Ten years ago, Raku Ichijou made a promise with a childhood friend to meet again and use the key she holds to open the locket he wears around his neck then be together forever. In the present day, this heir apparent to an intimidating yakuza family continues to wait for his friend’s return while trying to be as uninvolved in family matters as possible.
However, when a rival gang invades his family’s turf, the family leaders decide Raku should start a romantic relationship with the other chief’s daughter, Chitoge.
While they pretend to be dating to maintain the peace, Raku is almost positive his classmate Kosaki Onodera is the girl he made his promise with.
While not the first series to use a forced relationship premise as a base for romance, Nisekoi does it in a way that is so memorable for how lovable every character in the series is. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Nisekoi, head on down below.
Anime Like Nisekoi
For Fans of Childhood Friends and Promises
Love Hina
After making a childhood promise with a girl who moved away, Keitaro is dedicated to getting into the prestigious Tokyo University. Unfortunately, he is hopelessly stuck failing his entrance exams.
In order to continue trying, he moves out of his parent’s house into his grandmother’s inn to work as a manager.
However, what he doesn’t know is that her hot springs inn is also an all-girls dorm.
In truth, the mystery based around the promise made to a childhood friend you can’t remember in Nisekoi was so similar to Love Hina that it was uncanny.
Both series are harem romance anime about a main character who made a promise to be together with a girl when he was young, but doesn’t remember the girl. The series then leads you to believe it could be one girl or it could be another.
While Nisekoi actually keeps wobbling between the “clear” main girl, Love Hina is a little more obvious who the love interest is. However, the main character does have clear feelings for a tsundere girl as well as a more outwardly nice dandere girl.
Masamune-kun’s Revenge
As a child, Masamune Makabe confessed his love to the wealthy and beautiful Aki Adagaki. However, she brutally rejected him and nicknamed him “Piggy” due to his chubby appearance.
Fleeing to his grandfather’s home in the country, Masamune toiled endlessly to become fit. Once he became skinny and handsome, he returns to his old neighborhood in order to carry out revenge against the girl that wronged him.
With the help of Aki’s maid, Masamune sets out to make her fall in love with him so that he can be the one to break her heart.
Both Nisekoi and Masamune-kun’s Revenge are romance anime where the main character is motivated from events from his childhood. However, while Nisekoi is motivated by a wholesome event, Masamune-kun’s Revenge is motivated by him being hurt by a girl he had a crush on.
However, while Nisekoi has a harem element to it, Masamune-kun’s Revenge is a focused romance where the main character desires revenge on one girl right up until he doesn’t.
Osamake – Romcom Where The Childhood Friend Won’t Lose
Sueharu Maru, once a child actor and now just a normal high school boy, is considered lucky to have the constant company of his beautiful and popular childhood friend, Kuroha Shida. However, when Kuroha confesses to him, he immediately rejects her.
He still has his sights set on his first love – school idol and author, Shirokusa Kachi. Despite thinking he still has a chance, he finds out one day that she has a boyfriend which starts him on a complicated path of feelings.
Nisekoi and Osamake are anime for those who are sick of the childhood friend never getting any love in harem anime. Unfortunately, both series accomplish this by making every interested girl a childhood friend.
Both series focus primarily on the love triangle between the main character and the two women he has a variety of feelings for. Of course, they get much of their plot through forcing him to be with one girl even though he also likes another, and then shifting that dynamic back and forth.
For Fans of Fake Relationships
A Couple of Cuckoos
Nagi Umino, a diligent student, and Erika Amano, a social media star, seemingly have nothing in common until they discovered that they were actually switched at birth.
With this suddenly revealed to them, both families agree that in order to not uproot their life, the two of them should get engaged. The pair quickly reject this plan, but neither is really willing to back down either.
A Couple of Cuckoos is very much Nisekoi come again, but it is not without its differences in the plot and character dynamics so that it doesn’t feel like some carbon copy.
Both series focus on main characters who are sort of shoved together in a relationship due to their families. In Nisekoi, they pretend to date while A Couple of Cuckoos has them in an engagement that they both agree is not something they want.
Both Nisekoi and A Couple of Cuckoos focus on male main characters that have feelings for a different classmate, and their new girlfriend/fiancee getting increasingly involved in their life. However, his fiancee often serves as a sort of wing-woman in A Couple of Cuckoos, right up until she begins to acknowledge her own feelings, of course.
