You can have a harem anime, yes, but the characters are always so limited when you just have it set in a school. In public spaces, you can engage in a few fun shenanigans in a believable way, but you can’t get into the full degenerate harem stuff for the sake of “public decency,” you know?
Do you know where a harem anime can really stretch its wings? When it thinks of a contrived reason to move all of those young women into the same house as the male main character. Oh, the lewd things they can do~
If you are looking for harem anime where the main character actually lives with all his ladies, head on down below.
Harem Anime Where They Live Together
Monster Musume
Monster Musume makes the whole reason for a man to live with a harem really simple – The government is making him.
In Monster Musume, the main character accidentally becomes enrolled in the Inter-species Cultural Exchange act, in which a Lamia is sent to his home to live. From there, he ends up sheltering a number of beautiful female fantasy beings who end up living with him either by accident or because the coordinator for the project forces them on him and he feels bad sending them away.
Girlfriend; Girlfriend
After first, Girlfriend; Girlfriend is just suspension of disbelief-breaking polygamy as the main character gets a girlfriend, then suddenly has a new girl confess to him, and finally he decides to have two girlfriends instead of choosing one. Both know about the other. In fact, he asks both to come live with him.
However, Girlfriend; Girlfriend only gets more gloriously ridiculous as he adds two more girlfriends as the series goes on. Unlike typical harems where they all coexist either happily or oblivious to the other girls, Girlfriend; Girlfriend has each girl desiring to drive off the other three so they can win the singular man.
Love Flops
Love Flops is one of those harem anime series where they really wanted their characters to be the thing to shine. As such, it doesn’t really put so much effort into the set up and just hopes you are there for the lewd harem shenanigans and not the story.
In Love Flops, a guy has a series of random, lewd, or just plain comical meetcutes with five different girls who, as it turns out, are all candidates to be his bride invited by his father. So after meeting them on his way to school, finding out they also go to or teach at his school, he also discovers that they will be living with him too.
Alongside lewd shenanigans, the series also gradually reveals the forgotten history he has with each of them as well.
The Testament of New Devil Sister
The Testament of New Devil Sister starts off simply enough with a dad saying he remarried and telling his son that he now has two new sisters to take care of. However, that is where “simple” begins and ends in this anime.
From there, you discover that the main character was once a member of a group that slayed demons before quitting. His new sister is really the daughter of the demon lord and his other new sister is her guardian. Of course, now he has to protect them from his once-comrades.
What people remember about The Testament of New Devil Sister is the ecchi. It is a legendarily lewd ecchi anime. However, the anime series actually does have a really intricate plot within as well.
Mother of the Goddess’ Dormitory
Harem anime loves a good dorm setting. This is the first of several on this list. In Mother of the Goddess’ Dormitory, a literal 12-year-old boy is left homeless by his father, but invited to become the dorm mother of a dorm full of quirky, scantily-clad, thirsty college girls.
This one has some big Ara Ara energy, and it doesn’t hold that back.
The Fruit of Grisaia
The Fruit of Grisaia is a strange experience for an anime plot, but it is pretty normal by harem standards. This series follows a school which has only a small handful of students, and everyone except the main character is a girl.
Instead of watching them do normal school life things, like go to an actual class, you instead learn the sad and dramatic back story of all the girls, watch the main character help them in very dramatic ways, and it all culminates with the main character being burnt by his government organization, labeled a terrorist, and it then becomes up to his harem to save him.
It is a little easier to swallow the very odd right turn the plot does there at the end by explaining that this series is an adaptation of a visual novel, and not one of the better VN adaptations. The anime is actually really enjoyable for how odd it becomes, but it isn’t doing a very good job adapting the visual novel content, apparently.
Hanaukyo Maid Team
Why live with a manageable harem of girls when you can just be ridiculous? That is just what Hanaukyo Maid Team does.
As you may have surmised, Hanaukyo Maid Team is about a boy who inherits an estate that is bursting with hundreds of maids to cater to his every whim. While it uses the sheer number for comedy, it does whittle it down into a more compact harem of “main maids” that all serve and come to enjoy the main character.
Sekirei
Sekirei doesn’t start off a harem. Instead, the main character discovers he possesses the gene that allows the Sekirei to awaken their abilities when kissed by him. As such, he gets tangled up in their battle royale fight, and a girl moves in with him.
You know the series is setting up for a harem when the main character gets kicked out of his apartment and conveniently ends up moving into an inn that just so happens to have a lot of rooms. And yes, he fills those rooms with more Sekirei that he starts picking up like sexy Pokemon.
