Everyone needs a little love in their life, but even if you do have someone that warms your heart, romance anime can keep those good feelings of love flowing. You see, love is addicting and some people just can’t stop themselves from falling in love over and over again. That is exactly what romance anime does, it lets you experience the characters falling in love over and over again with each new series.
If you’re a hopeless romantic or just a love junkie, try getting swept away with these romance anime recommendations. They will make your heart soar without all the worry of STDs from your string of one night falling in love stands.
Best Romance Anime
Orange
Love is complicated, but it is made even more complicated in Orange when the main character, Naho, gets a letter from her future self detailing all the regrets she had concerning a transfer student who would commit suicide. In Orange, Naho and her friends try adamantly to stop the events that would lead to their new friend Kakeru’s suicide, and she finds herself falling in love with the man whose life she is trying to protect. Unfortunately, suicide is not always about what your friends did or didn’t do, and about what is eating away at your own soul.
The Pet Girl of Sakura Hall
The romance in Pet Girl of Sakura Hall is as fun and as light-hearted as its color palate suggests. It features a boy who can’t help but take in stray cats and a girl who, while extremely talented, can’t take care of herself. It is a simple premise that sets up for what might have been a simple love story, but throughout, you watch them fall in love while the girl’s talent for art motivates the boy falling in love with her to find his own passion and dedication in life.
While also a tale about misfits finding kinship with each other, it is also unexpectedly about the equality of love and asks the question of if you can live in the shadow of your more talented partner and still love them as an equal.
The Kawai Complex Guide to Manors and Hostel Behavior
What is a better set up than a boy and a girl living together through unexpected circumstance? Unfortunately, it is not them alone living together, but there are others that share a boarding house with them, each weirder than the next. However, this group of weirdos form a misfit family that makes the overall story of this series just as heart-warming as watching the shy, bookish girl slowly open up to the more outgoing new resident.
ReLife
Although relatively new, ReLife gave a refreshing boost to the romance genre by taking the relatively played out idea of giving someone a second chance at youth and reinvigorating it with playful characters and a few intriguing twists. In ReLife, you watch an older NEET named Kaizaki go back to high school as a young man and use his world knowledge to urge on his younger peers while also reforming himself after a traumatic incident. While he suppresses his own feelings of love for a high school girl because after a year they will lose all memory of him, he also encourages the awkward romance of two of his close friends. Through that side romance, you get the pay off that you don’t get in his story.
My Little Monster
Some people believe that you can only find love by finding someone similar to yourself, but often it is those different than you that expand your view on the world. In My Little Monster, Shizuku is cold and only motivated in her studies, while Haru is a violent truant that just wants to make friends but had his reputation ruined by his misunderstood violence. Bound together by both being outsiders, My Little Monster tells a story of understanding and building feelings through that, even if you don’t always recognize them until it is too late.
Nisekoi
Harem anime series are always a treasure trove of romance, and Nisekoi does it in an addictive way. Throughout the series, you get a number of girls vying for the main characters attention and affection as he helps them all out with their unique problems. However, instead of just having one girl you want to root for and know will win, you feel like rooting for all of their efforts and the best girl is not always so obvious.
Love, Chunibyou, and Other Delusions
Everyone wants to be normal, but normal is boring. That’s essentially the premise of Chunibyou. Yuuga Togashi wants to suppress his weird chunibyou side that ostracized him in middle school and live a normal high school life with a hot high school girlfriend. However, things don’t go that way when he meets another chunibyou and gets sucked into her world of fantasy.
Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun
Some of the best romance anime are built on the platform of misunderstandings. This hilarious little anime starts with a girl confessing to a stoic and cool boy she likes at school only to find out he is a shoujo mangaka. In even more misunderstandings, she ends up being his assistant. This series is all about the crushing reality of falling in love with dense individuals.
Blue Spring Ride
Our first loves are important to all of us, but we tend to idealize them a little bit. In Blue Spring Ride, the main girl falls in love with a gentle boy who soon after moves away. However, when she finds out he has returned years later, they have both become completely different people due to the experiences they had during their time apart. Yet, deep down there are still those feelings that made them fall in love in the first place, but can the love the people that they have become?
