Normally I'd have honorable mentions, but honestly even the bad anime of the year just wasn't that bad overall. It's not really until my number six that things start to feel like shows that belong on a worst of the year list. It's possible I just missed a lot of bad shows, I am just one man balancing an IRL job with keeping up on games and anime, but overall this has been a fantastic year.
To be fair though, this past year was the first I regularly watched anime again since around... 2007 I think? So between then and this year I've only been keeping up with a handful of shows.
Just a reminder, these are not objective judgments for my Top Ten lists, just my personal favorites with all bias intact. On to the list!
10) Rising of the Shield Hero
A degree of my distaste for this show comes from me just not liking Isekei anime. It was after I reviewed this I realized I should just step back from reviewing them at all, as at their core they just don't appeal to me. That said, I do think there are legit problems with the show. The biggest being that while the idea of the world turning against the Shield Hero and making him kind of an asshole, outside of the first couple episodes it just doesn't feel like anyone is really against him outside of the King and his daughter, both of who quickly become comically inconsequential. I dropped the show around the time the Sword Hero started looking into the religion stuff, but at that point, I had just stopped caring entirely.
9) Namu Amida Butsu!: Rendai Utena
As it turns out, shows whose focus is entirely on a certain type of Fanservice is boring regardless of who it's directed at! I don't have much to say here, it's an anime about pretty anime boys doing pretty anime boy things and nothing of substance beyond that.
8) Chou Kadou Girl 1/6
See my description of the previous show, only it's anime girls. Also, writing is a lot dumber. Fan Service Shows are boring to talk about.
7) One Punch Man Season 2
If this wasn't the followup to One Punch Man Season One I probably wouldn't have included it on this list, cause it's largely just a boring show. But the fact it does follow up One Punch Man, one of the shows that got me back into anime, I felt a certain sting with the sheer drop in quality here.
There are still some good fights here and there, but nothing felt like it mattered come seasons end, it was just kind of a series of things happening without the comedic impact season one had.
6) Granbelm
Granbelm is proof that no matter how good your graphics are, art design trumps it. The graphics and detail in this show is incredible, but the giant mechs that are summoned look goofy as fuck, making these fights hard to take seriously.
Not to mention how baffling some character motivations and turns are, with some terrible writing. At no point does anything interesting happen in the first six episodes, making it probably the most boring anime of the year I saw.
5) Fairy Gone
We are at this odd moment where I have to say a show that has both good graphics and animation is kind of ugly to look at. The Fairys they fight with are all CG, but the rest of the show is not. When it's just the Fairys or just the people, the show looks great. But when you see them both, which is often, it doesn't look like the fairies belong there. Not in a way that they seem other-worldly, but in a way that looks like to different anime were shoved together with no attempt to blend the styles.
To top it off you have two characters you follow through the show. One is a former soldier who is supposed to have issues due to not knowing a life of war, yet we see him have no issues getting into modern society, and a character who is supposed to be eternally unlucky, yet seems to have no bad luck. Pair that with some excessively stupid decisions by several characters to make certain events happen, the narrative feels forced.
It's a great premise, but the execution is utterly botched.
4) Egao No Daika
There are two stunning problems with this show. The first is it's insistent on you caring about the tragedies without giving you any investment in the people who die, or any real look at the world they live in. They just do stuff and say 'CARE!' a lot. Also, I am going to quote my original review, because I think there is no better way to explain the problem with this show.
“This is all on top of the elephant in the room, and that is that the new ruler of the Kingdom is a twelve-year-old girl. It wasn't until the end of episode six where they ship her off to a refugee camp so she can't interfere with the war efforts anymore where this kingdom finally stopped looking like complete morons for listening to the orders of a twelve-year-old sheltered girl for what they should be doing during a war. “
In short, everyone in this show is a moron.
3) To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts
A show that looks great, but operates under the premise that everyone is stupid. To effectively fight the Sacred Beast, the government developed the 'God Killer Bullet'. They do arm the main character with some as he is one of the Sacred Beasts, and is best equipped for fighting others, but they don't arm the specialized unit that fights them with these bullets, meaning they are all but useless. They do, however, give the bullets to a country girl they know nothing about. Knowing the full story doesn't make this better.
It also seems to rush through each confrontation with other sacred beasts way to fast, so you can never really enjoy the stories they are trying to tell. The show has all the ingredients for a great anime, but it just never manages to make anything stick.
2) Boogiepop Wa Warawanai
Other shows on this list I would double-check my reviews to make sure I was remembering things properly, but for this one there was no need to do that. There is one reason this show ranks so high, and that is the show's insistence on trying to wax poetic constantly, with almost every line of dialogue. The show just never knows when to stop hammering its poor attempts at sounding deep over the viewer's head.
I swear this show is worse about this than any David Cage game.
1) Gunjou no Magmel
Another show with a great premise, a new land rises from the ocean inspiring a new age of discovery in the world. So in this new mystical land of wonder and mystery, among the first wonders of the new world, we get to see are the bucktoothed horse you see above. I didn't even realize it had six legs at first because those teeth were so stupid and distracting. And that is pretty much everything else in this show, it's a show about wonder with no wonder.
Also, every character in this show comes across as entirely unlikable. Almost without exception, every character in the first six episodes is just an asshole for one reason or another. So I couldn't even root for anyone. Really this show offers nothing interesting, does nothing well, and fails horribly at living up to it's premise. I was shocked something worse then Boogiepop came out this year, but here we are.
Stay tuned, cause within the next week I should have my top ten best anime of the year posted, though that one gets a few honorable mentions.
