At a mysterious back alley ramen stand, a lonely college student in his final year accidentally bumps into a man that calls himself the God of Matrimony. There he pours his soul out to the god about all the regrets he has about his college life, which he spent bitterly trying to break up couples. However, soon he finds himself back at the very start of his college career. Can he change the past or will he just repeat past mistakes?
Experimental and later psychedelic in nature, Tatami Galaxy is what many consider a cult anime series, but if you are part of the cult, then give these other anime recommendations a try.
Anime Like The Tatami Galaxy
For Fans of Human Failures
Welcome to the NHK
College dropout Tatsuhiro Satou has been living as a hikikomori for four years, and in his isolation, he has come to believe in a number of conspiracy theories. Primary among them is that a conspirator is behind his NEET nature. Although he tries to overcome it, his NEET nature is a deep hole to crawl out of.
Both series follow relatively young people that are generally considered miserable pieces of human failure. Both series end up as semi-episodic as you follow the characters attempts to better themselves while being surrounded by equally weird misfits only to be tied together in the end by the narrative.
Paranoia Agent
There is an urban legend going around in Musashino City about Shounen Bat, a boy that rolls around on roller blades and beats people with his bent golden baseball bat. Numerous reports of his attacks have turned up, but the police have been unable to catch him. As the investigation continues and more people fall victim, paranoia begins to set in.
If you enjoyed the mind trip that set into Tatami Galaxy near the end, then Paranoia Agent will end up close to your heart. While it doesn’t really have a specific main character, Paranoia Agent and its many misfits highlight a number of psychological aspects that make it, like Tatami Galaxy, a sort of “thinking” anime.
Flowers of Evil
Kasuga Takao is a bookish student, but when he goes back to look for his book in the classroom one day, he instead finds the gym uniform of his school crush. Without thinking, he takes it. Now all his classmates are on the lookout for a pervert and he is being confronted by a friendless girl in class that saw him do it.
Outcasts and miserable people. Both Flowers of Evil and Tatami Galaxy are all about highlighting them. However, while Tatami Galaxy ends with more positivity, Flowers of Evil is just constant revelry in how horrible people generally are.
For Fans of Re-Do’s
Re:Zero
When Subaru Natsuki goes out for a midnight snack run, he suddenly finds himself transported to another world. As a bewildered teen in a land of swords and magic, he wanders around and ends up attacked by thugs. After being saved by a mysterious woman, he agrees to help her get back something that was stolen. Unfortunately, it ends in both their deaths. With his dying breath, he finds that he possesses the power of revival, escaping his death by the repeating the last few hours.
While wildly different in tone, characters, and genre, both shows are about getting re-do’s. The main characters are constantly going back in time to try and get a different outcome. However, while Tatami Galaxy is mature and more experimental, Re:Zero is more in line with your typical anime sensibilities these days.
Erased
Recently, the detached, struggling manga artist Satoru Fujinuma finds himself going back in time to just minutes before tragedy strikes around him. He has saved many lives with this power of “Revival,” but when he is wrongly accused of murdering someone close to him, Fujinuma finds himself sent back to his childhood. As he discovers, the recent death in his life is somehow connected the kidnap-murder of three children in the area that is about to happen. This time, he may be able to use his power to save more than just one life, easing his past regrets in the process.
Once you make a mistake, there isn’t a way to go back and fix it. This is how it is in real life, but both of these series pose the “what if” question of if you could do that, what would you do differently. While Erased is of a different sort of genre, both shows focus on trying to rectify past regrets.
Steins;Gate
In a rickety old building in Akihabara, mad scientist Rintarou Okabe and his lab assistants work on so-called future gadgets. However, their most successful contraption to date, the Phone Microwave, a machine that can turn bananas into gel, also has the added function of sending emails into the past, thus altering the flow of history.
What Tatami Galaxy and Steins;Gate have in common the most is that they are heavy on dialogue and often that dialogue is thrown at you in large, fast chunks. This means if you look away, you can often miss huge important chunks of the plot. Alongside that, you also have a series that is about going back in time and trying to fix mistakes or generate a different outcome. Will they succeed or continue to fail? We will see.
For Fans of Experimental Animation
Welcome to Irabu’s Office
This is the story of the many patients and their many problems that come to the psychiatric ward of Irabu General Hospital. Here, these patients undergo counselling by the child-like son of the hospital director, Dr. Ichiro Irabu and his sullen but sexy nurse Mayumi. While his treatments are unique and his advice seems insane, he gets results.
A large part of the enjoyment in Tatami Galaxy is not just the unique animation, but the story of a main character that is often surrounded by a bunch of weirdoes. It is a similar way in Irabu. However, while Tatami Galaxy’s events are tied up neatly by the narrative at the end, Irabu is more episodic, but you can see how the variety of characters are often tied together as well.
Devilman: Crybaby
Akira has always been a little weak and blends into the background, so when his childhood friend asks for help uncovering devils, he agrees. The pair head to Sabbath where many gather for debauchery and to be possessed by devils. When the devils begin to wreck havoc in their new living hosts, Akira agrees to merge bodies with a devil in order to save his friend. Though he now has a voracious devil inside him, he still has the heart of a crybaby.
Both of these series were directed by Masaaki Yuasa, who, as you can tell, has a very distinct and experimental art style. His art style is different from typical anime series as is usually the storytelling that he employs. While both series explore different themes, if you were one of the few that appreciated the animation in Tatami Galaxy, then this is just more to appreciate.
Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei
Nozomu Itoshiki is a high school teacher that is so pessimistic that even small misfortunes can send him spiraling into a pit of despair. Surrounded by increasingly insane students, Nozomu’s unique brand of despair has its own way of affecting them, often in a positive manner.
Both Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei and Tatami Galaxy are highly dialogue driven series and everything tends to move at a pretty brisk pace. However, their similarities are more than just that, you get the same feel from the main characters who see nothing but despair in life and often try to spread that to others.
Do you have any recommendations for fans of Tatami Galaxy? Let those fans know about them in the comments section below.
