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.
A spy thriller has never before been so comical and cute, which I suppose is what makes this a beloved darling! If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Spy x Family, then head on down below.
Anime Like Spy x Family
For Fans of Spy Thrillers
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.
Both Spy X Family and Princess Principal are spy anime about fictional lands still steeped in reality that are using espionage rather than warfare to gain advantage while still keeping the peace.
Interestingly enough, both series surround spy missions that require infiltrating schools, though Princess Principal comes at things a bit more seriously. It is filled with cute anime girls, but unlike Spy X Family, it is most often a serious spy anime.
Spy Classroom
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.
Both Spy X Family and Spy Classroom are spy anime that take place in a world where espionage is how conflict is prevented between nations. However, while the spy missions are serious, the actual anime series is often focused on other aspects.
Spy X Family is most beloved for its wacky comedy and cute family moments. Alternatively, Spy Classroom treats the missions more seriously, but ultimately is a series that invites you to fall in love with its diverse array of cute anime girls and their various specialties and quirks. I believe “waifu bait” would be the most appropriate term.
The actual spy action in both series is actually strongly undercut because the male main characters in both Spy X Family and Spy Classroom are, rather literally, the best spies in the world.
Love of Kill
Although a novice bounty hunter, Chateau Dankworth is confident in her skills. However, one day she is overpowered by a man who wasn’t even her target, and worse yet, he takes an immediate romantic interest in her.
She soon learns that the man who continues to pester her is Song Ryang-ha – a former assassin and wanted by the Asian underworld organization he turned against. This leads them to constant run-ins with members from both of their pasts.
Whereas Spy x Family cuts the seriousness of espionage and murder with fun family comedy, Love of Kill does something similar with romance.
Both series have their more serious moments of action, but they are often kept brief so it can return back to sappy flirting or family time.
Unlike Spy X Family that keeps serious moments extra brief and replaces them with wacky comedy, Love of Kill is a more serious story overall.
Full Metal Panic
Specialized troops armed with state-of-the-art weapons, Mithril is an organization tasked with stopping terrorism and keeping the peace on earth. However, their success hinges on the Whispered, individuals that possess remarkable knowledge of machinery and devices.
Enter Sousuke Sagara who is tasked with protecting Whispered candidate Kaname Chidori. In order to do so, he joins her in high school, but while he has a talent on the battlefield, it seems that doesn’t transfer as well to the classroom. However, the enemies of Mithril are just beginning to make their move.
While Full Metal Panic is more remembered for being a mecha rom-com school life thing (I guess, it really was a lot of things), it is ultimately about a skilled soldier that infiltrates a school to do his job.
Unlike Spy x Family, his job is simply to protect a girl that he similarly bonds with like Twilight and his family. The longer he stays, the more invested in them, rather than his mission, he gets.
While Full Metal Panic has plenty of comedy, it is very much a mecha action anime first.
For Fans of Found Families
Buddy Daddies
Kazuki and Rei are roommates that also work as professional mercenaries while they each flee from their grim memories through the dangerous work.
However, while carrying out an assassination on Christmas Eve, their paths cross with four-year-old Miri who traveled to Tokyo by herself, told by her mother who abandoned her to go find her father. Unfortunately for everyone involved, her father was their mark whom they successfully took out.
Now saddled with a small child, this pair of grown men struggle to adjust to being new parents while also balancing it with their dangerous job.
Although not about spies, Buddy Daddies evokes a similar feeling to the wholesome family moments in Spy X Family. It lacks some of the bigger, wackier action moments that Spy X Family has, but instead replaces them with action moments treated quite seriously since the main characters are criminals.
Essentially, both Spy X Family and Buddy Daddies are childcare anime about people who are not the actual parents raising a little girl as their own. However, Spy X Family is best described as quirky fun whereas Buddy Daddies is cute and occasionally serious. It also doesn’t sugarcoat that raising a child is actually pretty hard and expensive.
Hinamatsuri
One night, an object falls through space and time into the living room of dignified yakuza member Nitta. The object turns out to be a strange girl with psychic powers, but Nitta is reluctant to both take her in and to accept her offer to make use of those powers.
Respecting his decision to not use her as a tool, this girl, named Hina, decides to help him anyway as they begin their life together.
Both Spy X Family and Hinamatsuri are excellent comedies about a man who ends up taking care of a young girl with special powers. However, while Hinamatsuri has its moments, it is decidedly less wholesome, but still very funny.
Kotaro Lives Alone
Unsuccessful manga artist Shin Karino has his daily routine interrupted one day with the introduction to his new neighbor – a four-year-old boy who moved in next door, lives by himself, and talks like a samurai.
While this boy is more put together than most of his neighbors, living alone has its difficulties at any age.
