Animes That Are Romance

1. Romantic Anime Shows You Can't Miss
2. Romance Anime Can Be Cliche
3. Wotakoi Is One Of The Best New Anime Of Spring 2018

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I love romance and I love anime, but romantic anime that becomes popular in the United States tends to mostly focus on high school students falling in love, which means it focuses on a set of problems and hurdles that a lot of us anime fans have grown out of.

And Fruits Basket are among my top favorite anime of all time. But sometimes watching first-love jitters juxtaposed with the anxiety of exams and planning for post-graduation life doesn’t resonate with someone who’s past that stage of life. Those themes can be satisfying when done well, but I’m older now, I’ve watched a ton of anime dealing with that one specific flavor of romance, and I’m really ready to see on-screen couples dealing with different romantic problems.

Best Romance Anime On Crunchyroll

Finding romantic anime centered around slightly older or more mature characters hasn’t been easy, but the few I’ve found sparked so strongly to me. They have a sense of relatability that just hits in a totally different way. While I can reminisce about my high school days and how every single interaction with my crush felt like the most intensely important thing in the world, movies and TV series like the favorites I’ve listed below resonate with me because they focus on problems I’m dealing with right now.

In this one-season TV series from 2018, the four main characters are all work friends who are also secret nerds. The series primarily centers on Narumi, a 24-year-old office worker and yaoi fangirl who has a hard time dating because she feels like has to hide her fandoms from potential boyfriends. But when she starts a new job and reconnects with her childhood friend (and huge gamer) Hirotaka, they agree to try a relationship, since they get each other’s obsessions.

Instead of centering around first-relationship jitters and school problems, Narumi’s relationship anxiety comes from the fact that this is the first time she’s been fully open about her interests. A lot of her arc focuses on learning how to comfortably be herself, and learning that she can enjoy geeky things and be a responsible adult — and that plenty of people do that already.

Romantic Anime Shows You Can't Miss

Also deals with nerdy interests, but with the added intrigue that most of the relationships happen online. Newly unemployed social recluse Moriko decides to take up gaming again, and she creates a suave male persona in a popular online game. She finds a guild and connects with multiple people — but especially cute healer Lily.

As it turns out, Lily is the avatar character of Sakurai, an awkward man who Moriko keeps running into IRL. It’s like

With an incredibly geeky makeover. Both Moriko and Sakurai are nervous about real-life interactions, especially when they rely so much on their online personas. As central as their romantic relationship is,

Romance Anime Can Be Cliche

Is also about adult friendship, particularly unconventional online relationships. This anime shows the fuzzy line between people’s online personas and their real-life personalities, and ends up being a lovely and patient look at overcoming social anxiety to forge connections, no matter the method.

Studio Ghibli’s underseen anime classic Only Yesterday is a movie steeped in nostalgia. It follows 27-year-old office worker Taeko, who takes an extended vacation to the countryside to help out on a farm. During this reprieve from her day-to-day life, Taeko reflects a lot on her childhood, remembering key moments that are happy, sad, and all sorts of things in between. She questions whether she’s happy with her life as it is, all while getting closer with her brother-in-law’s second cousin Toshio, who lives in the area and works on a farm of his own.

A lot of Taeko’s journey is internal, as she looks back on her younger self and wonders whether she’s being true to herself after all these years. Her blossoming friendship with Toshio helps her realize what she actually wants out of life. Unlike the coming-of-age narrative in similar slice-of-life Ghibli movies like

Must Watch Romance Anime For 2021

, Taeko has mostly grown into who she is. Her journey involves trying to figure out whether that’s even what she wants — a quarter-life crisis moment that particularly resonated with me when I watched it for the first time.

In fact, all three of these stories have female characters grappling to some extent with who they are versus who they think society expects them to be. The love stories augment these journeys, helping them figure that out. The crux of their romantic relationships comes from finally finding someone who understands them, which is both thrilling and terrifying. The romances in these stories are more subdued than the big dramatic confessions of teen romance, but at the same time, they offer introspective looks at love, and highlight different priorities for prospective partners.

A good romance story will be about people connecting and changing each other for the better, no matter what age they are. But when those connections come in the form of getting drinks after work, supporting each other through career changes, and advising each other not to spend

Ranking: Anime Fans Wählen Die Top 25 Romance Serien

Much money on gacha games, they feel particularly satisfying to me. The whirlwind high school love story isn’t the only one worth telling. There are fulfilling stories out there about making connections at any age.Whether it's Valentine's Day or not, you'll be sure to enjoy these 14 top romance anime series and movies. Yes, these titles all deal with that oh-so-complicated human drive. From series such as Tamako Market and Paradise Kiss to films including Whisper of the Heart and Doukyusei, we’ve got you covered.

Oh, and while we were at it, we’ve went ahead and organized this list by what might correspond to your mood. So read on for the best romance anime you can watch right now. You can also take a look at our list of the best anime of all time for more classic anime options.

Following up her hit show K-On!, Naoko Yamada’s Tamako Market immediately differentiates itself from its predecessor in that most classic of ways: It adds a talking bird. But really the main difference is in the focus of its story, as it looks at the professional ambitions of and slowly blooming affection between childhood friends Tamako and Mochizo, each of whom are the children of competing mochi shops. It’s not exactly a Romeo and Juliet story – it’s much more sugary sweet than that (though not so much to inspire tooth rot). The series also got a lovely follow-up in the feature film Tamako Love Story, also directed by Yamada and also very worth watching.

Top Shoujo Anime Of The Summer 2023 Season To Satisfy All Hopeless Romantics!

A romantic comedy built around teenage orance and meta-humour poking fun at its own genre, Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun is a short but sweet adaptation of the four-panel comic-strip style manga by Tsubaki Izumi, in which a girl helps her completely obvious crush in his secret career of making shoujo manga. With its surprisingly large cast of charmingly idiotic teenagers, every situational sketch of Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun is perfectly expanded upon from its source - amplifying its various, loving parodies of shoujo manga tropes to endearing hilarity. If after you’re done you find yourself looking for more stories about sharing nerdy hobbies, Wotakoi, while aimed at an older crowd, may also be of interest. For another opposites attract rom-com, the recent series Horimiya – though it takes a dive in its final stages – is also incredibly charming.

Opening with beguiling interpolation of animated images over live-action photographs is just the beginning of the ingenuity and idiosyncrasy of Osamu Kobayashi (who sadly passed last year) in the adaptation of Paradise Kiss. As Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad followed a pursuit of passion into the world of music, Paradise Kiss explores fashion, framed as a sort of wonderland accessed by an isolated staircase into the HQ of the eponymous brand Paradise Kiss, which is run by students of Yazawa School for the Arts. (Fans of Ai Yazawa’s manga will know that school is also a primary location in her manga Neighbourhood Story). Yukari is recruited to model their output, and finds herself drawn to the deser Jōji George Koizumi. At the same time, she experiences an awakening of personal ambition that she lacked before.

It’s a show with romantic overtures, but with a more mature perspective on sexuality and the heartbreak that comes with coming-of-age. It also features gorgeous animation, and is must-watch at any time of the year, really. Plus, every episode culminating with a needle drop of Franz Ferdinand's Do You Want To over wildly stylised ending credits is just the delightful cherry on top.

Wotakoi Is One Of The Best New Anime Of Spring 2018

A slice-of-life show exploring the intersection between love and self-actualisation, Honey and Clover stands out a little from the rest of this selection simply because it’s the only one I picked that features college students. But it’s also good