15 Worst Romance Anime of All Time

Any media, not just anime, tends to go a bit wonky when it comes to romance. While there are some grounded ones, the most interesting romances in anime are the dramatic ones. That being said, not every anime romance that tries to be interesting is very successful at it. There are a lot of ways that romance anime can turn out just plain old bad, failing to appeal to many of the fans that are generally pretty easy to please.

Unlike a similar article where I discuss the most problematic romantic relationships in anime, this does not mean all of those series are bad romances. There is, however, a lot of crossover.

Worst Romance Anime

Kodomo no Jikan

This is the anime I like to pretend doesn’t exist because anime has a pretty controversial problem with what it does to its underage, albeit fictional, girls. Even when compared to some of the bad examples that exist in modern anime, this aged series is still really bad.

This romance series surrounds the feelings between a third grade girl and her teacher. At least he has the decency to resist her overly sexual advances, for awhile anyway. The longer you watch, the worse it gets.

Mother of the Goddess’ Dormitory

When I was first going into this anime all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I didn’t mind that it was a literal child living in a dorm of college women. Sometimes ecchi do be like that.

However, the issue I had was that it was also a romance ecchi. Still optimistic, I thought the romance would come from a later-introduced similarly aged girl. It… Does not. All these college women fall in love with this literal 12-year-old.

Diabolik Lovers

The plot of Diabolik Lovers is a girl getting kidnapped to serve as fodder to a house of handsome, hungry vampires. Now, that can be a perfectly serviceable plot if done with even a modicum of effort. However, that entire plot is all there is to the show.

No characters are developed or explored. The kidnap victim never even tries to escape. It is just one set piece of her being sucked on into another set piece of her being sucked on. Sexy sucking will always have a place in vampire romance anime, but you have to do other things too.

Eromanga Sensei

I was fine with Oreimo because for the vast majority of the series, it played really coy with the implied incest. Even the ending only left it only strongly implied. The sister series by the same creator, Eromanga Sensei, makes them step-siblings and drops all pretense. A stepbrother is in love with his younger – problematically younger – stepsister. Furthermore, he is also her only caretaker, so that’s not ideal either.

Yet, for as much as it dives right into that, the “romance” of the show is just her brother being absolutely awed by how cute his shut-in stepsister is away from prying eyes. Some of the time, he is just looking at her through the window from a neighbor’s house, as if looking at an animal at the zoo.

Class President is a Maid

There. I said it. I won’t yuck anyone’s yum, but I don’t see how this remains such a popular romance anime. It is not even that the relationship sprouted from what is essentially stalking, but it’s that it felt so bland throughout.

Romance anime often suffers from “this is a lot better in the manga” syndrome, but here it doesn’t even make me curious as to manga events unlike other objectively good and ultimately unfinished romance anime like Blue Spring Ride or My Little Monster.

The characters are archetypes, and even though that can be interesting, they are bland version of archetypes doing plot events that just dragged on and on. One blends into another and even those big, romantic, heart-throbbing moments – you know the ones – barely illicit a tingle.

Wolf Girl and Black Prince

With characters that look interchangeable with the characters from Class President is a Maid, it is easy to confuse the two. The good news is that the characters in Wolf Girl and Black Prince at least are interestingly flawed, though they squander all that potential pretty early on.

This series isn’t a bad romance because of its master/dog dynamic, it’s a bad romance because it doesn’t really do anything with that and never clearly explains why the male lead is the way he is.

If you have a wounded beautiful boy, you have to make it clear why he is damaged in this way so we can watch that earnest, hard-working cardboard cutout of a shoujo lead fix him. That is the traditional foundation of shoujo romance anime.

Domestic Girlfriend

I like Domestic Girlfriend specifically because it is bad in many ways. Bad can be entertaining. Anyway, what makes it a bad romance is not the love triangle between recently made step-siblings. It is that both girls fall in love with a guy for no clear reason.

He’s not a good guy. He’s not a charming guy. He, of course, aspires to be a writer, and that’s about it.

He gave one girl the D, and after later hanging out with her while stalking her sister whom he actually loves, she suddenly loves him. The aforementioned other sister puts her whole teaching career in jeopardy and throws away a relationship to sleep with this unlikable, uninteresting high school boy.

Both sisters then do everything short of fist fight over him, and he devolves into an even more scummy character.

