The title of “worst anime ever” is no less as difficult to name as picking the best anime series ever. There are some series that are so truly awful that the only reason you hear about them is because they are so fervently hated. This isn’t even one of those articles where I name drop popular series just to be inflammatory.
No, no. This is truly bottom-barrel stuff. Now it’s time to dig at those dregs of anime and explore what went so damned wrong with them.
Note: These are just full anime series. I know there are some god awful OVAs out there, but they are not here.
Worst Anime Ever
Pupa
Pupa came off the initial hype of the original Tokyo Ghoul when being edgy and eating people was all the rage. The plot being about an infected cannibal sister eating her continuously regenerating brother aside, the issue with Pupa isn’t the nom-nom-themed incest. It is that it is a horror anime with five minute long episodes.
Now horror can be done in short-form, the first few season of Yamishibai proved that, but really only when it is short stories. Pupa is developing characters and trying – and failing – to set an horror atmosphere. It moves too fast and ends up failing to have a solid story or a horror atmosphere. What makes up most of the show is moaning and uncomfortable squelching noises. It’s horrifying, but probably not in the way they wanted.
Ex-Arm
I only had the pleasure of watching a small handful of these terrible series as they aired. The others I had to track down for morbid curiosity. However, while many of the ones I did watch in the season they aired were a slow burn about sucking, Ex-Arm was different. I knew within the first minute of this series that it was a true masterpiece of being terrible. A real van Gogh of van Gross. A true Monet of Not Okay. A legit da Vinci of Get This Thing Away From Me.
You, too, can watch the first few minutes and see what is wrong with it. CGI in anime is still an unpopular choice, but it has come a long way. 2D is still preferred. Yet, some of the best anime series meld both 2D and CGI these days. Ex-Arm melds the two, but serves as an example of how truly bad it can be like a costly cautionary tale. Watching the switch is like playing a video game that frequently switches between high quality cinematic and bad in-game graphics, but does that every five seconds or sometimes in the same scene.
I would comment on the plot, but honestly I was too distracted by the visuals to even catch the subtitles.
Try Knights
As I understand it, people watch sports anime for many reasons. Some like the realistic character drama and struggles. Others like the lovely athletic characters. However, I always thought that at least some watchers of sports anime watch them because they have an interest in the sport. As such, the sport, if actually a real sport, needs to be presented with some form of realism.
Try Knights, a rugby anime that coincidentally aired around Japan’s Rugby World Cup, does about as much with rugby as Naruto does with pirates. To its credit, the characters do play rugby, so there’s that. However, they put as much effort into the sport as they do anything else. The cardboard characters in animation and personality kick at CGI balls, the plot… Um, well it simply doesn’t exist, and even the strongly hinted at fan service that can bait in the BL fanbase never happens. To drift into a different sport for a moment – they set up the ball for fan service, but no one spikes it. The anime, as a whole, has nothing for anyone. Think about that the next time you wonder why you even exist.
Gibiate
Perhaps the biggest problem with Gibiate is expectations. The series was hyped for having an incredible pedigree of creators behind it. It had character designs by Yoshitaka Amano of Final Fantasy fame, music by Yuzo Koshiro from Ys, and was directed by Masahiko Komino who, while not super experienced as a director, is a solid animator.
In all honesty, Gibiate gets more hate than it actually deserves, especially when placed on this list of chunky feces smears in particular. It at least looks very nice even if the plot and character are as dumb and ill-developed as dirt in a landfill. It may not have helped that it was a tone-deaf series about a pandemic that aired in a pandemic either, but somehow I think the well-documented empathy of many anime fans was unmoved by that. If I recall right, different races also transformed into different monsters, too. That light racism probably didn’t help it either.
Ladyspo
There have been plenty of ecchi anime that made me think “do I even like watching anime anymore?” but that’s only because I have to watch every new anime series to make recommendations and I think it just smooths my brain sometimes. The issue with Ladyspo is not that it’s lewd. The issue with Ladyspo is that it is a PowerPoint.
Take Keijo, for example. It is a lewd sports anime that follows a lewd made-up sport exactly like Ladyspo does. However, it has the animation to make that flesh jiggle and shine. It turns out that is a necessary thing for ecchi, whereas plot is not so necessary. The series has neither.
Vampire Holmes
There was a movie (and book) some years back called “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.” It was stupid, but also fun. Vampire Holmes seems to be poking at that same vein. It takes Sherlock Holmes and,instead of being a detective, he is a vampire hunter. It’s not a bad premise. There are worse out there even not on this list.
The issue is that he doesn’t actually do much vampire hunting. Mostly he just sasses back and forth witlessly and vaguely seductively with his Watson stand-in, Hudson. It is both boring and ugly. It really is just a series of conversations, and not even good conversations full of the hottest goss either.
Hand Shakers
Hand Shakers? Mind as well be called Face Palmers for as much as I did during it. The premise of Hand Shakers is that people forge a psychic connection by holding hands. The main characters were told they can never not hold hands or one of them perishes. However, the anime forgets this rather early in and blatantly has them not holding hands for a long period of time.
So not only does it create a really convoluted plot and is ugly with its 3D background mashed against 2D characters, but it breaks its own rules. It may not be World-building 101, but following the rules of your created world is certainly in the World-building 102 class.