Nodame Cantabile
In romance anime, contention between two people you so obviously know are going to fall in love is a popular plot, but between the music and the act of overcoming so many fears in Nodame Cantabile, it becomes an excellent love story. You watch two people, one serious and motivated, the other more haphazard and fun-loving, make beautiful music together.
Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day
This is another series that explores first love and the regrets that we often have in our youth. However, in Anohana, while the characters are given a chance to repair their relationships by a ghost of a friend whose death split them apart, you also get to see some of the drama and feelings that kept them apart. This series doesn’t give you a lot of relationship payoff, but its bittersweet story will make you cry.
Spice and Wolf
Spice and Wolf provides one of the most mature romances in anime. It follows the story of a merchant and a goddess as they travel together learning more about the world and each other. Things are slow and deliberate, but love is often that way. Throughout its several seasons, you watch as friendship turns into love while getting a front row seat to all the tender moments in between.
Your Lie in April
If you like your romance anime to be as rejuvenating as it is bitter sweet, than Your Lie in April will quickly rise to the top of your favorites. At a glance it seems like your typical music anime filled with music-related drama, but it is so much more. It is about facing your traumas, leaving no regrets, and living each day to its fullest. Full of drama, full of tears, and full of powerful love, this is a series that can bring you to your knees, my romantic friend.
Clannad
Clannad is a staple in the romance genre. It features your typical harem, each girl with sadder or more traumatic problems than the last, and a boy, with problems of his own, fixing them. It is a great story about friendship that turns into love, and by the end of Clannad After Story, you will never forget the effect it will have on you.
My Love Story
Think no one would ever fall for your ugly face? Well, My Love Story is proof that if you have a good person behind it, even you can get the cute girl no matter how handsome your best friend is. Humorous, if not a little repetitive after awhile, this is a genre-breaking romance anime where the manly friend with a face like the front of a bus finds his love story.
Say “I Love You”
It is a tale as old as time, the shy girl falls for the cute popular boy, but not without hating him and kicking him in the face first. It may be an over told tale, but it is done with such style and sweetness that it makes the story feel new again. Over time, you watch them become more similar to each other after understanding the experiences that made them kindred spirits in the first place.
Lovely Complex
Lovely Complex is an anime about how love happens in the most unexpected ways. Risa is way too tall for a girl and Atsushi is way too short for a boy. They fall in love with height-appropriate matches, but their crushes end up loving each other. However, because they are so similar in their attitudes and hobbies, the girl soon realizes that she loves the boy. Unfortunately, Atsushi is self-conscious about their height differences. This is a story about learning how love can help them overcome their physical differences.
Toradora
Like Lovely Complex, Toradora is about two misunderstood people that each have a crush on someone else. Taiga is short and looks sweet, but has a fierce attitude. Ryuuji looks like a delinquent, but is as gentle as they come. It is these misconceptions that others have of them that bind them together as they each help each other go after their crushes, only to realize that their friendship has blossomed into love.
Kimi ni Todoke
Simple, sweet, and refreshing – Kimi ni Todoke has become the standard for romance anime. It is a classic story between a shy girl that is misunderstood by her class and the popular boy that is strangely drawn to her. Everything about it is light-hearted and while the romance progresses slowly, it makes those rare tender moments between the couple even more rewarding.
Nana
What could possibly top Kimi ni Todoke as number one on this list? Nana. This may seem like a strange choice, but if you give Nana a chance, it can blow you away. One of the major reasons this takes the cake is because one of the Nana’s is as addicted to falling in love as you are. However, the loves of both Nana’s play out in such a magnificent and mature way that it draws you in and doesn’t let go. It is a story as much about loving your friends as it is romantic love. Sometimes you can’t fight your feelings, and sometimes you don’t end up with the person you think you love.
Did we miss your favorite romance anime? Yes, probably, because there are so many good ones out there. Let us know what your romance anime recommendations would be in the comments section below.
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