In romance anime, your choices are typically romance anime following working adults or, more commonly, romance anime about high school students. Romance anime tends to forget higher education is a valid and more flexible place to carry on a love affair.
College romance anime often enjoys the best of both worlds. Characters are old enough to enjoy drinking and all the shenanigans that come with adulthood. Yet, they are young enough to go to classes or believably have a wealth of free time on their hands. Because of this, it is actually pretty surprising that there are not way more college romance anime.
If you want a romance anime about adults, but still want them to not be worried about making their forced overtime quota at work then check out these great college romance anime recommendations.
Best College Romance Anime
Golden Time
Modern romance anime, even high school romance anime, have tended to move away from drama altogether, but especially away from the ham-fisted romance drama tropes of old. The amnesia, the love rivals, the misunderstandings – All of it is from a bygone age. That said, Golden Time is a memorial for all those romance drama tropes.
This college-set romance anime follows a man repeating his freshman year at a law school in Tokyo after a bout of amnesia. There, he becomes close with a whirlwind of a woman who chased her unrequited love to college. They eventually start dating, but not only does he have to deal with the most most insecure girlfriend to ever be in a romance anime, but he also remembers he was in love with another girl before his amnesia.
Drama. Golden Time is all drama. It has so much drama that it is actually pretty hard to enjoy the nice romantic moments because they are tainted with the memory of all the other drama going on in the story.
My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999
My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999 tells the story of a college woman who starts a relationship with a gamer friend from her MMO who is still in his last year of high school. As this is a particularly rare age dynamic, it adds an extra layer of interest to the romance story, but doesn’t take advantage of it as much as you were perhaps hoping.
While Yamada is a high school student, he acts quite a bit like an adult, even if he is a bit stunted at expressing his emotions. Akane, the college student, is the one who may be more believably a high schooler at times.
While this romance anime has one half of the couple in college, it still often acts a bit more like a high school romance anime. However, progress happens pretty fast, it has a nice gamer theme to it, and does take advantage of some of the benefits of having older characters in a romance anime.
Love Hina
Love Hina is a romance anime from the age of violent tsunderes where pissing her off or embarrassing her too much meant a punch would send you across town. However, Love Hina is also a harem anime, but one of a lower intensity. The girls all come to have feelings for him, but it has a main girl and it progresses the romance with that main girl.
Love Hina follows a main character who made a promise with a girl in his childhood to get into Tokyo University together. Unfortunately, he can neither remember who that girl is nor actually pass his entrance exams. To continue trying to get in, he takes a job at his grandmother’s hot springs inn that has recently become an all-girls dorm.
Why yes, that synopsis IS a very obvious set up for ecchi. Though Love Hina is an anime from an age before ecchi became just pretty much hentai like it is today. Instead, what you get is college-aged characters studying, enjoying slice of life activities, and occasionally beating up a guy who walked in on them taking a bath.
Nodame Cantabile
Nodame Cantabile is a college romance anime for those who also have an appreciation for music anime, fully taking advantage of the potential of both.
This series follows the adventures and building relationship of talented and uptight Chiaki and quirky and upbeat Noda Megumi, or “Nodame,” as she refers to herself. Upon their star-crossed meeting, he becomes enchanted by her unique music and she becomes enamored with him.
As is typical with music anime, you follow these two talents as they aim for their various musical goals. However, in doing that, you get a romantic relationship that is a bit different. It is not building towards those heart-pounding confessions or kisses, but is a relationship about the characters becoming pillars of support for each other in their professional goals and personal struggles.
Alongside getting to enjoy great music often, Nodame Cantabile fully embraces the age of its characters in their music university. They have more free time to spend as adults, but they are still not quite out of that phase of full time education. You get to see them form relationships that don’t feel like high school relationships in an older wrapped, but are still shaded with the uncertainty of youth.
Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It
While most anime fans will remember Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It as a science-themed romance anime, it is also a college romance anime.
Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It follows a group of grad students working in a research laboratory. One day, a girl confesses to her lab mate that she loves him, but what do they know of these intangible emotional feelings? Being people of science, they conduct a series of experiments to prove it.
While this series plays very coy with the official coupling of the couple, it rewards you in all the ways you want from a romance anime via their experimentation. They do things like the kabedon wall slam, kissing in the right ambiance, and going on dates for the science of it all. It ends up both cute and surprisingly educational because it uses valid hypotheses.
Honey and Clover
It might be better to describe Honey and Clover as a college drama anime rather than a college romance anime. This series doesn’t pursue romance in the same satisfying and wholesome way that most romance anime does. Rather, the romance is often unsatisfying for everyone involved – the characters and the audience.
However, love and romance play a large role in Honey and Clover. Everyone loves somebody, but often that somebody loves someone else. Get ready for a lot of one-sidedness, but what Honey and Clover excels in is showing how even rejection and unrequited feelings can help you grow. This is very much a coming-of-age drama about college-aged adults.
