banded together to continue torturing people who suffer in extreme hardship under their tyrannical grips. In both cases, we have the Celestial Being who are among the very few people truly willing to change the world for the better even though their methods are questionable at best.
Setsuna F. Seiei: Exia R2, Setsuna F. Seiei, clearing the way for the future!!
Gundam AGE is a blend between this and Crapsaccharine World (in part because of Art-Style Dissonance). On the one side, The Federation employs a powerful State Sec that operates by falsifying history and laid the groundwork for a decades-long war when they turned every victim of a failed colonization project into UnPeople rather than bring them home. On the other, the UE/Vagan have a sympathetic cause that they ruin by wiping out civilian colonies, which sets several otherwise-decent people on lifelong quests for retribution. Also, Anyone Can Die, and if they don't they'll probably betraumatized by fighting in battles that definitely do not involve Bloodless Carnage.
Gundam X actually starts its series by revealing that, fifteen years prior, Earth got ravaged by a mass Colony Drop, pretty much reducing the survivors into becoming scavengers of sorts.
The setting of Iron Blooded Orphans is where both Earth and Mars have been recovering from The Calamity War. Mars is basically an equivalent to an exploited Third World country, which poverty has become worse to the point where less-fortunate children tend to become either prostitute or Child Soldiers and most likely illiterate. Also there are also human abductions and made into HumanDebris who partake dangerous works, mainly soldiering. Earth Sphere is not that better since, while they are significantly well-off than Mars, Dort Colonies' working class faced poor working conditions and bad housings with recent protest ended with a massacre. Earth is no better since it too has poverty with an example being the background of McGillisFareed as a Street Urchin. That miserable conditions being ignored due to the callousSeven Stars of Gjallarhorn, who have become a Fallen Hero after stopping the war centuries ago.
Heavenly Delusion has a post-apocalyptic Japan with the main story taking place fifteen years after an unknown disaster razed the Earth. The pockets of humanity that are still alive often clash with each other, not to mention the giant “Hiruko” monsters who hunt down humans for food and have varying supernatural powers at their disposal. However, true to how many post-apocalyptic scenarios break down, humans are their own worst enemy, such as how the female lead, Kiruko, is raped later on in the story by her former Big Brother Mentor Inazaki Robin, who she had trusted with her life beforehand. Even worse, the storyline never shows him as being anything other than a good man trying to do good things in a screwed up world, so having him suddenly rape Kiruko with sadistic pleasure is a huge turning point to show that even the so-called “best” of humans are sometimes very skilled at hiding their true nature - a common theme throughout the story. Fortunately, Robin gets his comeuppance at the hands of the male lead, Maru, who toyed around with Robin before breaking him in a fight to show him what it felt like to be helpless, just like how Kiruko felt at the hands of someone she couldn’t fight back against.
Heavy Object occurs after the collapse of the United Nations and the proliferation of the titular Objects, massive weapon platforms capable of annihilating entire cities and surviving nuclear blasts. The fractured nations have formed into four supernations that are constantly skirmishing with one another without any care for the loss of soldiers as they're easily replaced compared to Objects. The majority of citizens are apathetic to the situation as they are distant from the battlefields and surrounded by constant media assurances of their righteousness and safety. As a result of decaying moral structure dirty tactics are commonly employed and child soldiers are not considered unusual. The current state of the world is perpetuated and exacerbated by extremists and war profiteers on all sides. The author himself points this out in an afterword.
Hell Girl is ostensibly set in the real world. But with each grudge Enma Ai satisfies, it's more obvious that hers is a world of miserable bastards.
On the one hand, we have her targets, almost always selfish people who deceive, abuse, and hurt those around them. On the other hand, we have her contractors — who, while usually sympathetic, nonetheless resort to damning their enemies and themselves to hell to solve their problems (The most generous thing you can call it is assassination). And then there are the cases where the contractors are just as bad, and even where the targets are completely innocent. Ai will take pretty much anyone's contract, and she never lacks for work. The ultimate proof of this World Half Empty is the final storyline of Futakomori, in which hundreds of people in one town go vengeance-crazy, damning even their friends and family. It's a great show, but watching too many episodes in a row is hard on the soul.
