10 Best Anime Romances Of All Time

Romance in anime is about as much of a mixed bag as romance in any other medium, with your usual grab bag of repeated elements, along with some very anime-esque spins mixed in for that extra flavour.

Romance is one of the most deceptively hard genres to do correctly. This is because you have to convince your audience that not only are the two characters you've presented to us good characters in their own right, but that they have enough in common to want to date each other, with all the emotional baggage such a decision entails.

It's VERY easy to screw up, especially in anime. Anime romances, whether in the genre of romance itself or just a sub-plot in a larger story, range from believable to flat out hokey. Not helped by flowery melodrama often being anime's default setting.

But sometimes, it really, REALLY works. And when that happens you get a romance that's just as compelling if not more so than the larger story surrounding it. Even decades after their initial release, these ten anime romances still send our hearts soaring.

Shonen anime, being made for young boys, is commonly not the best at portraying anything non-traditionally masculine, so their depictions of romance more often than not just fall flat on their faces.

But every now and then you get one that really works, and one of the most stand out examples is Yusuke and Keiko from Yu Yu Hakusho.

What sets their relationship apart is, fittingly, what sets everything else about this show apart: Yusuke Urumeshi being one of the most unique shonen protagonists out there.

He starts off as a closed off, violent juvenile delinquent, with a broken home and unresolved abandonment issues causing the young man to grow up angry at the world. Keiko is the only person who so much as talks to him, and after fourteen years, she's clearly gotten a little sick of the whole thing.

When Yusuke dies saving a child, he finds out just how much everyone in his life - particularly Keiko - genuinely loved him during his funeral. From there he resolves to not only come back to life but to also try to be a better person.

It's a long, slow development, as is usually the case with the kinds of issues that Yusuke has to deal with, but Keiko (despite her constant snark) is always there for him.

The two just have this understanding that can only come from two people that have known each other their entire lives. She doesn't understand EVERYTHING Yusuke is going through (those walls he put up reached the f*&king stratosphere), but there is a healthy understanding and patience with this relationship that was just lovely to see.