Second-year high school student Shun Tokinoya lives with his mother and disabled sister. After an accident killed his father and injured his sister, he took up the roll of not only studying hard to get a good future job to support them, but working part-time at an e-sports cafe to help pay the bills.
While Shun once obsessively loved the game that is taking the e-sports scene by storm, he puts off playing due to him blowing off his father the day he died to play it. However, when he is recruited onto the cafe’s e-sports team to help keep the cafe in business and earn some money while doing it, Shun gets pulled deeper and deeper into the world of professional e-sports.
E-sports is a solid topic for an anime, but the series focuses more on personal drama than making the actual gaming an interesting topic. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Our Rainy Protocol, head on down below.
Anime Like Our Rainy Protocol
For Fans of Gaming
The King’s Avatar
In the multiplayer online game Glory, Ye Xiu was a legendary professional player. However, when he gets into an altercation with a team mate, he is kicked from the team and forced out of the pro circuit. Ye Xiu manages to find work as manager in an internet café and resigns to his fate.
One day, he notices that Glory has launched a new server and throws himself into the fray once more. With ten years experience, Xiu is hardly a noob and he is set to play towards the summit.
For as popular as e-sports is, that popularity has had a hard time making it to anime. Now Our Rainy Protocol can join The King’s Avatar as an anime about (fictional) e-sports players.
Both series surround professional e-sports players and are focused on their relationship with the game. The King’s Avatar focuses more on him actually playing the game while Our Rainy Protocol does take more time our to showcase Shun’s relationships with other people and how that is affected by his relationship with his game of choice.
High Score Girl
Haruo is not popular, handsome, or even friendly. His sole redeeming quality is his skill at video games. However, his world is thrown upside down by a popular rich girl in his class, Oono, who absolutely trounces him in every game.
Now, he follows her from arcade to arcade, trying to win.
Both Our Rainy Protocol and High Score Girl are gaming focused series with just a dash of romantic drama thrown in. However, while Our Rainy Protocol focuses on modern e-sports gaming, High Score Girl is more like gaming history, showcasing the early 90’s arcade culture in Japan.
Not only is Our Rainy Protocol focused on a different era of gaming, but its romantic element is different as well. Our Rainy Protocol is focused on drama and a building love triangle. High Score Girl has its fair share of romantic drama, but as it is a romance with progression, there is no real love triangle drama involved. The drama is more centered around the female lead being a rich girl, and rich girls aren’t supposed to play games or pal around with normal boys.
Gamers
Keita Amano is an average high school student and gamer. After having an awkward encounter with Karen Tendou, the school’s idol, he discovers that she too is a gamer as she passionately begins to try to recruit him into the game club.
After paying a visit to the club, he witnesses a completely new side to his hobby due to the eccentric array of members.
While Gamers is about a gaming club in a school and Our Rainy Protocol is about teenage e-sports players breaking into the big leagues, both series have two crucial things in common – gaming and love triangles.
Yes, both series feature the most average male main characters who are normal levels of nice to everyone – and every girl he meets falls in love with him. However, unlike Our Rainy Protocol where the love triangle builds up to the point of tension and jealousy, Gamers keeps the love triangle subdued to just blush furiously, and no one acts on their feelings. As such, Gamers remains more of a light-hearted tale compared to the more dramatic Our Rainy Protocol.
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.
Both Our Rainy Protocol and Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki-kun are gaming anime with a large emphasis on the relationships between the characters.
Unlike Our Rainy Protocol that gives decent screen time to them playing the game and focuses the drama around a building love triangle and trauma from Shun’s past, Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki-kun, despite being about gamers, doesn’t actually give the Smash Bros-type game much time.
Instead, Tomozaki-kun is more about rehabilitating his social skills and the relationships he struggles to form with others. This means that Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki-kun is a more light-hearted drama compared to the heavier emotions swirling around in Our Rainy Protocol.
For Fans of Love Triangles
Golden Time
Banri Tada has finally been accepted into a private law academy in Tokyo, but due to an accident, he is without all his memories.
During his freshmen orientation, he meets Mitsuo Yanagisawa who is consummately stalked by a girl from his old school.
Banri begins to hit it off with both of them. As they spend more time together, their fates seem intertwined, but for better or worse?
