Even if our appreciation for monarchies in reality has waned significantly, royalty will always be the beloved stuff of fairy tales and a royal romance anime always runs away with the imagination.
What person hasn’t had the idle daydream of being whisked away by a person whose status commanded such authority that they could stop nation’s for your love?
Or perhaps your daydreams sit on the other side of the coin where you like to see a character with a personality so strong and admirable that it can purge the darkness from a corrupted royal teetering on the edge of evil with love?
If you are looking for royal romance anime recommendations that showcase love at the top of a kingdom, give these a try.
Best Royal Romance Anime
Bibliophile Princess
When it comes to royal romance anime, the romance between royalty and a commoner is most common, but it is still nice to see romance between just nobility so it can skip some of the more predictable drama.
Bibliophile Princess is the quintessential royal romance anime. It follows the relationship between a bookish noble girl who is engaged to the crown prince. She thinks she is just a placeholder so that other nobles won’t try to use intrigue to get him to marry their daughters and he can search for love.
However, his love for her was true all along. Bibliophile Princess starts with her realizing that, then you watch her discover her own feelings for the prince. It is a very sweet romance that feels like it was plucked out of a storybook, but actually goes to great lengths to explore what is expected from royalty.
The World is Still Beautiful
The oft-overlooked romance anime that is The World is Still Beautiful follows the arranged marriage between the recent conqueror of the world, the Sun King, and the daughter of a Dukedom that maintains its independence.
She possesses the power to call the rain and it never rains in the Kingdom of the Sun, so there is a distinct element of mysticism in The World is Still Beautiful that adds a lot of flavor to the world and its story.
The romance in The World is Still Beautiful is a rather unique one. The Sun King in question is actually a 15-year-old boy and his fiance is a 17-year-old girl. The age gap was lessened in the anime, but is still very distinct in their character designs.
Due to their ages, the relationship, while still having some of those tender moments that romance junkies crave as they begin to trust each other, is often more like an older sister and a younger brother.
Snow White With The Red Hair
Snow White With The Red Hair leans into the fairy tale nature that its title evokes, just not really the Snow White fairy tale.
Snow White With The Red Hair follows an herbalist who has to flee her home after the prince of that country covets her red hair color and seeks to make her a concubine. Coincidentally, she meets the prince of the neighboring country in the woods while crossing the border. They feel that spark and she ends up inspired to work as a court herbalist in his castle.
This anime doesn’t let itself get swept away in pure fairy tale romance, however. The main character is dedicated to her vocation, but it still makes time for nice moments between her and the prince. However, as she is a commoner, it does have the some of the standard “royal falling in love with a commoner” drama that you see often in royal romance anime.
Tada-kun Never Falls in Love
To include this series on this list of royal romance anime is technically a spoiler since Tada-kun Never Falls in Love doesn’t reveal who is a royal immediately.
The good news is that there are actually a few romantic relationships at play in Tada-kun Never Falls in Love, so any one of them could be a royal romance!
Either way, this anime is a lovely take on love for those interest more in modern royalty and less on fairy tale royalty. The royalty in Tada-kun Never Falls in Love is expected to marry people of a certain standing, but the monarchy has much less power than in other anime on this list.
The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady
This long titled isekai anime is unique among not just isekai but all royal romance anime in that it is a girl’s love anime.
The main character is an openly gay heroine who is a princess. She recruits a noble’s daughter to not just help her create magic-infused items to better the lives of those not privileged to use magic, but she also hopes that the girl will fall in love with her.
The series is a great mix of light-hearted romance and comedy, which is rare for girl’s love anime that often loves to get lost in drama and tragedy. It is also nice to see one unabashedly romantic and not just teasing you with subtext.
How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom
This isekai anime takes an economics student and sees him summoned to another world by a king. The king asks him to help his failing kingdom, and in the process of doing so, engages him to his daughter, and abdicates the throne to the main character.
How a Realist Hero Rebuilt a Kingdom is about what it says on the label. That economics student-now-king rebuilds the kingdom not through heroics, but through solid realm administration. He is aided in that endeavor by his betrothed who is more loyal solider than demure princess.
Unfortunately, as this is an isekai anime, the main character ends up gaining multiple fiancees that he would later marry to solidify various political alliances and because harems sell isekai anime, I guess. However, the princess he is first engaged to is considered his main girl and the only one he really ever returns affections for.
I’m the Villainess, So I’m Taming the Final Boss
This isekai anime sees a girl reincarnated into her favorite otome game. However, she is not the heroine, but the villainess. In order to avoid dying a miserable death like the game character would, when game events break her betrothal to the crown prince, she decides to go romance his older brother, a man shunned because he was the demon king.
