After hundreds of years of war between the kingdom of beasts and the neighboring human kingdom, a peace treaty was signed. The conditions of this treaty say that humans must offer a sacrifice to be devoured by the King of Beasts every year on a particular night.
Sariphi is the latest sacrifice to be sent, adopted by her parents to specifically protect their true-born daughter. Despondent after learning that truth and feeling like she has no home to return back to anyway, Sariphi is fine with dying and unafraid of the King of Beasts.
Intrigued by her lack of fear, the King of Beasts begins to grow closer to her, and when the day of sacrifice comes, he defies his advisors and decides to takes this interesting girl as his wife.
A Beauty and the Beast romance with an actual beast of a man instead of a metaphor? I love it. You’d think anime would have more, but actually they are pretty rare. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts, head on down below.
Anime Like Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts
For Fans of Beauty and The Beast-Style Romances
The Ancient Magus’ Bride
After being abandoned by her family, Chise Hatori is a 16-year-old teenager without hope.
In order to not have to worry about herself, she sells herself to slavers, only to be purchased by Magus Elias Ainsworth.
There, she is told she will become his apprentice and, in the future, his bride. Together, they work to build a relationship and work to control her own magus powers that will eventually result in her early death.
The parallels between Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts and Beauty and the Beast are pretty obvious. However, before it came out, The Ancient Magus’ Bride was really the fantasy romance you went to when you wanted a relationship between a beautiful human girl and a more monstrous looking being who has a kind but complicated heart.
While Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts is upfront with its romance, The Ancient Magus’ Bride puts a lot of effort into world building, showing you the unseen magical world lurking on the periphery of our modern world. As such, it does take some time before it actually becomes a romance, and when it does, it is not always a happy relationship between them.
Kamisama Kiss
Homeless and in debt, high schooler Nanami Momozono thinks things are looking up when she rescues a man and he offers to let her stay at his home. She soon discovers that his home is a rundown shrine.
Trying to leave, she is mistaken for the man she saved – the man that is also the land god of the shrine, Mikage.
Finding out she was tricked into being a god and not wanting to be homeless, Nanami tries to embrace her new divine duties, but has to deal with a hot-headed fox familiar to keep things running smoothly.
Both of these series feature human girls falling in love with brooding non-humans. However, while Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts is distinctly more a medieval fantasy, Kamisama Kiss is a modern-set supernatural romance.
While Kamisama Kiss has more of a contentious start between the main couple, it becomes more like Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts in that the powerful male love interest will constantly jump in to protect the female main character.
Sugar Apple Fairy Tale
Fairies once lived free alongside humanity until humans discovered that stripping a wing from a fairy means literally holding their life in your hands. Now, fairies are enslaved to humans.
Ann is a young girl aspiring to become a Silver Sugar Master like her late mother was. To further this goal, she sets out to the royal capital, and on this dangerous journey she purchases a warrior fairy named Challe Fen Challe to protect her.
As Ann believes in the freedom and equality of faeries, she buys him and offers to give his wing back when she reaches her destination. However, as they travel, their bond together grows.
While Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts is a romance about a king, there is no royalty at play in Sugar Apple Fairy Tale. However, what these two series share is that the romance is between a human girl and the protective, powerful, brooding non-human that comes to love her.
Both series are shoujo romance anime where it is really the love story that pushes the plot but you watch the female main characters overcome obstacles. However, the obstacles in Sugar Apple Fairy Tale are often more due to her profession and her relationships with others. While Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts really focuses on Sariphi often having to solve some things herself, Sugar Apple Fairy Tale takes a more classic approach of having her love interest often having to save her.
For Fans of Beast People
The Tale of Outcasts
Wisteria is an orphan who is forced to beg on the street for her orphanage in order to be fed. Her days are bleak, but her nights have a small ray of hope in the form of Marbas. This apathetic immortal demon comes to her window and they enjoy chats, despite him being hounded by hunters wherever he goes.
One day, Wisteria finds her freedom from her situation through Marbas, binding the two of them together with a promise to see the world. However, their pact did not come without a cost.
Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts and The Tale of Outcasts have similar looking main characters who have a similar sort of dynamic with each other. However, The Tale of Outcasts isn’t a romance (because the main character is quite young and blind), and it has a different, less focused story.
Alongside from having similar looking main characters where the human is protected by a beast person that became intrigued by her, both series also feature world where the beast people, who are demons in The Tale of Outcasts, exist unhappily with humanity.
Somali and the Forest Guardian
With humanity all but extinct after severe prosecution, the world is ruled over by spirits and all manner of strange creatures.
One day, a golem that serves as guardian of the forest meets a young human girl.
She has no memory of her parents, but the golem decides to at least seek out other humans to return her.
While Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts has humanity and beast people separated by kingdoms and existing unhappily, Somali and the Forest Guardian takes place in a world where humanity was supposedly wiped out and now only fantasy races exist.
Both series focus in on one human surrounded by beast people, though her identity as a human is often hidden in Somali and the Forest Guardian. While Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts is a romance, Somali and the Forest Guardian is not. Instead, Somali and the Forest Guardian is more of a childcare anime.
Grimoire of Zero
While witches exist, very little is understood about magic, so their kind is ostracized. Half-beast men like Yohei are also shunned, causing him to make his living as a mercenary and wish he was human.
One day, he meets a witch called Zero who offers to grant the wish to turn him human, but only if he agrees to be her escort.
Like Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts, Grimoire of Zero features a society where beast people exist and people discriminate against them. However, beast people seem to be a minority group in Grimoire of Zero whereas they have their own larger nation in Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts.
Aside from featuring beast people in a main role, Grimoire of Zero pursues a different sort of story when compared to Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts and its romance focus. It is distinctly more of an adventure and action story rather than a sappy, lightly drama-laced romance.
For Fans of Royal Politics
Snow White With The Red Hair
Shirayuki is an herbalist that lives a normal life in the country of Tanbarun. However, when her beautiful red hair is noticed by the Prince Raji, he tries to make her his concubine.
She then decides to cut her hair and flees into the forest. It is there she is rescued by the second Prince of neighboring country, Wistalia, named Zen.
In order to repay her life debt to him, she sets her hopes on becoming the court herbalist in the capital of Clarines.
Both Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts and Snow White With The Red Hair tells the love story between royalty and a common girl who just arrived in their kingdom in a disticntly fairy tale sort of way.
While Snow White With The Red Hair has the male interest be the second prince, the female love interest still faces the same sort of push back that Sariphi faces because she is a common girl and not royalty. This means that both series have that same element of the female heroines having to prove their worth to others who are examining their relationship.
However, unlike Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts where the characters are engaged pretty quickly, Snow White With The Red Hair is more coy with an official relationship.
The World is Still Beautiful
Within the realms of the Sun Kingdom, it never rains. However, in the Principality of the Rain, the women of the family possess the ability to call upon the rain. So when the Sun King, recent conqueror of the world, Livius I decides to take a wife, it is only natural to pick one of the four princesses from the Principality of the Rain.
Nike Remarcier is the youngest and lost a game to her sisters, so she was chosen to go. Frustrated at her lot, she journeys to the kingdom and is surprised to find that the Sun King is not as scary as they say, and also that he is just a boy.
Both Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts and The World is Still Beautiful follows the new engagement between the king and his fiancee from another land. However, while Sariphi has to endure obstacles set up by the king’s own administration, The World is Still Beautiful doesn’t really have push back against the engagement. The drama comes from the king being vulnerable to attacks and his new fiancee having to deal with that.
While both series are romance anime, The World is Still Beautiful puts a little more emphasis on the relationship. The couple doesn’t get along immediately, and as such, they series focuses on them growing closer and understanding each other better.
Why Raeliana Ended Up at The Duke’s Mansion
After being pushed off a building to her death, office worker Rinko Hanasaki is reborn as Raeliana McMillan, a minor character in a novel she had once read.
While Raeliana is the eldest daughter of a nouveau-rich baron, Rinko knows that her new life isn’t exactly blessed. Having knowledge of Raeliana’s fate in the novel, she knows that her fiancee, Lord Francis Brooks, kills her to kick off the plot of the book for the actual heroine.
