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.
There a handful of gamer-themed romance anime, but they tend to either be light on the gaming or light on the romance, so it is absolutely fantastic that My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun is heavy on both. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun, head on down below.
Anime Like My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun
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.
What My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun is to gamers, Wotakoi is to weebs.
Both of these series are romance anime that follow the romantic lives of adults who have hobbies like gaming, anime, or manga. In fact, Nifuji in Wotakoi is a salaryman version of Yamada. He is good at games, bad at expressing himself emotionally, and really quite a kind person under the stoic surface.
However, while My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun has a few moments of traditional romantic relationship drama, Wotakoi, as it is about working adults, has none of that drama and is instead focused on the characters understanding and supporting each other.
A Galaxy Next Door
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 the romantic couple in A Galaxy Next Door are working adults, both series are romance anime about adults where the characters become a couple pretty quickly.
However, while My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun is gamer-themed, A Galaxy Next Door has a distinctly sci-fi twist that doesn’t play as big of a role as you’d think.
As adult romances, both series avoid the obvious and traditional romantic drama found in high school-set romance anime and instead explore the characters getting to know each other better and building their relationship. Instead of doing that through gaming as a framing device like My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun, A Galaxy Next Door uses making manga.
Koikimo – It’s Too Sick to Call This Love
Successful businessman Ryou Amakusa is used to being the target of women’s affections despite never asking anyone out himself. One day, after feeling dizzy from a lack of sleep, he nearly falls down some stairs at the station.
He is saved by high school otaku Ichika Arima, a girl who gives him her own lunch for energy and runs off.
He later finds out she attends his little sisters’ school, and after offering his body in thanks, he falls in love with her and her disgusted reaction.
While My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun follows the love story of a college girl and a boy in his last year of high school, because there is only a very small gap in age, it isn’t really such a big deal. However, Koikimo catches a little more flack because it follows the romance between a high school girl and an adult salaryman in his late 20’s.
As Koikimo is an age gap romance, it often has most of its focus on the couple overcoming that gap, particularly the female lead being understandably creeped out at first. However, like My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun, it is a more mature romance anime about two people coming to understand and love a someone despite their differences as people.
For Fans of Gaming
Netoge – And You Thought There is Never a Girl Online?
After proposing to a girl in a video game, Rusian is not only rejected, but finds out that girl is really a man playing as a female avatar. Afterwards, he makes a sweeping declaration that he will never trust girls online again.
However, years later a girl named Ako proposes to him. Although he thinks she might be a guy, he accepts. When Rusian meets this Ako and his other guild mates in real life, he finds them not only to be classmates of his, but cute girls.
Netoge is built upon the old joke that there are no girls online, and every time you let your guard down, prepare to find out that it was a guy all along.
While Netoge leans hard on that old joke, both it and My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun do acknowledge the common occurrence of crossplay in MMOs, it just doesn’t play as big of a part in My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun.
The big difference between Netoge and My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun is that Netoge is a high school romance anime, and boy does it feel like it. The relationship is sluggish and hindered on occasion by the female leads’ emotional issues. It is more of a good gamer comedy than it is a satisfying romance anime.
Recovery of an MMO Junkie
Morioka Moriko has had enough of being an overworked corporate slave, so she decided to retire herself to the NEET lifestyle. While at home, yearning for the previous connections she once made in online gaming, she starts up a new MMO. There, she creates her character, the handsome Hayashi.
However, in her newbie struggles she meets a Lily, another character willing to help her and they begin to grow closer to each other. At the same time, in real life, Moriko also has a shocking encounter with a handsome corporate employee.
Both My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun and Recovery of an MMO Junkie are adult romance anime about a couple that plays an MMO together. However, the large bulk of Recovery of an MMO Junkie has those two characters not knowing that.
Alongside following a NEET, Recovery of an MMO Junkie isn’t what you would call a satisfying romance anime in that they take most of the series to even realize their feelings were directed at each other. However, it is still a gaming-themed romance with nice characters and relatable comedy.
