12 Worst Isekai Anime of All Time (So Far)

Isekai anime has grown large enough to the point of it almost growing out of being a fantasy sub-genre into being a full-on anime genre of its own. And it continues to grow every season.

In this age where there is now no less than three new isekai anime premieres every new anime season, if not way more, I thought it might be fun to go through the bottom of the barrel worst isekai anime. Who knows, I may even get to add some of new premieres on here later as the anime industry continues to mine your desire to escape reality for quick cash.

Worst Isekai Anime

Is All Isekai Anime Bad?

There are some who would call the entire isekai genre pretty bad because it often feeds solely on offering wish fulfillment and escapism for its disillusioned audience, but nothing is ever wholly bad. There have been some great isekai anime made even after it grew so wildly popular and over-saturated with cash-grabs. Some of which might not have received anime adaptations if other isekai anime wasn’t so well received.

The entries below are solely my opinion because I watch almost every new anime of each season for this site in order to continue to make accurate anime recommendations. I have seen a ton of isekai at this point, and I generally enjoy at least portions of most things I watch.

That said, I believe that just as there is a lid for every pot, there is a fan for every anime. Sometimes even what people call “the worst” hits just right for you, and that’s great! So just because I point out flaws in these series, there are interesting elements in all of them. Even if the most interesting thing about it was the idea and not the execution.

In Another World With My Smartphone

It must sting the fans of anime like No Game No Life that they get crickets on a second season for years while In Another World With My Smartphone, the isekai equivalent of a sheet of cardboard, gets a season 2 on deck after years of seeming like yet another “light novel advertisement” series. Somebody is clearly playing the isekai anime production Game of Thrones right or In Another World With My Smartphone is more popular in Japan than we realize.

Anyway, In Another World With My Smartphone is, like many a light novel series, exactly what it reads on the package. He goes to another world and can Google things with his smartphone. As you would expect with a fantasy land, his quickly assembled harem is just gobsmacked with this ability.

Having the ability to get knowledge quickly is actually a rather interesting ability to have in a fantasy land, if not one that might risk you being burned as a heretic. However, they do none of the interesting potential things you could imagine, choosing instead to focus on his harem being precious and devoted while he puts the bare minimum into being a character himself.

Isekai Cheat Magicians

Isekai Cheat Magicians suffers much in the same way that In Another World With My Smartphone suffers, but with the distinct disadvantage of not even really having a creative hook.

If I were to perhaps issue a challenge to write the most generic, trope-riddled isekai anime ever, you would end up very close to Isekai Cheat Magicians.

It has two childhood friends with the standard male anime protagonist and his love interest personality traits transported to a standard medieval fantasy world with creatures, adventurer guilds, and magic. They then almost immediately learn they are super overpowered there compared to even veteran adventurers.

The boy gets a harem, and his childhood friend doesn’t seem to mind the romantic competition. They aim to discover why they were summoned there and get home. They go on adventures to that end and by the conclusion of the series, nothing of meaning really happens.

I mean, that is a good chunk of isekai anime there, and that’s what makes Isekai Cheat Magicians one the worst isekai anime. You can’t actually say one unique thing about it.

Conception

This particular isekai anime is based off a dating sim/dungeon crawler game, and having that knowledge makes the plot of the anime make a lot more sense.

You see, Conception is about a boy and his pregnant cousin that get sent to another world where he discovers that his children that he makes with specific women of destiny (one being his cousin, because of course) will combat impurity and save the world.

In the game, you dated the girls and carried out your little eugenic experiments to makes fighters to use in the dungeons. That’s less weird in a game, but much more insane in an anime plot.

The anime has a very big harem, and he makes kids with all the girls. Now, that’s a pretty good hentai plot, except for it lacks the crucial thing you need for a hentai plot – bare skin. There’s some ecchi, but making this a hentai would have actually been an improvement.

Instead, it has all the interest of a dating sim that you don’t actually get to play – so none of it. That’s what makes this one of the worst isekai anime, it just isn’t fun to watch.

The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar

Perhaps someday there will be an isekai anime where the protagonist has access to a smartphone that isn’t actually bad, but it’s not this day. Whereas In Another World With My Smartphone suffered from just being bland, The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar suffers more from just being eye-rolling, I suppose you’d say.

In isekai anime, you expect the barest minimum of set up. You want to see why the protagonist is overpowered in that world, you want to see how his harem is gathered, and you want to see him do some cool initial shit that gets more grandiose as time marches on.