Determined not to die, Raeliana makes moves to break her engagement and save her life. This leads her to the mysterious Duke Noah Wynknight, the male love interest in the novel and general manipulator of politics among the nobility. She ends up blackmailing him, threatening to reveal his secrets, if he does not pretend to be her fiancee so she can break things off with Brooks.
However, while this saves her life for now, Raeliana’s relationship with the Duke grows more complicated by the day.
Both Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts and Why Raeliana Ended Up at The Duke’s Mansion follow new engagements between nobility. Both series also tend to focus on the things happening within the kingdom rather than the actual relationship between the characters.
That said, while the relationship between Sariphi and Leo is pretty wholesome and there isn’t too much drama between them, the romantic relationship Why Raeliana Ended Up at The Duke’s Mansion is more mysterious since it is clear that the male love interest has some secrets and the female main character is keeps some secrets of her own. Theirs isn’t a relationship built on trust, thus you get nice romantic moments, but you can’t say their relationship is very stable.
The Story of Saiunkoku
Although her family was once nobles, they fell on hard times. Now, with her father making a pittance as an archivist, Shuurei takes odds jobs to make ends meet.
One day, she receives an offer to become the emperor’s consort for a huge sum of money. She accepts in hopes that it could further her own governmental ambitions.
If you were into Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts because you liked the politics and the romance, but wish the politics were just more dense and dramatic, The Story of Saiunkoku is for you.
Although The Story of Saiunkoku is more Chinese Imperial Court-inspired than fantasy and it doesn’t start off as a romance, it is one of the best options for dense royal political dramas. It also does become a more romance-driven series as it goes on.
If plotting in the palace is for you, but you also enjoy some romance, then this is an excellent choice.
Yona of the Dawn
After having her luxurious life shattered by the betrayal of her cousin, Princess Yona is forced to escape with her childhood friend Son Hak.
However, leaving her palace forces her to see the poverty and strife that really makes up her beloved kingdom.
Now, she must journey to not only regain her rightful throne, but to return her kingdom to its former glory.
Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts and Yona of the Dawn are both fantasy romance anime that don’t put the sole focus on the gushing sappiness of the relationship. While in Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts, the romance drives the plot, there are other things at work in Yona of the Dawn.
Both series are romance stories about royalty, but also have an emphasis of the female main character having to prove her worth. In Yona of the Dawn, she is proving herself to the warriors that will help her take back her kingdom since her problems aren’t caused by her romantic relationship unlike Sariphi.
The Raven of the Inner Palace
Within the imperial palace, the emperor lives with his consorts. One such woman is the Raven Consort, who does not perform night time duties and remains in solitude.
This Raven Consort, a title currently held by the young Liu Shouxue, is charged with handling spiritual matters brought to her – everything from finding lost items to sending on spirits. It is even said that she can perform curses.
After living her days often undisturbed, she is visited by the young emperor Xia Gaojun, whose visits become even more frequent as the pair bond and she assists him in unraveling the spiritual mysteries of the inner palace.
Both Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts and The Raven of the Inner Palace take place almost completely withing the king or emperor’s palace. However, while The Raven of the Inner Palace has some elements of romance, it isn’t a fully romance-driven story like Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts.
Instead, what you get in both series is a king being intrigued by a girl they aren’t supposed to interact with, then interacting with them a lot. In Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts, he makes her his wife while in The Raven of the Inner Palace, they slowly grow closer as she deals with the supernatural problems inside the palace grounds.
Bibliophile Princess
Ever since she was a child, Elianna Bernstein has preferred the company of books to people. As such, when she is proposed to by Crown Prince Christopher, she believes that she is just a temporary fiancee to protect the royal family from the schemes of other noble families.
Yet, when Christopher appears to be getting closer to another girl, Elianna looks up from her books and realizes that she is not as indifferent to him as she thought. What’s more, Christopher was never anything other than in love with her either.
Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts and Bibliophile Princess are not only both romance anime, but they actually tell the same basic sort of romance story.
The main characters love each other and have a pretty good relationship, but everyone else seems to have a problem with it. Thus, the plot of both of these anime series is the female heroine overcoming obstacles to proves that she is worthy to be married to a king.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts? Let fans know in the comments section below.