Futakomori (the 2nd season) is sick and sad enough...but wait until you see Mitsuganae (the 3rd season); it will shatter you soul into a million little pieces.
Then there was the episode where a nurse (who was a good, hardworking person in every way) is sent to hell by a person she doesn't know because said person was a sick bastard who wanted to send her to hell because... well, just because he could.
Getting killed and sent to hell is bad enough but it's worse when you can't figure out why you're there. Sure the protagonist was violent but it was always in the service of good: he formed his group to protect the helpless from bullies and gangsters, absolutely forbid his friends to act like gangsters themselves, and started a clothing company so they wouldn't need to charge for their protection. He's later shocked to discover that his companion in hell was an aborted fetus. His reaction: "How is that fair?!".
If being unfairly sent to hell wasn't bad enough there's also the ruthless, incredibly powerful reapers and the threat of turning into a giant, mindless "dead" (like a hollow but with no chance, as far as has been shown, for regaining their minds as they are almost immediately destroyed by Reapers and sealed into stone).
Are you a vampire? Enjoy getting gruesomely killed and possibly eaten by Alucard, or slashed to ribbons by Alexander Anderson. Are you a regular human? Hoo boy, are you ever boned; if you don't wind up as vampire chow or turned into a ghoul, you're likely to fall victim to any number of other misfortunes.
The two major organizations dedicated to fighting vampires are a Protestant-based organization that are not above using vampires (such as the aforementioned Alucard) to fight other vampires; and a fanatical Catholic organization whose members (particularly Anderson) are often insane, and whose leader eventually goes off the deep end and orders the slaughter of everyone in London still trying to deal with a wave of Vampire Nazis because he hates Protestants. And it does not stop there - a group of those aforementioned Vampire Nazis are tryting to plunge the world into endless war and destruction For the Evulz, basically turning the world into a Death World that will eventually render humanity extinct because of the endless wars they cause.
The vampire Nazis don't manage to destroy the world, but they manage to completely destroy London, to the point that virtually everyone other than Hellsing forces was killed. The political effects of that could not have been good.
The Irregular at Magic High School plays with this, especially after the first arches. First, we are shown typical setting with Wizarding School and various dosages of The Beautiful Elite with a variety of fan service, but then the world of the series begins to unfold as increasingly cynical, militarized and discriminatory. In particular, all of the current 10 great magical clans are the result of many years of experiments on people and the creation of Designer Babies using Superpowerful Genetics, including positive eugenics in the literal sense of the word. Moreover, it becomes even more frightening when we find out that the sister of the protagonist is a perfect Artificial Human and due to her perfect genetics she must become the wife of her own sibling in order to contain his unique abilities in the clan and to give their family powerful offspring without the participation of someone from other clans. Ultimately, good genes and strong magical abilities are the only things that determine the value of a person in this world.
The works of Junji Ito tend to be cosmic horror stories. Everyone is doomed, they just don't know it yet. The setting of Uzumaki in particular is a pretty horrible place.
That's what happens when a town is built over the ruins of a Genius LociEldritch Abomination city that is obsessed with spirals and hates humans. The only way to avoid a horrible death or fate worse than death is to devote the rest of your life to spirals without ever leaving the area. Which is also arguably a fate worse than death.
The Alternate Universe medieval Japan of Kagerou-Nostalgia. The nation has been engulfed in a civil war for decades, with eighty percent of the country under the control of the psychotic Kiyotaka Kuroda, who organises random massacres of the population by Sociopathic Soldiers just for kicks. The remaining twenty percent of the country go out of their way to avoid opposing Kuroda, even aiding the "People Hunts" in some cases so that he'll leave them alone; generally speaking their governments seem to be either crooked or cowardly. People who do go to war with Kuroda have a tendency to go insane, coming home and spreading even more misery around. And that's without mentioning Gessho Kuki, The Man Behind the Man to Kuroda, and the armies of demons and monsters he summons to bolster the General's ranks. The world's only hope at this point are six kids, who don't like one another, have yet to defeat a single major enemy, and whose major accomplishment as of the most recent volumes have been getting their leader killed and her kingdom decimated, and suffering a betrayal by one of their own. They've yet to really help anyone, and the entire setting is pretty much overwhelmed with a sense of cynicism and despair.
