After a brutal war, nations turned instead to a more elusive, less public form of warfare – one waged through espionage.
Lily is one girl of many who attended one of the various spy schools throughout her nation. However, despite a small handful of talents, she is considered a washout due to failures on her practical exams.
One day, she is given the opportunity to join a special team of spies, put together by a master spy and consisting of other washouts from other spy schools. While not the team they imagined, they do their best in their hopeless situation.
While Spy Classroom has its charm hidden in the characters, it does often feel like being spies was a theme, and not one they actually wanted to do seriously. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Spy Classroom, head on down below.
Anime Like Spy Classroom
For Fans of Spies
Spy X Family
There is no order too big for master spy Twilight.
He uses his numerous skills as a spy to keep the peace between his country and aggressive neighbors, but his recent mission demands he investigate a reclusive politician that only attends school events for his child.
Dictating that he must now have a child and wife of his own to pull off the mission, Twilight manages to recruit a small orphan girl and an office lady to play the roles.
However, what he doesn’t know is that his new daughter is an esper capable of reading minds and his new wife is actually an assassin using him as a cover to maintain a guise of normalcy.
Both Spy X Family and Spy Classroom are spy anime that, while having tense and exciting moments of spy action, often focus on other things.
In Spy X Family, the focus outside of spy missions is Loid managing his pretend family so he can complete his long-term overall spy mission. In Spy Classroom, the series often focuses on training the girls or helping them grow as characters in between larger spy missions.
Both anime make time for action, but often what they are remembered for is being cute – be it in a “wholesome found family” way or in a “collection of cute anime girls doing cute things” way.
Princess Principal
After the discovery of a mineral called Cavorite, it led to the rapid creation of advanced military technology and plunged the world into conflict.
Now London is separated into two nations by a wall that divides the city. While neither the Kingdom or the Commonwealth of Albion are outwardly hostile, they continuously destabilize each other through espionage.
At the prestigious Queen’s Mayfaire School, a series of girls are enrolled that are actually Commonwealth spies who do covert work for their nation.
If Spy Classroom committed itself less to its diversely cute cast of girls and more to its spy tale, it would be more akin to Princess Principal.
Like Spy Classroom, Princess Principal focuses on a group of female spies. However, they are using going to high school as a cover and often engage in missions inside and outside of it to conduct their activities while training a recent new spy added to the group.
While Spy Classroom often feels rather low stakes in its spy missions, Princess Principal keeps things tense and has a few surprises in store for viewers. Essentially, it is what you want in a quality spy anime.
Release the Spyce
Momo is a shy teenager that wants to follow in her father’s footsteps as a police officer. She also has a unique ability to determine what someone is feeling with a simple lick.
One day, Momo is recruited by her classmates into a secret agency that works to unravel crime with their unique abilities.
While Spy Classroom is prone to being more upbeat than you would expect from a spy anime, it is not quite the level of upbeat that the spy anime Release the Spyce is.
Both anime series are spy anime that treat the subject with varying degrees of seriousness. Release The Spyce is energetic and often over-the-top more like a big action anime where the good guy always wins than a serious spy thriller.
However, like the girls in Spy Classroom each have their specific talents, Release the Spyce also has characters that are given unique powers via spice.
For Fans of Skilled Masters
Assassination Classroom
After the moon is mysteriously turned into a permanent crescent by an unknown calamity, the students of class 3-E at Kunogigaoka Middle School are presented with a daunting task – Assassinate the creature that blew up half the moon before the year’s end or die when the world is destroyed.
The creature in question, dubbed Koro-sensei by his class, is super fast, super strong, and by all respects, indestructible. However, while the students try and learn how to destroy him, they also learn that he is the best teacher that they have ever had.
If you took Princess Principal and combined it together with Assassination Classroom, you would get something very close to Spy Classroom.
While Assassination Classroom takes place in an actual school, both series are about wildly talented spies or assassins training a group of misfits. The declaration of this master is that his students defeat him in a given time period.
However, Koro-sensei in Assassination Classroom does actually know how to be a teacher, unlike Klaus. So the show is balanced between the teacher teaching them actual subjects, them getting taught assassination, and later, them going on missions.
While both Spy Classroom and Assassination Classroom have their serious mission arcs, they also make a lot of time to just be cute and comedic.
The Shadow in Eminence
Like most kids, Kagerou wanted to be a hero, but unlike most kids, he never grew out of that phase. He constantly trained his body to achieve it. In modern Japan, he was unable to achieve that goal, understanding that he could never reach enough power to be the type of hero he wanted to be.
However, when he was reborn in a new world, he pretends to be just another character in the world. He recruits people into his organization, Shadow Garden, and decides to target a sinister cult that is lurking in the shadows that he wishes to occupy.
