After the death of their father, Ichirou Kuga supported his two younger siblings on their inheritance and by taking up drawing manga. However, with tight deadlines, he finds himself in need of a new assistant to help him meet his schedule.
While growing dangerously near his breaking point, Shiori Goshiki takes the job. She is incredibly fast and also detailed, a real dream assistant.
However, one night while working late, Ichirou gets pricked by something on Goshiki’s body and suddenly finds out that now they can’t be too physically far apart without him suffering ill effects, but they are, according to the customs of her homeland, engaged to marry.
While it is always great to see a romance anime about adults, the alien spin gave A Galaxy Next Door a unique twist to keep it from fading into all the other romance anime. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like A Galaxy Next Door, head on down below.
Anime Like A Galaxy Next Door
For Fans of Adult Romance
Wotakoi – Love is Hard for Otaku
After discovering they work at the same company, a gaming otaku and a fujoshi rekindle for the first time since middle school.
After some good old-fashioned after work drinks, they decide to start dating, but dating an otaku as an otaku is more difficult that one would think.
Both Wotakoi and A Galaxy Next Door are adult romance with a bit of a nerdy spin on them. While A Galaxy Next Door is about manga artists, Wotakoi is just about office workers that are fans of anime, manga, and games.
What these series have most in common is the couples, while having different dynamics, start dating early. You spend the series watching them get to know each other and fall in love with each other. However, while A Galaxy Next Door moves quickly onto them gushing about each other, Wotakoi is a little more reserved with romantic gushing because it takes longer to admit their budding feelings.
Tonikawa – Over The Moon For You
After being ridiculed for his strange name, Nasa, like the space agency, decides he will become a man even greater than the starry sky. However, one night, that all changes when he sees a beautiful girl.
She ends up saving him from being fatally hit by a truck while crossing the street to talk to her. Having chased her down despite his serious injuries, he asks her out. She says she will go out with him if they marry. He agrees, and passes out.
Waking up to find her gone, he abandons his ambitions until one day when she shows up with their marriage registration.
Do you just like really cozy romances with minimal couple drama between a genuinely nice guy and a girl who may or may not have come from space? Because that is both of these anime.
While A Galaxy Next Door can be a little heavier with the character relationships and the professional struggle as a manga artist, Tonikawa is a fluff. Both series follow adults who very quickly move in with each other and are either engaged or just straight-up married.
Nodame Cantabile
Shinichi Chiaki is a first-rate musician that has dreams of playing among Europe’s elite. However, due to his fear of flying, he has remained firmly grounded in Japan.
In his fourth year at Japan’s top music university, he meets Megumi Noda, or Nodame, as she prefers to be called.
At first she seems unkempt and without direction, but when he hears her play, everything he thought he knew about her was wrong.
Although A Galaxy Next Door is a romance between manga artists and Nodame Cantabile is a romance between musicians, what they actually have in common is the relationship they start to display.
Both couples are more focused on being supportive of each other professionally. A Galaxy Next Door has a certain lovey-dovey-ness to the main couple while Nodame Cantabile can have a more comically contentious dynamic between the couple, but in both series, they are there for each other as support when it comes to their professional career struggles.
My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun
After her boyfriend cheats on her, Akane Kinoshita flees to her favorite MMO and vents her frustrations on some in-game mobs. While doing that, she happens across Akito Yamada who bluntly asks her to leave while he farms those mobs for a specific item.
While she initially finds him pretty rude, she meets Yamada again by chance in an offline meetup event for the game. It turns out she, like so many others, misinterpreted his poor social skills for antagonism.
From then on, Akane finds herself meeting Yamada more and more both in-game and offline as her feelings for him grow.
Both A Galaxy Next Door and My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun are romance anime about adults where the couple actually starts dating rather quickly. Once they start dating, A Galaxy Next Door tends to focus more on professional issues with their careers whereas My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun does have a few more moments of relationship insecurities. That said, both series are actually pretty low on drama.
What you get with both series is new couples getting to know each other, as new couples do, and having those nice moments that romance anime fans live for.