Bofuri – I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense
After receiving an invitation from a friend, Kaede Honjou starts playing the VRMMO game New World Online as a character named Maple.
However, in her desire to not get hurt, she puts all her stats in Vitality. This makes her move very slowly, unable to use magic, and get attacked by even the smallest creatures. However, it does allow her impenetrable defense, and the gear she finds while wandering grants her a one-hit counter skill.
And so, her adventures begin.
While Bofuri isn’t a romance anime and is about a VRMMO, it merits mentioning because the way Akane plays her MMO in My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun is the way Maple plays her VRMMO in Bofuri.
Both start off with characters that are just playing for fun. They aren’t into using fully optimized builds and gear or being so pretentious that they need to solo everything. They are just having fun.
That said, Akane realistically struggles because she is not optimized. Bofuri does the opposite. Maple’s non-conventional build ends up being the most OP in the game because of her items, so she just stomps every try-hard she meets with a smile on her face. It’s not a romance, but it is very wholesome.
Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki-kun
Fumiya Tomozaki is the top player in Japan at a fighting game called TackFam. Despite holding such a title, he is a failure at everything else, blaming it on the unfair rules and mechanics of life.
One day, the second best TackFam player asks to meet up.
Tomozaki discovers that they are actually Aoi, one of the most popular girls at school. She, however, is disappointed that someone she respected is a failure at life.
Now, she aims to teach him how to succeed at the glorious game of life.
While My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun has a pretty positive message with Akane loving Yamada for who he is and not necessarily wanting to change him, Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki-kun explores the exact opposite.
Both series have male leads that are gamers who are also a bit socially dysfunctional. There are nice men on the inside, and both series explore that. However, Tomozaki-kun is more about the main character changing into a more socially functional person.
For Fans of Stoic Male Love Interests
Blue Spring Ride
Futaba Yoshioka was an attractive middle schooler, popular with boys, but not with girls. It left her feeling lonely, but none of that mattered as long as her crush, Kou Tanaka, liked her.
However, when Kou moved away, Futaba decided to change herself, purposely adopting unattractive traits to be popular with the girls, but one day, Kou comes back as different of a person as she is.
Both Blue Spring Ride and My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun are romance anime where the male lead is cold and almost emotionless, but, as is tradition, they are just damaged or misunderstood.
Like Yamada is actually quite kind despite his attitude, so too is Kou. However, while Yamada just as a more stoic and muted in personality, Kou’s attitude comes from the trauma he suffered in the past.
Regardless, both series are about these stoic men falling in love with a more outgoing girl. Perhaps what they have most in common is how rewarding the various shows of affection are when they come from the male main character, since they are more rare.
Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible
Junta Shiraishi has a special, if not sometimes inconvenient skill of being difficult for people to notice due to his lack of presence. However, while even the teacher fails to notice him, his desk neighbor Nagisa Kubo seems to never miss him.
Unfortunately, Kubo likes to tease him on a daily basis and put his near-invisibility to the test in nerve-wracking situations. However, her playful antics begin to evolve into what normal people would easy see as clear feelings for him.
Although Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible is notably different in that it follows middle schoolers, both of these romance anime follow the building love between a beautiful and popular girl and the quiet kid that she becomes interested in.
However, while Yamada is more the “cool, handsome, but quiet” type, Shiraishi is distinctly more of an outcast.
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.
Although Horimiya is a romance anime set in high school, it presents a similar dynamic to My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun. Both romance anime follow a more popular and outgoing girl with her own issues that begins dating a quiet boy.
While Yamada has some baggage, Miyamura in Hormiya was shaped into the person he is today by his emotional baggage.
While these romance anime have their differences, they are part of the new age of romance anime where drama is kept pretty low, and when it does happen, it is kept realistic. Instead, these series focus on other things when not focusing on the relationship, like gaming in My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun or side character relationships in Horimiya.
Do you have more anime recommendations like My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun? Let fans know in the comments section below.