Kazuma Shudo: "In the end we were powerless, again. We fought like mad, but all that's ever left is the devastation."
Kiba no Tabishounin – The Arms Peddler takes place on Earth after a cataclysmic war wiped out modern civilization where humans have to not only survive the wasteland but also defend themselves against raiders, bandits, slavers, mutants and supernatural creatures.
The Legend of the Legendary Heroes: If you're a Cursed Eye bearer, you'll be victim to severe Fantastic Racism and likely die young. If you're a commoner, you're at the mercy of poverty and of the nobles, who'll be more than happy to kill you for petty reasons. War is also rampant, meaning that there's a good chance you'll be dragged into one regardless of who you are, with age meaning nothing. Furthermore, what with war breaking out across the entire continent and Fantastic Nukes in the hands of many, your country is likely going to be conquered sooner or later — in which case you better pray that the one doing the conquering accepts surrenders. Oh, and the world is destroyed every thousand years, with the next deadline being about ten years away. There's a reason why most of the cast are desperate to change the world.
Loveless takes place in a rather shitty world. To put things into perspective — almost all of our main characters are or were abused children and are severely emotionally fucked up; even people on the 'good guy' side do very bad things (Ritsu-sensei, anyone?); the few decent people who try to help are useless; kids as young as twelve get dragged into presumably-very-dangerous spell battles; Seven Moons Academy gets attacked and the ones dealing with the resulting mess are the students; and, at least for now, The Bad Guy Wins.
The world of Naruto was this during the Warring Clans Era, their version of the Sengoku Period. Clan feuds were so prevelant that shinobi wouldn't say their last names to outsiders, for fear of being attacked by an enemy. The average life expectancy was barely 30 years old for both civilians and shinobi due to the high death toll among the clan's Child Soldiers. Became a World Half Full after Hashirama founded Konoha alongside Madara, since a lasting peace actually began and the average life expectancy started to rise. Frighteningly, it's mentioned that the world was even worse before the Sage of Six Paths introduced the chakra arts and sparked the Warring Clans Era. That makes sense when you consider that this was the time when the Juubi was rampaging across the world.
Half of humanity died in the Second Impact, war killed off even more, the oceans are barren, and the remaining ecosystems are on the brink of complete ecological collapse. The humans who managed to survive that are now trapped in a war with the Angels. The only means of defense is to send what few children were born at the right time out in gigantic Angel-derived Evangelions. But it's actually worse than that.
The children who are supposed to pilot the Evangelions are traumatized, broken, neurotic and mentally unstable to begin with, and the rest of the cast is growing to be increasingly generally bitter, psychologically incompetent, and pessimistic. Also, the entirety of existence basically revolves around the Hedgehog's Dilemma, which is the philosophical notion that if you go near other people, you become Hell to them and they become Hell to you, but when you go far from them, you cannot survive. As time passes, the dysfunction and insanity only gets much more worse in scenes that are more and morehorrifying and madness-inducing, while everyone is forced to watch them in all their gory details, the most memorable of them being played with unfitting music, finally culminating in what the masterminds who masqueraded themselves to be humanity's protectors had in mind in the first place: ending the world in a manner that suits them through a controlled mass Mind Rape and suicide of all humanity caused by the fusion of two dead-yet-almighty Eldritch Abominations. The only positive thing is that humans can be reborn, but the world would have been left as a totally alien and deserted Hell by then.
While the Rebuild of Evangelion film series had up to the third movie been Lighter and Softer, Evangelion 3.33 plays this up to eleven. The world is a totally desolate hellscape, and just a few hundred people appear to be left alive on Earth after an aborted Third Impact. Civilization appears to be all but dead, as all the resources humanity has left have been diverted to the war between NERV and its splinter organization, WILLIE. While the post-Second Impact world showed signs of hope, the post-Third Impact world is speeding down an irreparable death spiral.