The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar skips the set up. All of it.

Within minutes, it fast forwards to him all having his beautiful army harem of fantasy women who are extremely dedicated to him and he is winning clan battles without breaking a sweat. He wins them with overwhelming strength, but being able to search battle strategies on his smartphone is probably carrying the team here.

Now bland isekai anime is difficult to endure, but there are many who enjoy exactly that. What happens when you make a bland isekai anime that is also overwhelmed by terrible CGI animation? It turns off even those who revel in the basic tropes and becomes one of the worst isekai anime.

Sometimes you just want to watch cute girls be in awe of a protagonist that is so least common denominator that they could very well be you! That’s fine, but when the show actually isn’t even nice to look at sometimes, you kind of push away even the audience you were catering to.

The 8th Son? Are You Kidding Me?

Because there are so many and they are still so popular, isekai anime is moving into “Phase 2” where all new isekai anime needs to have a unique hook. Being sent to another world just isn’t enough anymore. There needs to be a twist.

The twist in The 8th Son? Are You Kidding Me is that he is that he is reincarnated into the youngest son of an already destitute noble family. That could have been a fine hook – fun, even – if the brothers were lovable or interesting. But you know what? Every single brother is gone by the second episode, to adventure off-screen and, in my headcanon, live in more interesting fantasy anime.

Instead, you discover he has an aptitude in magic when he was a young boy. He gets a mentor, and it time skips to when he is a young adult, already very powerful, and has already assembled his harem.

He then goes to school – which is a pretty quick trip to the bland for any isekai plot – where he thinks everyone just hates him, but of course they are just intimidated by his immense power.

It has some nice fan service from his one-dimensional harem, but there are much better isekai anime to watch for fan service.

High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even in Another World!

Oh, High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even in Another World, you were so close. So close to adequate okayness that you could have just reached out and touched it.

This series follows, as its very light novel title suggests, seven high school prodigies, each one very perfectly Mary Sue in one specified field, that are sent into another world via a plane crash.

The idea is they try to balance helping this medieval-level fantasy world thrive with their modern talents without ruining it like we’ve ruined bits of our world. What you get instead is archetype heroes using their talent to fight a never-ending array of generic rapist, torturer, zealot, corrupt-type villains that are all just evil for evil’s sake.

The worst part of this series isn’t that it revels in the bland. Even the bland in this series is at least somewhat interesting. The worst part is the magic.

Not the spellcasting type of magic, but what you could call “off-screen anime magic” where they get exactly what they need off-screen without any work put in.

The characters need a truck? It is built quickly off-screen with not even a nod to how they got materials or built the complex parts that all work together to make a truck function. It isn’t even a shitty truck like you might see in a similar invention-based scenario like Dr. Stone. It is a perfectly modern truck, built off-screen, by anime magic – not spellcasting magic.

Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World

Let me preface this by saying I appreciate what Harem in the Labyrinth in Another World is, but what it is isn’t a good isekai anime.

Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World is perhaps one of the more honest isekai anime series out there in that the main character gets sent to another world, grinds money by killing bandits that he doesn’t even acknowledge are living humans, and then buys a slave girl that he fucks every night.

Once he gets his slave, that’s how it goes. They have a little, very boring adventure, and the episode ends with him carrying out his urges all over her.

Its fine, probably even good for an ecchi anime, and I continue to be in awe of the boldness of what ecchi can get away broadcasting these days.

But all that said, as an isekai anime, Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World is one of the worst.

Even as a harem anime it is pretty sub-par since they start throwing in the other girls in the last two episodes just so it fits the title and they can have multi-partner bedroom shenanigans for a finale.

Sengoku Night Blood

Isekai appeals to a certain type of audience, and otome isekai narrows that audience down significantly to mostly female isekai fans.

However, Sengoku Night Blood fails fundamentally as both an isekai anime and an otome anime. It even kind of fails as a visual novel adaptation.

The series takes place in an alternative Sengoku era Japan where all the famous warlords are either vampires or werewolves, which is a pretty great starting recipe. It then kind of drops the ball by ignoring all the beautiful supernatural and historically-inspired boys.

The series chooses instead to explore the bland girl of destiny that was sent to that world and constantly talk about how important she is while she wanders pointlessly through the world, following literally anyone that asks her to with almost no question or concern.

This sets up those quintessential otome moments where a handsome boy sweeps in to save her, but the boys are barely explored, barely developed, and often just ignored for the main character. This would be okay if the main character wasn’t a self-insert character meant to be so bland any watcher could slide right into her skin like a glove.