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For Fans of Paranormal Girlfriends
Waiting in Summer
While testing out his filming camera one night, Kaito is blown off the bridge by a streak of blue light. As he is falling, the last thing he remembers is a hand, grabbing his own.
When he wakes up, he finds himself mysteriously back in his room, dazed but uninjured.
As Kaito proceeds with his summer break, deciding to make a movie with his friends, he takes an interest the new upperclassman wandering the town, Ichika Takatsuki, and she ends up invited to join them.
There actually are not a ton of alien romance anime that either aren’t entirely about action or pretty ecchi. However, both A Galaxy Next Door and Waiting in Summer represent normal romances with alien girls well.
Both series follow rather meek/nerdy men who encounter an alien woman and soon fall in love with them while working on their own passion. In Waiting in Summer, their relationship is framed by making a movie that the main character is directing while A Galaxy Next Door has the couple working on the main character’s manga series.
While Waiting in Summer has a little action near the end, both series are rather down-to-earth alien romances where you get to see the couple really fall in love with each other.
Please Teacher
One day, Kei discovers a floating woman in a lake and learns two things – she is an alien and also his teacher.
As they get to know each other, a romance blooms, but when the principal discovers this, he insists they get married.
Both A Galaxy Next Door and Please Teacher have the same basic hook for romance – boy meets alien, boy accidentally gets engaged to alien. However, as is usually the case, the differences are firmly in the details.
The most notable difference is that the relationship in Please Teacher is between a student and a teacher, but further complicated that is that his teacher is an alien and the student is in the body of an 18-year-old with the mind of a 15-year-old due to his unique illness.
So, while A Galaxy Next Door and Please Teacher actually have a very similar hook and both are romance anime, they have distinctly different relationship dynamics.
My Bride is a Mermaid
Michishio Nagasumi is living a normal life when he almost drowns on summer vacation. He is rescued by, of all things, a beautiful mermaid.
Unfortunately, she is from a yakuza family that states if a human sees a mermaid, either the human or the mermaid must die.
To save her life, Michishio agrees to marry the mermaid and become part of this crazy family.
Both A Galaxy Next Door and My Bride is a Mermaid follow main characters who, one day, discover that a woman they barely know is not a human. Through various circumstances, they are now also suddenly engaged to them.
While both series focus on the “getting to know you” period of a new and newly engaged couple that really do develop feelings for each other, there is one crucial difference – comedy.
My Bride is a Mermaid commits itself to comedy more than romance. So this may not be the series for someone that enjoyed the more mature and lower intensity romance of A Galaxy Next Door who is looking for more of that rather than frenetic comedy shenanigans.
Dusk Maiden of Amnesia
For 60 years, the Seikyou Private Academy has been haunted by a ghost known as Yuuko, a young woman that died in the basement.
With no memory of her life, the ghost founds the Paranormal Investigation Club to find answers.
While not about dating an alien, Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is about dating something a little more problematic – dating a ghost.
At first, Dusk Maiden of Amnesia has profoundly little in common with A Galaxy Next Door because it is about a club in a school, led by a ghost, investigating her own death and other paranormal mysteries in the school. However, the series later eschews that and becomes focused on the romance between the ghost and male main character that is nice and a little dopey, just like Kuga.
Mysterious Girlfriend X
Every girl is mysterious to a young man, but new transfer student Mikoto Urabe is particularly curious to Akira Tsubaki. She earns a reputation as a weirdo on her first day when she laughs in the middle of class for no reason, doesn’t interact with her classmates, and sleeps on her desk.
One day, Akira finds her napping at her desk, notices some drool that she left and impulsively tastes it. He is suddenly struck with a fever and finds out he is suffering from a love sickness that is a form of withdrawal from not ingesting more of her drool.
As such, the two enter a very strange new relationship.
While Mysterious Girlfriend X is a high school-set romance, it too follows a guy who accidentally binds himself to a girl by touching something from her body while she was sleeping.
Of course, the way of binding himself to her is more gross in Mysterious Girlfriend X than in A Galaxy Next Door, but if you can get past the drool thing, this series is actually a really nice slow burn romance in a similar way to A Galaxy Next Door.