No Game No Life: During the war of the Old Deus 6,000 years ago, Disboard was in complete chaos as each Old Deus and their Exceeds attempted to kill one another so that one Old Deus may become the one true god of Disboard. Imanity, the only non-Exceed, only survived by hiding and staying out of the conflict while being extremely careful not to present themselves as a threat to the other Exceeds or they will be immediately wiped out. The present day state of Disboard under the Ten Covenants is hardly perfect, especially not for Imanity, but it's still an improvement over the old world.
The war-torn desert planet that Now and Then, Here and There takes place on, mostly because it's a (slightly) exaggerated version of modern Africa. The planet is actually Earth, 10 billion years in the future. The sun is expanding into a red giant and will eventually destroy the world.
Despite being a gag manga (at first) and subversing various tropes, the world of One-Punch Man is one where monsters capable of destroying cities are not particularly uncommon, unhealthy obsessions can turn people into Always Chaotic Evil monsters, and the only association of heroes capable of dealing with the monsters is highly corrupt and severely understaffed. The only positive is that the existence of Saitama puts a cap on how much damage a monster can do before it gets destroyed. Later in the manga a setting becomes more of a Crapsacharine World and World Half Full combination.
The New World in Overlord (2012) is not a nice place to live, especially if you're an ordinary human villager.
Slave trafficking, random monster encounters, corrupt/selfish/incompetent/insane rulers...and all of that is an improvement of what life was like before the Six Gods showed up and gave humans a fighting chance by introducing Yggdrasil magic to the world. Before that happened humans were nearly at the bottom of the food chain and an endangered species, easy prey for their more powerful neighbors such as the Dragons. The sudden appearance of the protagonist and his guild — a nigh unstoppable Evil Overlord lich and his army of genocidal monsters — has actually been an improvement over the status quo in certain places since he believes in Pragmatic Villainy.
Turns out Earth isn't any better. In 2138, Earth has become a polluted cesspool that going outside requires the constant wearing of level Anote The highest level given in the US biohazard suits with SCBA breathing apparatuses, Social class retardation is a thing that no-one born into poverty is capable of leaving it, giant conglomerates rule the world and the mandatory education system has been abolished making people having to literally work themselves to death, including the protagonist's parents, to send their children to elementary school which is barely enough to make them corporate slaves. No wonder Momonga was so fixated on YGGDRASIL, it was probably the only scrap of happiness he can find.
Most of the stories in Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix series. The historical chapters feature a decidedly unromantic depiction of feudal Japan full of war, famine, disease, filth, corruption, death & copious amounts of mutilation with sharp objects. But at least the characters in those stories had the breathtaking beauty of nature to raise their spirits. Those who have the misfortune of being born in this world's bleak, Zeerusted future get no such luck. In addition to having all the above mentioned problems, the world is ecologically screwed, full of bigots who mistreat clones and robots, and occasionally ruled by an oppressive theocracy. After people start piling into rocket ships to escape this awful mess, the Earth eventually faces an immigration crisis when the space colonists & their children start coming back in droves because most of the other planets in the universe are even worse than the world that they left! When humanity finally goes extinct in the (chronologically) final chapter, it comes as something of a relief.
Pocket Monsters: The Animation depicts the Pokémon anime world as this. To name a few details: children are legally considered adults when they become ten, thus subject to marriage, taxes and jobs, plus many fathers and grandfathers leave their families only to get nowhere on their journey. In addition, Gym Leaders get fired from their jobs for losing three consecutive matches and sometimes have to bribe Trainers to survive.
Primitive Boy Ryu obviously has this because it's set in the prehistoric era. Dinosaurs run wild and humans have to sell their own children to survive. Not helping matters is the fact that all tribes are a bunch of racist cultists with messed up beliefs and are quick to use violence on each other.
Ryu's Path: Unless you're with Ryu or lucky enough to meet him, chances are you'll starve to death, be killed by murderous machines, be killed by mutants (if not turned into one yourself) or oppressed by the Religion of Evil.