Girlfriend, Girlfriend

Every time I think about Girlfriend, Girlfriend, there is a little voice in my head that starts shrieking at top volume. It’s a show about a guy as boring as can be that gets a girlfriend. He then gets confessed to by another girl. Instead of choosing, he suggests to the girls that he just date them both. Oh, and that they also move into together if only for pure ease of injecting ecchi into this romcom.

I’m all for anime exploring polyamory. I’m all for anime exploring cheating. I’m not for stupid ecchi romantic comedies full of tired jokes that make women just instantly fine with ridiculous situations. My suspension of disbelief was shattered the moment his girlfriend didn’t just walk off and never look back.

Vampire Knight

There are people that Vampire Knight appeals to, and I imagine those people also enjoy Twilight as well. Much like Twilight, Vampire Knight is about beautiful vampire men and melodrama. It does nothing if it can’t do it way over-the-top and dramatically.

I blame it as the reason we simply can’t have good vampire romance anime. You put “vampire romance” in a pitch, everyone thinks of Vampire Knight, heaves a mighty “UGH,” and shuts that shit down.

Ultimately, it is just another romance series about a cardboard cutout of a girl that frenetically weeble-wobbles between two vampire men who also fight each other for whatever reason they decide on that day.

Masamune-kun Revenge

This series had potential. The plot was there. A guy was insulted by a girl as a child, got hot as a teen, so dared to make her fall in love with him so he could dump her. It was all neatly lined up. The seasoned romance fan could easily trace it to a pleasing conclusion, but this son of a bitch juked us.

It juked us by completely not focusing on his revenge or even his romance. What it did do is allowed us to watch uninteresting characters do uninteresting school life stuff.

Charlotte

Charlotte – the anime – was good, or at least fine if you can’t overlook the pacing issue. Charlotte – the part that’s romance – was not so good. Why? Because it appears suddenly right near the end and kind of comes out of nowhere, to be honest.

Yet, as the entire third act of Charlotte was essentially put on fast forward when it comes to pacing, its sudden romance isn’t that shocking.

The breadcrumbs were there, but the execution was sudden. They literally had like three scenes of them even acknowledging it. You need more to romance than just the “I like you,” the “come back safe so we can date,” and the “we’re dating now” scenes.

The Day I Became a God

Jun Maeda anime is a bit of a guilty pleasure, and The Day I Became a God is, at present, his newest series. It is the same stuff you can expect from Angel Beats, Clannad, Kanon, and the like. You have that vague supernatural twist hung over your head as you watch a group of people do friendship stuff, solve people’s problems, and maybe fall in love.

However, while one could argue that hanging out as friends is a good way to fall in love, and it is, the love plot at the end kind of just springs up.

You didn’t get a lot of breadcrumbs for it, and this guy ends up going a long way for his sudden love interest. Furthermore, the place it ends up is pretty daring, but I can’t say why due to spoilers.

Osamake – Romcom Where The Childhood Friend Won’t Lose

Perhaps I take offense to this because it promised to play with tropes right there in the title before basically telling you to fuck off because all the love interests were his childhood friends all along. However, one can get past that type of cheekiness if the romance is good.

Yet, it is just not good. It is cliched, not even one waifu of the bunch is remotely unique or enticing, and the male lead is, unsurprisingly, the same. It is a drop of water in a vast ocean, overlooked for its lack of variation and will ultimately be forgotten because of it.

Love and Lies

There are a lot of bad romances here, and many of them are bad for different reasons. Some are bad because the relationship they explore is just really wrong. Some of them are bad purely because of the execution of the series. Is Love and Lies the worst romance anime? No, but it is special because it suffers from both a pretty bad relationship and just plain old bad writing.

To be fair, the relationship isn’t actually too bad. The entire anime is based around the premise that you are assigned a marriage partner at a certain age, and just as the main character falls in love, he gets a marriage partner that is a different girl. Not the best thing to start off with, but you can make that into an interestingly complex series of relationships. Or something interestingly trashy like Domestic Girlfriend.

Unfortunately, because of the writing, Love and Lies squanders any potential because the characters simply don’t act like any normal person would act when placed in a love polygon. It is very much a prequel to the stupidity that is Girlfriend, Girlfriend, but at least it gave a reason for it.

Do you have more romance anime series that you would consider the worst? Let fans know in the comments section below.