More Than A Married Couple, But Not Lovers
Jirou Yakuin, third-year high school student and otaku, has had a crush on his childhood friend, Shiori. He hopes to be paired with her for their school’s upcoming marriage practical – an exam where two people are paired to live together in order to practice married life as they are observed and scored.
For popular Akari Watanabe, she hopes to be paired with the handsome Minami. Much to each other’s dismay, Jirou and Akari and paired together while Minami and Shiori are paired together.
Luckily, if both couples rank in the top, they can change partners, thus do Akari and Jirou venture to pretend to have a perfect married life.
Nisekoi and More Than A Married Couple, But Not Lovers are love triangle romance anime where it is hard to pick a side to root for since both girls are actually quite likable.
While More Than A Married Couple, But Not Lovers differs in its “marriage practice” set up, it features a similar love triangle dynamic to Nisekoi. One girl is an aggressive tsundere and the other is a more reserved dandere type with a pretty standard guy caught in between.
The biggest difference is perhaps the amount of horny. More Than A Married Couple, But Not Lovers is not an ecchi series, but it has some notable fan service moments compared to Nisekoi which has character designs that are hard to lewd up.
Oreshura
After being abandoned by his love-addled parents, Eita Kidou is a bit put off by romance. It also causes him to see through the love confession of one, Masuzu Natsukawa.
As it turns out, she just wanted a boyfriend to stop the daily love confessions. While he initially declines, she takes to blackmailing him to be her fake boyfriend.
Sure, you could have a noble motive when forcing a relationship with a girl like in Nisekoi, or you could be blackmailed into being a boyfriend like in Oreshura.
Both series focus on men who are forced to date a beautiful and popular girl. However, unlike Nisekoi where he has feelings for another girl, Oreshura is all about how much the main character hates the concept of love due to his parents.
As he obviously warms to the idea due to his new girlfriend, Oreshura is a more single-focus romance, but it has its harem elements like Nisekoi does as well.
Rent-a-Girlfriend
Recently dumped by his girlfriend, college student Kazuya Kinoshita tries to fill the void with an app that lets him rent a girlfriend. While Chizuru seems like the perfect girlfriend, reading the reviews online, he finds out it is an act.
He leaves her a bad review and this reveals her more sassy true self when she comes after him for it. Unfortunately, after his grandmother’s collapse, he introduces her as his girlfriend at the hospital, and thus they begin their fake relationship.
Rent-a-Girlfriend is a rather unique harem anime where the main character gets close to a series of girls that he rented to be his girlfriend. The primary relationship of the show has the first girlfriend he rented forced to pretend she is dating him after their grandmothers, who are friends, discover them together.
While most of the girls in Rent-a-Girlfriend are as lovable as the characters in Nisekoi, the big difference between these two pretty similar series is the male main character. Raku is pretty standard for a rom-com lead – nice, dashing, and indecisive with his feelings. Kazuya, on the other hand, keeps the same indecisiveness with his feelings, but is overall kind of spineless.
In essence, Raku is hard to hate while Kazuya sometimes makes it too easy to dislike him for the sake of comedy.
Love and Lies
In order to encourage successful marriages and to combat the low birthrate, the Japanese government now assigns marriage partners at the age of 16. Unwilling to face the severe repercussions that come with denial, Yukari Nejima goes along with it, despite confessing to his long-time crush.
However, is his reciprocated love doomed to be crushed when he gets his marriage notice?
Both Nisekoi and Love and Lies tell complicated romance stories about a guy that loves one girl, but is forced to be in a relationship with a different one. Instead of being forced together by their families like in Nisekoi, Love and Lies features a government system where people are assigned a marriage partner when they reach a certain age.
As these things go, their forced partner is initially a bit supportive or indifferent like in Nisekoi about them pursuing the girl they like, but that changes as feelings between them develop.
The big difference is that Love and Lies puts a little more emphasis on drama, and while this is subjective, the characters are a little less likable than in Nisekoi since it is indeed filled with love and frustrating lies.
Boarding School Juliet
At the prestigious Dahlia Academy, the Black Dogs and White Cats dorms have a long-standing feud.
However, the leaders of these dorms, Romio Inuzuka and Juliet Persia, aren’t quite the bitter enemies that they play themselves to be. In fact, they are very much in love, but hide their relationship to keep the peace.