Rainy Cocoa
There are very few ways to mess up a slice of life anime. Even with upsetting series like Glasslip where the established plot goes exactly nowhere by the end, people still enjoyed that sweet, sweet P.A. Works animation. However, it turns out there is a worse sin for slice of life anime – being boring to watch. That’s Rainy Cocoa.
I was all in for handsome boys working in a cafe, but it is as boring as working in an actual cafe. Much of the conversations are just as mundane and the comedy would be polite chucklers at best.
The absolutely bonkers thing is that there are so many sequel series to it. You can’t get a No Game No Life season two to save your life, but this one has gotten like three subsequent series by just being boring.
Diabolik Lovers
If I had to say one nice thing about Diabolik Lovers, it would be that the men are handsome. For many watchers, that was enough to save it. But damn, they sure are rape-y. Furthermore, the main character, being a literal kidnapping victim, just kind of lets it go on with many missed chances to just leave.
Otome shows tend to be real trope-laden and even a bit eye-rolling, but at least they try to build a protagonist… And plot… And character development… And suspension of disbelief. Diabolik Lovers is just having beautiful men taking turns sexually assaulting a piece of cardboard in a wig.
Legend of Duo
Boy’s Love anime has its problems, but it usually has enough titillation to keep its targeted audience pleased. Legend of Duo lacks in every regard. First, the episodes are only five minutes long, which isn’t the main issue. The main issue is that within each of those five minutes, they use every single corner-cutting technique to not animate things. It’s like Way of the Househusband, but without a wholesome story, cool yakuza characters, and Kenjiro Tsuda.
So, it’s a Boy’s Love series without any titillation in the animation, and the world’s most bland and unsexy vampires despite a premise that leaves ample room for seduction.
Hanoka
Now, I’m all for experimentation with new techniques in anime. It is why shows like Flowers of Evil and some stuff by more experimental-leaning JC Staff gets a pass. In order for any art medium to grow, you have to sometimes be daring. However, you also have to be able to realize that you have a hot mess on your hands too.
Hanoka is a series made using Adobe Flash in an era where Flash still existed and people considered it a medium that could be used. However, while a practiced hand could turn a Flash animation into a splash on Newgrounds, it seemed the individuals who dared to make Hanoka could not boast the same. Unfortunately, the plot carpet matches the visual drapes on this mess as well.
Ragnastrike Angels
I’m actually okay with anime that are based off games and clearly used to build hype for said games. Princess Connect Re:Dive, for example, did not make me want to play their gacha game because I have self control and lack a thirst for anime waifus, but I still really enjoyed that anime. Ragnastrike Angels is a different sort of beast.
Each episode is about 30 seconds long, which even for short-form series is too short. It made the entire thing seem like a series of ads for the game. The biggest ‘oof’ comes from the knowledge that the game shut down a year after the anime series, so it probably wasn’t a great game either.
The Reflection
Watching without prior knowledge, you will spend much of The Reflection viewing it through suspicion-squinted eyes because it takes so hard from Western super hero stuff. The stupid thing is that I don’t even know that much about Western super hero stuff, as I am not generally a fan, but I know enough to see that this is “similar-to-but-just-legally-different-enough-from” X-Men. It even has a Stan Lee cameo!
Why yes, Stan Lee did collaborate with The Reflection in hopes to create a superhero series that both Japan and the West would enjoy. Unfortunately, neither did.
The issue isn’t with the plot. It has a “superhero” plot, so you can guess what it is about, and it does it fine. To it’s credit, its Japanese X-Men were actually the highlight of the show. The huge problem with this show is the production. The still shots look good, but when they start moving they show an incredibly lack of effort on the studio’s part. Furthermore, The Reflection can be one of those series that shows what pacing is and why it is important. It switches from too fast to too slow in pacing in a way that is noticeable even to people that don’t normally notice bad pacing.
King’s Game
I wasn’t going to let this get personal, but King’s Game and the next entry merit it because they wounded me so deeply. The big issue with King’s Game is that they tried to wedge the events of three manga series, or three separate King’s Games, into one single cour anime series.
It is not that the lore in King’s Game is complex. It’s a killing game. It’s very straightforward. However, when you wedge in all these characters and all theirs deaths, you can’t spend the actual time fleshing them out into characters that someone will care about when they die. For killing games to work, you need to invest the audience in people. Even the main character, who you spend so much time with, feels like barely a person.
I have a very special fondness for killing games, and this manga series was one of my favorites. However, its anime adaptation was so bad it made me wonder if I just have really bad tastes. Which, I suppose, is also a possibility.
Berserk (2016)
Perhaps it is the causality of fate that makes any Berserk anime adaptation bad. Or more specifically, plagued by what appears to be budget issues. Like the 1997 version of Berserk, the 2016 version of Berserk, which continued the story, starts off strong. However, by the end it becomes increasingly apparent they blew their entire budget on the scenes that they used to put in the trailer.
The CGI is bad, but CGI in anime need not be bad these days. The problem is that they let it be bad. Some corners can be cut, but if you cut a corner too sharply, you’re walking into a wall. This time that wall was immeasurable fan rage and disappointment.
Do you believe you have found an anime series that is worse than these, or at least so equally bad that they deserve a spot? Are my tastes in anime indeed bad? Give us that rant in the comments section below.
