Top 10 Worst Anime of 2020

Maybe this one should do us all a favour and perform a disappearing act on itself, then we wouldn’t have to deal with such a boring and forgettable slog. As you can guess, this story about childhood friends reuniting and becoming magicians has zero magic to its name. Everything just falls flat, including its lead duo, whose comedic and romantic chemistry is non-existent, made all the worse by how much of a slow burn the whole thing is! Why couldn’t we have had more Magical Sempai instead?!

Yep, it’s another adaptation of an android game, and wouldn’t you know it, it too fell into the spike pit of mediocrity. Repeatedly. You honestly can’t get more generic than this. Two kingdoms at war, one light, one dark, a tragic hero promises to change his kingdom for the better, falls in love with someone on the opposing side, whose personality consists of differing shades of wallpaper. We’ve had our fair share of subpar Romeo and Juliet style anime this year, but this one is beneath them all!

It may not be offensive but it sure as hell isn’t doing anything to push itself beyond is tropes. Once again, we find ourselves with a substandard fantasy outing, one that isn’t only lacking any bite with its fight scenes but also has no subtlety when it comes to its characters or politics. Humans hate elves, elves hate humans, evil people working behind the scenes, lacklustre dude bro has to rise up to be the knight he knows he can be etc. Maybe if it had any charm or wit it could have taken these stale beats and made them enjoyable, but as it stands, this is one to skip.

We have a love-hate relationship with Netflix’s anime scene these days. On the one hand it continues to surprise us with some truly premium outings like Aggretsuko, Devilman Crybaby, Violet Evergarden and the Great Pretender. Then it gives us disappointments like this. There was so much hype going into this after what they accomplished with Castlevania. And the result? Laughable. The game has so much potential for giant conflicts with its monsters and its lore, and yet all you’re going to get from this is a fleeting memory of that one side quest, only with way worse animation.

What is it with trains and terrible anime?! Rail Wars was bad enough but now we have actual trains being turned into young girls? While we’ve seen this kind of thing done several times over, the fact each episode is three minutes, barely does anything to develop its large cast, and there’s the apparent potential for it to become a harem starring some random older guy…yeah, we’re putting this one on red alert. We’d say it’s a waste of time, but there’s so little content here that you’ll barely even register you’ve watched anything!

At long last, Power Rangers and Hardcore Erotica together…said no one ever. We all love a fanservice show every now and again, especially when it’s light-hearted enough to poke fun at itself. But this? This plays it so seriously that it’s borderline jarring, yet it still landed itself with crisp and vibrant visuals. It’s about a stoic lead using the lewdness of his mini-harem to defeat aliens who feed on erotic energy, while juggling a will-they, won’t-they romance - how the hell did it land such a high budget?!

This had the potential to be so much more. The components were all there. We even had a giant mecha paired with rock and roll; this should have been a slam dunk. And yet it turned out to be one of the most misguided misfires of the year. Maybe in the right hands, these placeholder characters spouting out random lyrics while getting bogged down in cliché after cliché could have worked. Alas, the dismal and depressing art-style paired with the lack of direction when it comes to its thinly failed “music is good” narrative keeps it from reaching any manner of height. Not so much Jimi Hendrix, more like Fred Durst.

Was this a dare? Because on every level, this thing fails. As an anime, there’s barely enough here to qualify as anything more than a collection of poorly rendered still shots that run at one frame per second. As a horror? You get more fright from just jumping out and yelling boo. As a collection of ninja? Don’t ask us, the bastards barely even show up outside of the trailer! This is essentially a bunch of four-minute, stand-alone spook stories that don’t scare, look horrendous, and make us question what exactly these studios consider quality these days!

Remember that OVA adapted from a story involving giant bugs killing and impregnating a bunch of unlikable human castaways? Yeah. It got a movie adaption. Over an hour of watching poorly crafted CGI insects fly around trying to have their way with a bunch of caricatures whose only purpose seems to be to either to aggravate us, flaunt what they’ve got, or serve as fodder. While thankfully lacking the more…disturbing elements from the source material, there’s still plenty here to hate. We can go another lifetime without having to watch busty girls be covered in larvae, thank you.

How did this happen? There was so much talent put into this project that it should have been monumental in scope, but now we have fans calling it the second coming of Mars of Destruction. Let that sink in. Every aspect of this series is atrocious, from the mismatched animation of its monsters, all the way to the terrible way it introduces and rapidly disposes of its cast. You have a samurai and a ninja who travelled into a future overrun by a plague that turns people into creatures, yet the result is obnoxiously boring and cringe-worthy from start to finish. No joke, this has the potential to be the worst of the decade!