While isekai, even otome isekai, loves to lean towards harems. Taming the Final Boss has the main character laser-focused on her main man in a very cute way. It still explores much of the usual drama that you expect from otome game anime, but the main characters have wonderful chemistry.
Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte
This otome game anime has a bit of a twist. The main characters aren’t isekai’d into it, but instead they can talk with the prince character while playing it. They explain what a tsundere is to him, and help him see why the villainess is cute, helping her to avoid her fate by keeping him in love with her.
While this series is mostly focused on the relationship between the prince and the tsundere villainess or the heroine and a side character, but it also explores the developing relationship between the two players of the game. As such, this oddly-named series is a multi-faceted romance, but only some of that romance is a royal romance.
My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!
Rounding out the otome game anime entries is the OG otome game isekai anime. My Next Life as a Villainess has what will be a familiar premise of having the main character die and be reincarnated as a character in her favorite otome game. However, she is not the heroine, but the villainess.
Not wanting to die, she sets out to avoid events that will ultimately lead to her death. In doing so, she not just gains the affections of all the male love interests, but all the female characters of the game as well. In essence, building a large bisexual harem for herself.
While My Next Life as a Villainess is filled with a lot of cute moments, this is not a particularly satisfying royal romance. She has the love of so many people, that the storytelling really can’t shift to her returning the love of just one. However, if you can be satisfied with wholesome fluff, it is a great anime.
The Titan’s Bride
The Titan’s Bride is a boy’s love anime, and one of the saucier ones to boot. It follows a man who was sent to another world where everyone is a titan, or rather, a very large human. He is chosen by the prince of the kingdom to be his bride.
As I mentioned, this was one of the more lewd boy’s love anime. So you will get to see the more physical sides of a royal romance.
Maoyu – Archenemy and Hero
Maoyu is about the romance between the Demon Queen and the Hero that had originally rushed into her castle to defeat her. Once inside, he discovered that she actually wanted to not just team up with him to save both their countries, but date him as well.
To be fair, Maoyu often focuses on agriculture and economics as the Demon Queen tries to foster advances in those areas in order to be able to stop the war that is propping up a nation’s economy. It makes only a little time for romance, but when it does, it is very rewarding because the Demon Queen is unexpectedly very cute in her personality.
Romeo X Juliet
This anime re-imagining of Romeo and Juliet takes the characters and the very basic premise from Shakespeare and them paints it on a pretty interesting sci-fi action anime that is likely a lot more interesting to people than the original story.
While this anime has romance, the romance actually isn’t the focus like it is in the original telling. The families are both of royal blood, one family overthrows the other, and intrigue ensues afterwards.
100 Sleeping Princes & the Kingdom of Dreams
You can tell within the opening credits if not by the title alone that 100 Sleeping Princes & the Kingdom of Dreams is based off an otome game.
Like in many an otome game, the main character is a girl of destiny chosen to save the world from the darkness alongside a whole stable of absolutely beautiful boys. In this series, the main character is a salarywoman isekai’d over and determined to be the long-lost princess that can wake the 100 princes that were sealed by dream-eaters.
Except she doesn’t, actually. She wakes up one prince in the beginning and the rest appear to already be walking around and just doing various things. She meets them, yes, she does nothing to really endear herself to them, and they love her.
It’s an otome game anime adaptation, so you can’t really expect much more than beautiful boys. The boys are beautiful, but the romance is as flimsy as the plot since it refuses to commit to a main boy to serve as a love interest.
The Story of Saiunkoku
The Story of Saiunkoku follows the imperial house of the country of Saiunkoku that is still recovering from a brutal war of succession several years prior. The current emperor is the sixth son of the previous and only sits the throne because his brothers ended up killing each other in their pursuit for power.
The series follows a young noble’s daughter who, despite coming from a noble house, lives in destitution due to the diminished wealth of her family. She ends up taking a job at the imperial palace where her good nature begins to have a positive effect on the emperor who continuously shirks all his duties.
While The Story of Saiunkoku has romance between royalty, it is most often focused on character and political drama. The imperial house is rife with problems that need fixing by a hard-working earnest shoujo heroine.
Yona of the Dawn
I hesitated to put Yona of the Dawn in because it, as a romance anime, distinctly suffers from lack of another season. However, all the breadcrumbs are there, so why not?
In Yona of the Dawn, the titular princess is whisked away from the castle by her bodyguard after her cousin and crush leads a coup that kills her father and takes the throne for himself.
Outside of the palace, she swiftly learns that her father was not the benevolent and good king that she thought, but still decides to gather the dragon warriors of legend to help her regain her throne.
While much of the anime is focused on her finding and convincing these legendary reincarnations to join her cause, on her journey, you see the distinct seeds of love begin to blossom between Yona and her bodyguard that has been with her since childhood.
Do you have more royal romance anime recommendations that detail the love lives of royalty? Let fans know in the comments section below.