Love triangles and drama surrounding the world’s most average-est guy – That is what Our Rainy Protocol and Golden Time have in common. While Golden Time lacks any sort of gaming focus, it does go particularly big with the drama.
The drama in Our Rainy Protocol is slowly building up over time until it starts to overflow. Meanwhile, Golden Time frequently introduces drama like a whirlwind where is swirls, fades, and then swells up again. Fueling this drama is the love triangle formed between a girl that is a childhood friend type and a beautiful and wealthy girl that is newer in his life, which is something Golden Time also shares with Our Rainy Protocol.
Sing “Yesterday” for Me
After college, unsure of what to do with his life, Rikou gets a job at a convenience store.
There, he becomes visited by a high school dropout with a pet crow as well as has rekindled feelings for a senpai that visits the store one day.
This is the story of the growth of several individuals as they take their first steps into adulthood.
If you enjoyed the character drama more so than the gaming spin in Our Rainy Protocol, then Sing “Yesterday” For Me might be something you enjoy.
While Sing “Yesterday” For Me focuses on characters that are a bit older, the main character is similarly as directionless as Shun, lacking even a passion like Shun has for games. His story follows his relationship with other characters and what turns out to be an even messier love triangle than Our Rainy Protocol.
Essentially, the drama in Sing “Yesterday” For Me is similar drama to Our Rainy Protocol, but matured up a bit and with a larger dose of melancholy.
For Fans of Tournament Play
Chihayafuru
Growing up in the shadow of her older sister, Chihaya Ayase is strong-willed and a tomboy with no dreams of her own. However, after learning an outcast in her class, Arata Wataya, has incredible skill at karuta and his huge passion inspires her, she is pulled into the world of the poem-based card game along with her other childhood friend, Taichi Mashima.
While Chihaya grew a passion for karuta with her two childhood friends, they grew distant when they were separated in middle school. Now a high schooler, Chihaya still aims to be the queen of karuta and wants to compete with Arata again to grow her skill.
While e-sports is definitely more of a popular competitive sport than the relatively unknown card matching sport of karuta, these series both have a similar style of storytelling.
Yes, both series are about their specific sports and the competitions that the main characters go to in order to aim for the top. However, they are also both equally as much about the relationships between the characters. Like Our Rainy Protocol is about Shun and the love that every female character seems to have for him, Chihayafuru is about a female main character whose two childhood friends both have feelings for her.
In both series, they really accent that all the characters are friends, and all of them love the sport, but that romantic love has really complicated things.
Ping Pong the Animation
Makoto and Yukata, nicknamed Smile and Peco, have grown up playing ping pong together.
While Yukata is bursting with confidence in his matches, Makoto is somewhat less ambitious about the sport. However, because they play their matches together, they have built a mutual love for the sport.
While Ping Pong, because of its art style, looks like it would be a very different affair from Our Rainy Protocol, both series are about a character’s complicated relationship with games and other people.
While not a love triangle and emotional trauma affair like Our Rainy Protocol, both series follow friend groups who have played the game together since they were younger. They then reunite to play it on a higher level and find that their relationship with that game and with each other has become more complicated.
Both series highlight the very human drama around the sport as well as the sport itself. It is just that they are about two very different sports.
March Comes In Like A Lion
Rei Kiriyama recently started to live alone in his last year of high school. He is able to financial support himself as a professional Shogi player, but while he officially became a pro in middle school, he is collapsing under the pressure to succeed.
Burdened with his own problems, Rei has found solace among a kind family of three sisters, the Kawamotos. The oldest, Akari, likes to take in strays and Rei is the latest.
While he feels conflicted about spending time with them, they provide the accepting affection that he has gotten nowhere else.
While March Comes In Like a Lion is about shogi, like Our Rainy Protocol, it is more about a main characters’ complicated feelings for the activity they enjoy.
Similar to Shun having a complicated relationship with gaming due to events in his past, Rei in March Comes in like a Lion has something similar, but with much more crippling depression.
Although the sport displayed in these series gets it fair share of time in the spotlight, both series have a very large emphasis on the relationships in the main characters life. Some are healing, some are romantic, some are wildly toxic – they both explore the good, the bad, and the ugly in their drama-laced sports tale.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Our Rainy Protocol? Let fans know in the comments section below.