For Fans of Caring For Kids
Sweetness and Lightning
After the death of his wife, high school math teacher Kouhei Inuzuka is left to care for his young daughter, Tsumugi. He does his best, but his busy schedule and poor culinary skills limit them to eating convenience store food separately.
One day, his daughter expresses an interest to eat together after talking to one of his students in the park, Kotori, who deeply enjoys food. He rushes over to the restaurant owned by the student’s mother, but she is not there.
While Kotori tries her best to cook for them, her skills are lacking. However, together, Inuzuka-sensei, Tsumugi, and Kotori learn to expand their cooking skills.
A Galaxy Next Door and Sweetness and Lightning share the same author, so you will notice a lot of similarities between the characters. It is particularly noticeable in the sweet, slightly dorky male main characters.
Furthermore, both A Galaxy Next Door and Sweetness and Lightning are stories that are framed by something, but not necessarily fully about that. A Galaxy Next Door is a romance story framed by the pair making manga, Sweetness and Lighting is a parenting story framed by learning to cook.
The big difference is that Sweetness and Lightning never commits fully to romance despite the chemistry being there because the female lead is a high school student.
Deaimon
It has been ten years since Nagomu Irino left home to pursue his dream of music. While his dream is failing, he receives a letter hearing saying father has been hospitalized, so he returns home to help run his family’s traditional Kyoto sweets shop.
Once there, he finds his father is fine, but they have picked up an abandoned 10-year-old girl named Itsuka Yukihira, and his father has chosen her as successor.
It isn’t long before Nagomu bonds with Itsuka, viewing himself as a father-like figure to her.
Both A Galaxy Next Door and Deaimon are about sweet male main characters that either are or begin to act like a father figure to a younger children. While romance is the much larger focus in A Galaxy Next Door, Deaimon also has that male main character have a little romantic relationship of his own with his rekindling ex-girlfriend.
While both series focus on other things (making manga or making traditional Japanese sweets), they are stories about their characters. However, Deaimon is more focused on the child and her problems when compared to the Kuga siblings who, while having some problems, are often more just wing-people for the main couple.
Horimiya
Although lauded for being likable and intelligent, Kyouko Hori hides the fact that she has to take care of her brother and the housework because her parents are always working.
Izumi Miyamura, on the other hand, is seen as a brooding, bespectacled otaku. Outside of school, he sports tattoos and nine piercings.
By happenstance, the two outside school personalities of these two classmates meet and they get to know a side of each other they don’t show their peers.
Like in A Galaxy Next Door where taking care of a his siblings is a pretty big part of Kuga’s life and the story, Horimiya also features one of the main character’s being the primary caretaker for her younger sibling. However, it is less of a focus.
Both series are quick-moving romances where the couple gets together early, and then follows a relationship that is pretty low drama. Horimiya and A Galaxy Next Door both give you a lot of wholesome couple moments.
For Fans of Love and Manga
The Manga Artist and His Assistants
This story depicts the work life of a perverted manga artist, Aito Yuuki, and his assistant, Ashisu Sahoto.
Under constant pressure by his editor and lacking girl experience, he frequently used his assistant as a reference.
What if Kuga had a female harem of assistants and was occasionally a degenerate? That’s the Manga Artist and His Assistants.
Both series about about manga artists and their female assistants, but while both main characters have their moments where they are kind, generous people, The Manga Artist and His Assistants is an ecchi comedy rather than a romance like A Galaxy Next Door.
Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun
Chiyo Sakura has fallen head over heels for the handsome and oblivious Umetarou Nozaki. However, when she confesses her love, he gives her an autograph.
It turns out this stoic boy is actually a respected shoujo manga artist.
After a series of misunderstandings, Chiyo winds up not as his girlfriend, but as his manga assistant.
Both A Galaxy Next Door and Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun are about the romantic lives of manga artists. However, while A Galaxy Next Door moved quickly into being a nice romance, Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun kills that at every opportunity with a joke.
Both series get pretty in-depth with the manga creation process, but Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun often prevents any attempt at satisfying romantic moments with the density of its male lead. It is still very funny and minimal romance progress is made, but it is decidedly not the romantic experience that A Galaxy Next Door is.
Do you have more anime recommendations like A Galaxy Next Door? Let fans know in the comments section below.