Psycho-Pass takes us 100 years into The Future, by which time people's minds can be quantified and people's "criminality coefficients" are tracked by the Sybil System. If you so much as have a brief thought about harming someone, you will be either drafted as a special police officer or summarily executed without trial by a gun that turns you into Pink Mist. Oh, and juvenile statutes have since been revoked, so there are no exemptions for children. (Sound familiar? This series was written by the same guy as Madoka above.) This has all led to a brutal societal emphasis on sanity at all costs, to the point where antidepressant abuse has skyrocketed and a certain girls' boarding school advertises its old-fashioned sheltering from the world...and most art has been restricted.
Are you a Muggle? Enjoy getting Driven to Suicide, dismembered and eaten by a Witch. Are you a Witch? Enjoy a life as a horrifying Eldritch Abomination trapped in its own Hell-dimension, then being killed by a Magical Girl, then having your Soul Jar eaten by an Incubator for energy after said Magical Girl uses it to cleanse the corruption of her own Soul Jar. Are you a Magical Girl? Enjoy isolation from all your friends and spending the rest of your life at a shitty job fighting insanity-inducing abominations where the smallest misstep can spell swift death.
And it doesn't even stop there — by accepting the contract with Kyubey to become a magical girl, you basically become a Lich, and if you don't die horribly at some point, you WILL mutate into a Witch. And the universe itself?Is undergoing entropy, such that it will eventually die if not fed by the Incubators a steady diet of emotional energy harvested from the despair of said Magical Girls when they inevitably fall and become Witches (though we still don't know whether that is even true or if Kyubey is just fucking with people's heads for its own amusement). Fun for everyone!
Kyubey never lies, though he's often used half-truths. So it's implied that the universe-saving thing is at least partially true. Though it's not like humans will be around to enjoy it when his plan is through.
Through Madoka's wish and ascension to goddesshood in the final episode, though, things have gotten a little better. However, with the disappearance of witches, all magical girls now have a new problem to deal with in the form of demons born from the curses of humanity, because Incubators still need the energy to stave off the heat death of the universe. Indeed, the meguca battle never ends...
The world of Redo of Healer is, to put it mildly, a hellish nightmare. The Kingdom of Jioral is a genocidal expansionist slavocracy, where people are considered legal adults at 14 and nonhumans are treated like animals at best. The king, the princesses and the "heroes" of the kingdom are ALL corrupt abusers, perverts, rapists, and warmongers, and the adventurers are little more than a strike team used by the Evil Overlord to aggressively expand his territory. When Keyaru was found to have healing powers, the heroes decided to make him a member...which involved imprisoning him, getting him addicted to drugs and treating him like a sex toy. After four long years of this, Keyaru develops the Drug Resistance skill and, after an encounter with a demon, has the opportunity to go back in time to before he was ever recruited by them. Does he take the opportunity to start a new life or fix Jioral's problems? Nope. His goal is getting revenge on the people who wronged him, which involves paying evilunto evil. It says something when the protagonist is a Serial Rapist who brainwashes women into becoming his Battle Harem, yet he's not the most evil person in the setting.
The Ride-On King: The world has a recurring problem of royals starting wars against each other, systematic slavery of non-humans, monsters rampaging everywhere and The Tower performing inhuman experiments on everyone they can. The inhabited world is also composed of two small continents, while the majority of the world is considered to be lost to the Curse.
The world where The Rising of the Shield Hero takes place is pretty much this. For starters, high-level monsters appear and kill indiscriminately until they are stopped by deadly force, with a giant magical hourglass showing when it will happen, each and every time and no way to prevent it. The world also suffers from a bad case of Fantastic Racism against demi-humans, who are looked down upon and more often than not sold as slaves. Says a lot that one of the most honest and upright merchants in the setting is a slave trader.