Boarding School Juliet is actually like a sort of opposite Nisekoi. Instead of two people faking a relationship to prevent their families from going to war, two people pretend to hate each other to prevent their dorms from going to war.
As it is a reverse, there is really no firm love triangle element in Boarding School Juliet like in Nisekoi. Instead, Boarding School Juliet focuses on them sneaking nice moments away from people and not getting caught while also not being forced together with other romantic partners.
For Fans of Love Triangles
Bokuben – We Never Learn
In order to help his family out financially, Nariyuki Yuiga dedicated himself to becoming a high achiever in order to get a special nomination that covers future university fees.
While he is constantly overshadowed by two other classmates in math and literature, he manages to get the nomination anyway with the condition he tutor these two other students in other academic areas.
It turns out that these two girls that excel over him in those two subjects are mediocre at everything else.
Unlike Nisekoi that focuses on one girl, and then starts focusing more on the other, Bokuben keeps the main girl more mysterious by having a sort of visual novel approach. Every girl in the harem is explored because, in the manga source material, every girl gets their own ending. So the girl that he ends up with in the anime is just one of several endings to Bokuben.
As Bokuben is a visual novel-style harem where every girl gets a focus, it also leads to a sort of love triangle situation like in Nisekoi. The main character likes all the girls, but there is some long-term questioning as to who he loves.
Bakemonogatari
After surviving a vampire attack, high school student Koyomi Araragi finds he has several supernatural side effects that remained after being cured including the ability to rapidly heal.
While trying to live a normal life after the event, he ends up catching a classmate, Hitagi Senjougahara, as she fell down some stairs. As he catches her, he discovers that she is near weightless after being inflicted with a curse.
Enlisting the help of the easy-going wandering Shinto priest that helped him with his vampirism, Araragi finds himself embroiled in not just Senjogahara’s issue but several different supernatural events afflicting those in his town.
While Bakemonogatari is notably different from a more standard harem romance anime with its supernatural mysteries and twists, what it shares with Nisekoi is actually a visual style.
Both Bakemonogatari and Nisekoi have a surreal visual style that they use to accent certain moments. Things like oddly colored or texture backgrounds, long lingering shots of characters faces while they are taking, and just general shots that are suspended from reality.
While the surreal element contributes to Bakemonogatari’s supernatural-laced atmosphere, in Nisekoi, the surreal imagery adds an extra layer of interest to what is a pretty standard harem rom-com setting. It’s something people didn’t know they wanted in a school rom-com until they got it.
The Quintessential Quintuplets
As his family is in some serious debt, Fuutaro Uesugi is a serious penny pincher. However, his great grades have landed him a higher than normal paying tutor job.
The problem is that his five wards, all sisters, are dumb as door nails and think he is a complete idiot.
However, to get his pay, he has to think of a way to get these five unique girls to study and learn.
What Nisekoi started with harem/love triangle anime that keeps the “main” girl unclear, The Quintessential Quintuplets (debatably) perfected.
Both series keeps you guessing on who the main character will end up with and do so right up to the end. However, while Nisekoi frustrated some by having Raku be a bit wishy-washy between Chitoge and Kosaki, The Quintessential Quintuplets baited you with a marriage scene where you can’t tell witch one of the quintuplets it is.
All the girls involved get ample time with the main character and have their stories fully developed, as such there is no clear front-runner until much later in the series.
Toradora
Ryuuji Takasu is a gentle student with a passion for housework, but his thuggish face causes his fellow students to think him a delinquent. Taiga Aisaka is small and cute, but with an attitude as fierce as a tiger.
Both of these misunderstood students also harbor feelings for their crushes, and after a series of misunderstandings of their own, they find themselves in an unlikely alliance to get their crushes to notice them.
Both Nisekoi and Toradora are about people in a fake relationship that love someone else. While Nisekoi is a fake relationship to prevent a war, Toradora is about two people becoming allies in order to help each other hook up with their crush.
As the series progress, it becomes clear that the pair in this fake relationship or alliance have actually developed legitimate feelings for each other. Further complicating things, their crushes have started to reciprocate feelings as well.
While Toradora does have that element of a love triangle, it does start to move away from that into a more straightforward romance, however.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Nisekoi? Let fans know in the comments section below.