Ah! My Goddess
Ah My Goddess tells the tale of a college guy who accidentally called the Goddess Help Hotline, where deities offer help and grant wishes, then accidentally wished that the goddess he was talking to would stay with him forever.
So on top of being a college romance anime, it is also a supernatural romance anime between two literal strangers that now live together.
The getting-to-know you phase and the awkwardness of living with a stranger takes up a large chunk of the plot. However, because it has so many different things, Ah My Goddess, as a romance, can be a bit muddled. It is certainly pretty light-hearted, but it gets lost in arcs that aren’t necessarily romantically rewarding, but build out the characters.
Maison Ikkoku
While the Maison Ikkoku anime is of an age where people take one look at it and push it away due to older animation, it still tells an entertaining and long-progressing college romance.
This series follows the relationship of a college student who falls in love with his boarding house manager. However, their blossoming feelings are not without difficulties, the most notable being that the boarding manager is recently widowed.
While you see their feelings bloom for each other, she is also conflicted by her still lingering feelings for her husband and feels guilty about the prospect of moving on. So while this series is as occasionally silly as you can expect from a Rumiko Takahashi (Inuyasha, Urusei Yatsura) romance, it is also pretty emotionally deep as well.
Ai Yori Aoshi
While not the only college romance anime that is also a harem on here, Ai Yori Aoshi is probably the most lackluster. It isn’t that it is bad, it is just that it isn’t really different from any high school-set harem romance anime out there.
Ai Yori Aoshi follows a college student who lives alone in Tokyo. He left his home after being disowned by his family and thus was his arranged marriage broken as well. However, the girl from that now-dissolved arrangement shows up at his door and wants to marry him.
As this is a harem anime, she has several rivals who are all in love with the main character, though his arranged marriage partner is clearly the “main girl” of this harem anime.
Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out
Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out is part of a small sub-genre of teasing romance anime where the female lead is often being obnoxious to their male crush. However, that teasing will later reward you with them being adorably caught off-guard by actual feelings.
Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out follows a college guy who reunites with his underclassman from his club in high school when she too starts going to the same college. Without actually realizing her feelings, she really wants to spend time with him, and he finds that occasionally annoying since he just wants to be alone.
While Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out meanders a bit from ecchi comedy situation to ecchi comedy situation in the beginning, it does eventually grow more romance-oriented, though with painfully slow progress.
The Tatami Galaxy
There are a few debatable anime series on here that might not fit the criteria of college romance anime in the most pure sense. However, The Tatami Galaxy is perhaps one of the most dubious. The series technically follows the main character’s repeated attempts at romance in college, each ending with him failing in some way or another before trying again.
It is a time looping series that just happens to be about college romance. However, rather than the usual rom-com, this is distinctly more artful and ponderous.
Remake Our Life
What ReLife is to redoing your high school years after becoming a failure, Remake Our Life is to redoing your college years after becoming a failure.
Remake Our Life follows a guy that, after choosing the more safe option of business school, comes to wonder what if he had chosen the more risky arts school after a series of failures in his career as a game developer as an adult. After going to sleep, he finds himself back in his youth, ready to make a choice of where to go to college.
He goes to the arts school and ends up being classmates with people who, in his future, were legendary game development talents. He befriends them and starts a romance with one of his peers.
While this series is dedicated to its romance plot, it is also equally dedicated to the main character engaging in his college life in hopes to have a more successful future. It is a lovely series for anime fans who have had a regret or two in their life, but the romance has some interesting implications by the end.
Paradise Kiss
Like My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999, Paradise Kiss follows the relationship between a high schooler and a college student. This time, it tells the tale of a dispassionate high school girl on the cusp of higher education and a mysterious and endlessly intriguing college fashion student.
Paradise Kiss shares the same creator as Nana which, while not following college students, follows young adults of the same age and enjoys the same elements of bad romance. Paradise Kiss is rife with character drama where the characters often pursue relationships that are bad for them because of how exciting they are.
If you enjoy more drama-driven romance and don’t necessarily need wholesome relationships, then Paradise Kiss is an excellent anime.
Rent-a-Girlfriend
Can you call Rent-a-Girlfriend a romance? It is certainly centered around the main character’s romantic life with the several girls he rents as girlfriends at any given time. But can you call it a romance if the main character has all the spine of a crusty cumsock when it comes to pursuing the earnest feelings some of these girls are clearly showing him?
Rent-a-Girlfriend is a harem anime set in college. The kind of harem anime where there is a clearly defined best girl that you know will win. Unfortunately, it is also a harem anime with frustrating little actual romantic progression.
Do you have more romance anime about love between college-aged adults? Let fans know in the comments section below.