The world of Roll Over and Die has the same problems as the real-life Medieval Period. Slavery is seen as normal, the common people don't have access to proper medicine thanks to a highly controlling Corrupt Church, and a certain race (in this case demons) suffers heavy discrimination thanks to religious propaganda. And that's the nice part. Turns out that the God of said Church is a Mad God and possibly an Omnicidal Maniac that will spread massive destruction on Earth if released. Pretty much everyone in the upper echelons of the Church is his pawn, and they will do anything to achieve his goals. This includes performing inhuman experiments on people and monsters and send the results to deal with any threat to their plans. And those experiments are not only very powerful, but their abilities are not suited to give their foes painless deaths. Even with many strong fighters discovering the truth, the bad guys have an overwhelming advantage through the story.
The world of Saikano, while never directly shown, is undoubtedly this. We know that there's a large-scale war going on from the beginning, but halfway through we find out that the protagonist's hometown is peaceful because Chie's specifically protecting it, and everywhere else has gone to hell. By the end of the series, all the different countries have either been destroyed, or are committed to plans of mutually assured destruction, and Chie's lost most of her humanity and turned into a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds out of a desire to give everyone a nice, painless death. There's a very good chance this was the best thing left to do at that point.
Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (Goodbye Mr. Despair) takes place in a world where a suicidal, paranoid Large Ham megalomaniac is actually one of the most sane and collected members of the cast. This is all Played for Laughs, of course.
Shimoneta takes place sixteen years after Japan passed several insane censorship laws to make obscenities illegal. This includes any foul language, gestures, pornography, sexually explicit images, and even the accurate medical terms for certain body parts. People are forced to wear chokers and wristbands called Peace makers, which will alert the authorities if you say, draw, write, or even look up anything obscene. The heavily modified education system means the current generation doesn't even know where babies come from or what sex even is. People who actively disregard these laws are branded as "obscenity terrorists." While this is mostly Played for Laughs, especially in the beginning, the series also explores the issues that would crop up in such a world, such as Anna attempting to rape Tanukichi and seeing nothing wrong with it, since she doesn't have a concept of lewdness or consent. The only reason she fails is because she's ignorant of how sex works as well.
Even before the event that lead to the end of days, Silent Möbius already had a decaying world.
It was sped up by opening a portal way to another world containing demonic beings called Lucifer Hawk who started preying on humans and destroying existing establishments. The irony is that the very reasons the humans opened the gateway to Lucifer Hawks is because they felt contact could enable finding solutions to save the decaying Earth.
In an interesting twist to the formula, the Lucifer Hawks were just as desparate to get into contact with the humans because their own world was falling apart. In particular foodsource was becoming scarcer and scarcer. A second attempt to reopen the portal is what drives the series present timelin conflict.
Japan in Speed Grapher is a crapsack world. Everyone person in power is corrupt, and a MegaCorp has bribed even the police force. All but a handful of characters are monsters.
Amberground in Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee is a corrupt world of perpetual night, where a man-made sun shines over the capital city of Akatsuki. Life is rough almost everywhere, and even the people assigned to deliver some happiness throughout the world through letters—the titular Bees—could be killed by or lose their Life Energy (Heart) to mechanical monsters along the way. It gets worse when it turns out the man made sun is made by constantly draining the people of their heart.
Humans have been driven from the surface into underground villages. If anyone dares to climb to the world above, they're mercilessly hunted down and killed by the Spiral King Lordgenome's Beastmen. Of course, all it takes is a band of insanely badass fighters led by an exceedingly charismatic and determined idiot, and then his young friend/stepbrother of sorts to turn everything around. Then the aliens show up.
Neither the Pre-timeskip world nor the Post-timeskip world looked too good. First people were forced to live underground, so there would never be 1 million humans on the planet. After timeskip, they are forced out of their underground homes, where they were safer, only to reach 1 million and get attacked by aliens, though those are easily repelled... until they toss the Moon at Earth, just to make sure humanity is exterminated. It gets better, though, when Simon and Co. turns the Moon into the Cathedral Terra, a giant battleship later named Chouginga Dai-Gurren.
Plus, post-timeskip, the ruling government was entirely staffed by idiots who had their position based not on merit, but merely because they were friends with the protagonist.
Played extremely straight in Texhnolyze. The entire population of Lux are either: a) evil, selfish bastards, b) poor broken woobies, or c) some combination of the two. Not to mention that they all live in a cave underground and the entire city survives because of Rafia, which grows from people. And don't think you can escape by going to the surface. It's not pretty.