Both Spy x Family and Kotaro Lives Alone follow precocious and often independent young children that have a certain wisdom well beyond their years, but also still act like children in many instances.
If you enjoyed Spy x Family for cute Anya, Kotaro is very much in a similar vein. The kids are cute and get into various antics. Both anime focus on a sort of found family comfort. However, Kotaro Lives Alone does have a reason that Kotaro lives alone, and it is a sad one that it explores.
Michiko and Hatchin
For the fourth time, hardened criminal Michiko breaks out of a South American prison in order to search for a man from her past.
This search leads her to the young Hana, a girl trapped under the thumb of her abusive foster family and daughter of the man Michiko is looking for.
Breaking her out to lure out her father, the unlikely pair set off on their search, only to be embroiled in everything from betrayal to gang warfare.
Essentially, both Spy X Family and Michiko and Hatchin are about adults using children for their own means. They then start to bond with the children they picked up, and by the end it is like they are family.
However, Michiko and Hatchin is more about scummy criminals, but it leads to good doses of action although everything about it is less wholesome.
If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord
Despite his age, Dale is a skillful adventurer with quite the reputation for competence. However, one day while he was on a job, he finds a young devil girl, weak and malnourished, with a dead parent nearby.
He decides to take her home and ultimately ends up adopting her. However, the question remains, why was she in the forest to begin with?
While If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord is definitely a medieval fantasy anime, it also features a powerful main character who ends up with a cute daughter that also has special powers.
They grow together as a family and share all those wholesome moments with just a dash of action to keep it interesting. However, while Spy X Family is often silly, If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord is more focused on cuteness than any sort of solid comedy.
For Fans of Liars With Hearts of Gold
Kaguya-sama – Love is War
Considered a genius, Miyuki Shirogane leads the student council in his prestigious school. Alongside his beautiful and wealthy vice president, Kaguya Shinomiya, the two are regarded as the perfect couple despite no romantic relationship.
The truth is, however, they both have feelings for each other, but neither can confess.
This is the battle of two people trying to get the other to confess first!
Consider Miyuki and Kaguya like a school-aged version of Loid and Yor, but less honest with their feelings. They are both skilled individuals that admire each other, but they play this distinct game of never acknowledging it and definitely never admitting it.
Spy x Family is wholesome family moments while Kaguya-sama: Love is War is more about wholesome romance moments. That said, they are both about great comedy.
Great Pretender
After life turned him down the path of crime, Makoto Edamura cockily thinks himself the best swindler in Japan. However, after trying to swindle a tourist only for the tourist to swap it back, he finds the police on his trail.
Making his escape, he runs into this tourist again, a move that would take him all the way across the sea to Los Angeles.
There, he learns that this tourist was in fact a man called Laurent Thierry, a successful confidence man, who wants to recruit him onto his team.
Unlike Spy X Family, Great Pretender isn’t about espionage or found family, but it is about a lovable group of international thieves that steal from rich, evil people. As such, like how Loid and Yor are lovable despite being spies and killers, you fall in love with the characters in Great Pretender because of how silly or suave they are rather than the objectively not so legal or good things that they do – though those things are also part of the charm.
In truth, what Spy X Family and Great Pretender most have in common is a sense of slickness. Both present those fluid, jazzy action scenes that are buttery smooth, energetic, and just a joy to watch.
Kakushigoto
Kakushi Goto is relatively well known for the lewd manga that he creates. However, when his daughter Hime was born, he vowed to keep his profession a secret.
This is the story of the great lengths he goes through to keep his ecchi manga profession a secret from his beloved daughter.
Like Spy x Family, Kakushigoto is all about a father trying (and failing) to hide the dark truth from his daughter. However, instead of being a spy, Kakushigoto focuses on the man being a lewd artist.
Both Spy X Family and Kaushigoto are comedies, and wacky ones at that. However, Spy X Family tends to go very big with the wackiness while Kakushigoto is just about the rediculious lengths that one man will go to in order to keep his daughters’ respect.
The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting
Tooru Kirishima is known as the Demon of the Sakuragi crime family due to his overly violent tendencies. Because of his skill and loyalty, he has been selected by the boss of the family for an important job – the job of babysitting the boss’ daughter.
What Spy X Family is to espionage, The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting is to yakuza. Both series have those elements in them, but they are often more focused on the family aspect.
Both series focus on men who take care of a child that is not their own and who also hide their violent profession from them. As Anya is a mind reader, Loid immediately fails, The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting has the cute child remain rather innocent and significantly less mischievous.
Unlike Spy X Family that has some great comedy, The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting is more focused on being wholesome.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Spy x Family? Let fans know in the comments section below.