Otome anime fans came here for the boys. You didn’t do anything interesting with the boys and you didn’t do anything with the isekai story. You leaned real hard into a plot that wasn’t anything special instead, and you floundered.

She Professed Herself Pupil of the Wise Man

She Professed Herself Pupil of the Wise Man suffers from technical issues on top of just being kind of boring and even sometimes plain old dumb.

For the technical issues, you will see them everywhere. First, you may be able to look past the ton of still shots that showcase a low budget. I mean, if the material is good, you can get past it like some people did with The Way of the House Husband.

You will next notice the awkward and poorly done CGI, another likely cost-cutting measure and one lacking polish.

Finally, there is the soundtrack. It is fine to reuse a soundtrack in an anime. However, you can’t do that when the soundtrack you are reusing doesn’t fit the tone of the scene. I don’t normally notice sound too much in an anime unless it is really good. This time I recognized it because it was so bad it dragged my attention to it.

As for the story, it is about a guy in a VRMMO that uses a cash item to see what his elderly wise sage of a character would look like as a loli. He gets stuck that way and finds a ton of time has also passed. People, recognizing his magic, force him to say he’s actually his character’s disciple instead of just saying its him like a normal person.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in She Professed Herself Pupil of the Wise Man is that it likes setting up grand plot lines that seem like they could be full blown arcs like shows such as Overlord, The Rising of the Shield Hero, or That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime have. It then promptly abandoned those grand set-ups just as quickly. If it had followed them diligently, this could have even risen up to the ranks of being fine.

Demon Lord Retry

Like High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even in Another World, Demon Lord Retry had okayness right in its grasp, but its hand fell just a bit short.

It starts with a reasonably fine hook about a developer working on an MMO game, then finding himself inside said game upon shutting it down in a very Overlord sort of way. However, this time, he is the Demon Lord NPC in the game and he finds a small girl NPC that he doesn’t actually remember developing for the game.

That right there is a solid foundation for a mystery to be solved, but the show doesn’t do that. That’s the problem. It doesn’t do anything.

The main character wanders with his mysterious small loli. Usually he happens upon someone with a very small problem which he quickly solves, earns their admiration, and then possibly leaves with a new loli harem member. There are no grand adventure arcs, no large intrigues, and even the small intrigue it sets up initially isn’t explored.

This is, as is occasionally a problem in many a recent anime, a light novel advertisement. As in, they explain little of the world, cover the bare minimum of the characters, and invite you to buy the light novel to get the meat that goes with your side of potatoes.

Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody

Like other series, even some on this very list, Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody starts with a game developer who presumably dies and ends up inside the game he was working on. Explained solely by “he’s a developer, lul,” he immediately has access to high-level spells and maintains that level of wildly overpowered throughout.

What does he do with this magnificent power?

Well, mostly he travels around freeing slaves and adding them to his totally not just re-enslaved to him harem. They love him and his power, and as he is as nice as most men imagine themselves, he never hits on them or makes them feel uncomfortable. The lewdest this series gets is head pats, which is probably for the best as it didn’t put a lot of effort into making its characters look visually appealing.

That’s about it. He travels with his harem in a wagon, and occasionally adds to that harem. Moments of action don’t last long and moments of fan service are rare. If you lack those two things that garner a fan base for generic isekai anime, what is left to like?

The Fruit of Evolution: Before I Knew It, My Life Had It Made

This one is bland, but I had brief hope for it in the beginning. It had a female gorilla with cute anime girl eyes be in love with him, and I could have watched a whole anime about only that.

The set up is that he was a chubby unpopular boy who, when his whole school was told to group up by God to go to another world, was outcasted. As such, he was transported far away from the group where he at a fruit of plot device evolution. This turned him from chubby zero to the literal pinnacle of humanity – a generic OP isekai protagonist.

The aforementioned gorilla with anime girl eyes would fall in love with his combat skill and later evolve to into a boring old harem starter. The rest of the series was really just him trying to find his classmates and instead finding quirky harem members instead.

The thing is, when The Fruit of Evolution is letting itself be a silly comedy isekai, it is actually pretty good. The comedy isn’t anything unique, but it is effective. The issue is that it often stops being a comedy isekai anime and tries to be just another action isekai anime with an eye-rolling “we can just share him” type of harem, and that’s where it becomes incredibly banal.

These are, as I said, just my opinions. What’s your pick for worst isekai ever? Let everyone know in the comments section below.