Tokyo Ghoul isn't fun for either side. For humanity, they have to live in constant fear of a predatory species that looks just like them, hiding until they reveal their Game Face and start eating them. In reality, however, while many Ghouls are brutal sadists that enjoy killing humans, many others seek to find ways to live peacefully with humans as much as is possible. They eat human flesh because they simply can't consume anything else, other than water, coffee, and the flesh of other Ghouls. Most live miserable lives fearing for their own safety and have lost family members to the Ghoul Investigators, trying to scrape out a living on the fringes of society. The humans who try to help them are punished just as severely, and both sides are trapped in a Cycle of Revenge. By the end, however, the two species have a chance at learning to live together in peace.
Planet Gunsmoke in Trigun is a barely-habitable desert planet that humanity is forced to retreat to after it has already killed Earth, but even mankind's fight for survival isn't enough to unify the people. About half the population is made up of resource-hording tycoons and trigger-happy bounty hunters with no disregard for the well-being of bystanders.
Another Dark Fantasy manga contender is Übel Blatt. The main human empire is the sole bulwark against Wistech, which uses horrifying, corruptmagitek to create Body HorrorEldritch Abominations and Weapons of Mass Destruction as tools of war, but the humans are bolstered by the might of the Seven Heroes who won the last great war by striking at the heart of Wistech; and now it seems the Four Lances of Betrayal, former companions of the Seven Heroes who betrayed their comrades, are Back from the Dead and stirring up touble in the hinterlands. seems like a recipe for a cliché Black-and-White Morality setting, no? Wrong.It turns out the Seven Heroes are frauds; they panicked and chose to stay behind after reaching the border, and when their four former True Companions came back after successfully completing their mission, the "heroes" ambushed and slaughtered them and demonized them into the Four Lances of Betrayal to cover their own asses. After their return, the "heroes" were acclaimed throughout the empire and got positions of power and prestige as nobility, which they proceeded to abuse and reign oppressively over the populace; at least two devolved into monsters, one went batshit crazy from guilt and paranoia, and the rest are at the very least flagrant hypocrites. The Four Lances stirring up trouble are also fakes using the name as free publicity. And that's not mentioning the Fantastic Racism towards those with elven/fairy blood, the numerous other corrupt assholes which liberally pepper the setting, or the fact that The Hero, an Anti-Hero on a Roaring Rampage of Revengeagainst the Seven Heroes, as he's one of the true Four Lances, mysteriously recovered from the massacre, is still one of the more morally upright main characters bar some others in his current group. And of course, after several good-guy victories and a slowly building Hope Spot for the setting in general, come volume 9 and 10, things go downhill again.
Vampire Hunter D: Technology has regressed from a super-advanced future to a mix of medieval and futuristic where mutants, monster, vampiric nobles, and highly advanced technology exist to kill the average human who usually live in poor village with horrible things just outside vision radius during the daytime.
Versus (2022) has a multiversal variety wherein every humanity is on its last leg before seeking aid from other realities leading to the Patchwork World where every threat existed simultaneously.
Most of humanity is crammed into crumbling domed concrete cities ruled by warring Nobles, and the environment outside is slowly decaying. Maybe the most telling line in the entire series is spoken by the wolf Hige, who looks at the sky and says, "C'mon, birds, let's see some flying up there." But we don't see any birds at all after that — maybe they're all extinct. Until the final episode, when the world is regenerated.
However, that world was the previous one before ours, and while the world did regenerate, it was corrupted by Darcia's bloody eye falling in the purifying waters of rebirth, making the next world (ours) also a far cry from Paradise. There is still some hope left, though, as in the last shot a reincarnated Kibaappears to start his quest for Paradise anew.
Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds has Satellite, where Yusei has lived a hard life. This changes later on in the series. The post-apocalyptic world Z-one, Antimony, Paradox and Aporia come from is also this.
Purity Sue into Tartarus for a single completely minor sin committed in life. Yeah.