Love Hina
While a bit up there in age now, Love Hina came from the era where tsunderes still used criminal violence to express their latent affection. Of course, tsundere isn’t the only harem trope in Love Hina, the all-girls dorm setting houses all of them.
Love Hina follows a main character who keeps failing his university entrance exam. Hoping to have a few more tries at it, he agrees to fill in for his grandmother and be the manager of her hot springs inn. What she didn’t tell him is that some time ago, the hot springs inn was actually converted into an all-girls’ dorm.
Invaders of the Rokujyoma
Why share a whole house when you can contain things further to a single room? That’s what Invaders of the Rokujyoma is working with.
In this series, a guy rents a room in a boarding house because it was cheap. It turns out is was cheap because the room has an abundance of magical energy and attracts a number of otherworldly and supernatural beings who just so happen to be girls. They all want to live there for one reason or another, so they all pretty much share the tiny space.
Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs
Not unlike Love Hina, Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs follows a guy who moves into a hot springs inn that was transformed into a boarding house. Unlike Love Hina, this boarding house is haunted by a cute female ghost. He took the job to exorcise the spirit in return for some cheap rent, but the ghost isn’t really malicious.
While one cute ghost does not a harem make, it turns out that all the other residents of the boarding house are women. They’re not ghosts, but the are all also some form of strange.
Is This a Zombie?
With its necromancers, cross-dressing magical girls, and vampire ninjas, Is This a Zombie wins for the most creative harem anime.
The series follows a guy who was killed by a serial killer and resurrected by a necromancer. His resurrector starts living with him as they look for the killer together.
However, in a later incident, he accidentally steals the magical girl powers from a girl. She decides to stay with him until her powers return and now has to use the powers he stole from her to do her duty defending humanity.
Even later still, a vampire ninja comes to request assistance from the necromancer, and ends up becoming the main character’s servant. And guess what? She also lives with him now.
The plot of Is This a Zombie is like someone took a handful of loose pills and wrote an anime, but it is never not entertaining.
Makenki
Like many a harem anime, Makenki takes place at a recently co-ed school where the students all happen to have the special ability to craft weapons out of their spiritual energy.
In an interesting twist to this all-too-common school harem formula, despite them being at a school with dorm rooms, all of the girls go live in the main characters’ dorm suite because he’s the only boy and it has multiple rooms. As is tradition with harem anime, it is more of a “just go with it and don’t look for an explanation” sort of situation.
To Love-Ru
The thing about To Love-Ru is that not all of his harem lives with him. Furthermore, some harem members don’t join his harem or move in with the main character until later on. However, I’m counting it because at least some of his harem does live with him, and the rest come over to visit frequently enough. This isn’t much of a school life harem anime, it is distinctly more of a home life harem anime.
That aside, To Love-Ru tells the growing love story between an average guy unable to admit his feelings to his classmate and the alien princess who dropping into his home from space while he was in the bath. In order to escape a forced marriage, she asks him to be her fiancee instead.
From there, it is his shenanigans with human women, his alien fiancee, and the great number of other aliens that pay a visit to their household/move right in.
The Terrace Cafe and Its Goddesses
Upping the ante even more than living together, The Terrace Cafe and Its Goddesses focuses on the characters living and working together. Unlike in reality, these co-workers actually like each other well enough to do that peacefully.
In The Terrace Cafe and Its Goddesses, a man inherits a struggling cafe and boarding house from his grandmother who raised him after she passes. While he initially intends to sell it, it turns out that while he was at university, she employed a series of girls who worked at the cafe for room and board. They beg him to reconsider and eventually he decides to re-open the cafe his grandmother loved so much as well as move into the boarding house with them.
Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World
Admittedly, I left a few technically applicable isekai harems off this list. They’re isekai, of course the harems live together. Harem isekai anime is often about traveling together, so of course they all stay at the same inn. Sometimes in the same room. Though, you also have the rarer occurrences where the harem all live in a house together, but that is more for a convenience for storytelling than a set up for shenanigans. However, Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World merits mention because there is no more blatantly ecchi harem in isekai than this one.
The entire premise of the anime is a guy who gets isekai’d, gets shown a cute slave girl by a salesman, kills bandits to scrape together enough money, then buys a female slave to be his “adventuring companion” and dubiously consenting partner in bed.
He goes on to buy more girls, thus the “harem” bit of the title. As he invites them all to his bed, not only do they live together, they share a bed together.
Do you know more harem anime where they all live together in ecchi bliss? Let fans know in the comments section below.