Both Spy Classroom and The Shadow in Eminence feature a group of talented women in an organization led by a supremely more powerful male. Of course, they are all very attached to him almost immediately for no established reason other than his sheer skill.
However, The Shadow in Eminence is an isekai anime, and the main character believes he made up a fake scenario about an organization acting in the shadows and his female minions are just indulging him. The joke is that the organization is real, and they actually are fighting it.
While The Shadow in Eminence doesn’t sound like a serious show, it takes itself very seriously not unlike Spy Classroom. As the male characters are so very good at everything pretty naturally, the stakes often feel pretty low, though.
The World’s Finest Assassin Gets Reincarnated in Another World as an Aristocrat
The greatest assassin on Earth lived only to be a tool by those that wished to wield his mastery. That is, until they decided that he was no longer needed and ended his life.
By the grace of a goddess, this masterful man was reincarnated into a new world where he is asked to kill a hero that will later bring about the end of that world.
Deciding to finally live for himself, this man, now named Lugh Tuatha De, puts his skills as a killer to the test with foes who wield real magic.
While Spy Classroom isn’t an isekai anime, it often has some similar sensibilities to one. That is what makes it similar to The World’s Finest Assassin Gets Reincarnated in Another World as an Aristocrat.
Both series have very talented master spies or assassins who put together a team of skilled, but distinctly less talented individuals who all happen to be very cute girls that come to admire him.
Spy Classroom shakes things up by not having the master spy as the main character of the series, but The World’s Finest Assassin Gets Reincarnated in Another World as an Aristocrat makes no such effort.
For Fans of Cute Girls Doing Criminal Things
Lycoris Recoil
In order to cut down on crime and terrorism, an organization called Direct Attack was formed. They take orphaned girls and turn them into agents that protect the country in the Lycoris program.
Takina is one gifted agent, but after a hostage situation leads to insubordination, she is transferred out of the main unit to a lower key branch of Lycoris ran out of a cafe.
Despite being paired with a famed, but more easy-going Lycoris prodigy Chisato while there, Takina is determined to get back into DA, but her new partner is determined to prove that there is more to life than just taking lives.
There is much that feels incredibly similar between Lycoris Recoil and Spy Classroom.
Both series follow spy or counter-terrorism organizations that train and deploy agents for the government. They immediately both also center their plot around the misfits of that organization.
Both Lycoris Recoil and Spy Classroom have cute and quirky girls that are working under their handler. They don’t just focus on action, but also give a wholesome glimpse of slice of life activities that often lessen the tension of their violent professions.
While Spy Classroom has too many girls on the team to give them all time to shine, Lycoris Recoil is balanced between a threat to the city and a mystery behind one of the main characters.
Gunslinger Girls
In Italy, the Social Welfare Agency rescues girls dying in hospitals and gives them a second shot at life using cybernetics. However, these girls are then brainwashed and turned into assassins that carry out missions for the government.
Despite this, they are still children and crave recognition from those they love, even if that love is manufactured.
While Spy Classroom follows the misfits of their various spy schools as they go on missions, Gunslinger Girls has a focus on misfits that were turned into assassins that go on missions.
While both series have characters with the standard moe look, they then have those characters plot and kill for their governments.
One notable difference is in the tone. Spy Classroom is often rather upbeat. Gunslinger Girl, as the girls have shortened lifespans from cybernetics and their general line of work, really leans into the melancholy of the situation. If you wanted something as cheerful as Spy Classroom often is, Gunslinger Girl is often not that.
The Fruit of Grisaia
Yuuji Kazama is a new transfer student to Mihama Academy. As an assassin that was raised by a notorious terrorist, all he craves is a normal school life.
However, with the school consisting of the principal and five other – all female – students, he finds his new school life off to a strange start.
As he gets to know each girl, he finds them just as irreparably damaged as himself, but their shared traumatic experiences bind them together.
In the beginning of The Fruit of Grisaia, the similarities between it and Spy Classroom are not as apparent. However, what starts off as a “helping a harem of troubled girls solve their problems” series transforms into a “harem of helped girls rescue their harem king from the counter-terrorism organization he works for after being captured” by the second season. It takes a wild turn in that way.
The Fruit of Grisaia series grows even more like Spy Classroom if you choose to watch the Phantom Trigger movies which are about a school that trains female counter-terrorism agents.
In essence, Spy Classroom is a harem show in the skin of a spy thriller and The Fruit of Grisaia is a spy thriller in the skin of a harem show. However, The Fruit of Grisaia, as it starts very harem-forward, has distinctly more ecchi wedged in there.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Spy Classroom? Let fans know in the comments section below.
