Due to his love of cute things, Souta Takanashi ends up taking a job at the Wagnaria family restaurant in Hokkaido at the behest of the small and cute Popura Taneshima. However, while he enjoys doting on Popura, he must stay on his toes while working with his more eccentric colleagues.
While the first season is the weakest, Working!! and its subsequent seasons only continues to perfect the “slice of work” formula that is growing in popularity in the slice of life genre these days.
Anime Like Working!!
For Fans of Working Hard
Servant x Service
Servant x Service follows three new civil servants in the city of Mitsuba. Each character is driven by their own personal motivations, but never-the-less they are encouraged to work hard for the city even if it is a thankless job.
Servant x Service and Working!! both had their source material penned by the same mangaka, so of course there are similarities abound. Although civil servant offices and a restaurant are vastly different settings, the humor remains the same.
The Devil is a Part-Timer
Just as he was on the cusp of conquering his world, Satan is thrown through a portal to Tokyo. Although he cannot use magic in this world, he is still motivated to conquer it, but first, he must get a job and pay his rent on time.
Although a good deal of The Devil is a Part-Timer takes place outside of the McDonald’s he works at, like Working!!, the show features a similar comical situations on how even mundane things can be funny.
Hanasaku Iroha
Ohana Matsumae is an energetic teenager that lives with her mother in Tokyo. However, when her mother decides to run off with a man, she is sent to the country to live with a grandmother she has never met. As it turns out, her grandmother runs a traditional Japanese inn, but due to her frivolous mother, treats Ohana quite coldly. Eager to earn her keep and grandmother’s affection, Ohana begins the hard work that makes sure an inn runs smoothly.
The inn in Iroha and the restaurant in Working!! Aren’t too terribly different, but the differences in these anime series lie in their tone. Iroha has its comedic moments, but tends to be more dramatic and more rooted to reality while Working!! can go a bit out there for the sake of the joke.
For Fans of Eccentric Characters
MM!
Upon discovering that he actually loves being abused and miserable, Sado tries to join a special club at school to work through his issues. Unfortunately, he is not the only club member with issues.
Although these series sound so vastly different, the similarities between Working!! and MM lie in the characters. Working!! is powered by a cast of weird characters, but MM takes the weirdness to the next level.
Azumanga Daioh
When the 10-year-old child prodigy joins the freshmen high school class, she is one of the strangest additions to the class. However, with a whole slew of equally curious girls, including their homeroom teacher, strange is a relative word.
Azumanga Daioh is the classic option for a good slice of life comedy series, and Working!!, while more modern, adopted that classic Azumanga Daioh humor easily. Carried by strange situations created by strange characters, the similarities are myriad.
Durarara!!
Tokyo’s downtown district of Ikebukuro is awash in strange rumors, everything from colorless color gangs to a headless rider roaming town populate the rumors. For Mikado Ryuugamine who just moved there from the countryside, he is but one witness to the district’s slew of strange events.
If the large cast of weirdoes in Working!! was what really sold the series for you, but you crave something more serious, characters are something that Durarara!! has much of. However, as you work through the series, it becomes less comedic and more serious in nature.
For Fans of Laidback Comedy
Shirokuma Café
Located near the local zoo, the charismatic polar bear Shirokuma decided to open his eponymous café. As a popular spot for humans and animals alike, it is a good place to relax after a hard day.
Naturally, both Working!! and Shirokuma Café are both about working in the food service industry. However, Shirokuma Café abandons any roots in realities for cute animal characters and even more fun situations.
Nichijou
Nichijou primarily focuses on the daily antics of a trio of childhood friends—high school girls Mio Naganohara, Yuuko Aioi and Mai Minakami—whose stories soon intertwine with the young genius Hakase Shinonome, her robot caretaker Nano, and their talking cat Sakamoto. With every passing day, the lives of these six, as well as of the many people around them, experience both the calms of normal life and the insanity of the absurd.
Both Working!! and Nichijou feature minimal solid storylines and choose to be more episodic and comedic. However, Nichijou is a little more laidback in its comedy and relies more on its utterly strange characters.
School Rumble
Sophomore high school student Tenma Tsukamoto is on a quest to confess her feelings to the boy she likes. Kenji Harima, a delinquent, is on the same quest. This is the story of the complicated world of one-sided romance.
Like Working!!, School Rumble focuses on the random lives of its characters. While it seems like things should be normal, the characters always end up with random and unexpected things happening to them. However, School Rumble tends to be more about love triangles than Working!!
Have your own recommendations for anime series like Working!!? Tell us about it in the comments section below.
