Top 20 Worst Anime Of The Century (So Far)

Small mercies that we never ended up meeting the remainder of these one thousand barebone caricatures, all of which happen to be humanised versions of famous firearms manufactured for all those otome lovers out there. Even if it’s based on a low-tier video game, there’s no excuse for a series to be this terrible in quality. Given the enormous range of characters, nobody gets any kind of development outside of the typical “bringing sexy back” stare. The gun fights are laughable, the animation is so poorly put together that character’s expressions start peeling off between frames, honestly the only thing noble about Brown Bess and his band is that they’re so forgettable.

It’s crap like this that gives the reverse harem genre a bad name, especially when the host of grimdark, vampiric love interests aren’t so much dominant in their approach to romance as they are…sadistic, abusive, creepy, and deserve to have wooden stakes shoved up their bat caves. After being sent to a gothic mansion, useless lead Yui is preyed upon by a set of bloodsucking brothers, all of whom aren’t keen on asking for permission before they go about touching her up and using her as a blood bank. It’s just unpleasant to watch. Seriously, how can anyone consider swooning over a guy who YEETs the girl he likes into a pool despite knowing she can’t swim?

Please let there never be a continuation of this schlock-fest, once was more than enough. After their plane crash lands on a random island, a group of students and teachers find themselves coming under threat of giant insects, and have to find a way to escape before they’re eaten…or worse. While it certainly holds back on some of the manga’s obscener elements involving cross-species nastiness, that doesn’t stop it from going full fanservice. Every female character feels like a busty trophy just waiting to be tossed into another icky situation, the gore is all shock with no substance, and quite frankly we’re just disturbed by the fact some people are clearly getting off on this kind of content!

Want an example of a legitimately good Gundam series aimed at a younger audience that everyone can still enjoy? Try Build Fighters or AGE, at least you can have fun with them! This on the other hand? This is the blight on Sunrise’s reputation that they likely wish they could undo. Small-scale, talking Mobile Suits with weird moe-girl eyes that duke it out in some truly terrible animated fight scenes, all the while some creepy kid follows around the lead mecha like an infatuated maiden. Seriously, Shute makes Chris Thorndyke look tame by comparison. It’s just a strange, pointless venture that probably still gives Tomino nightmares.

There are hentai out there that have more dignity than this series. Taking the worse elements from the harem sub-genre with a plot that could only come from a crappy JRPG dating sim, it’s not so much that the story revolves around the lead having to bed a dozen women in order to create offspring to defeat a great evil, it’s the almost clinical approach it takes towards such a ridiculous premise. This could only work if it were highly self-aware, was saturated in charm and pushed the comedy factor to eleven. Here? They don’t even get down and dirty, just lots of pillow talk before “poof” – deus ex childbirth.

You want to talk about whiplash? Take a gander at this adaptation. What’s it about? Who are the characters? Why is there a flying hippo? No idea, because the pacing in this series is all over the place. Everything goes by so damn quickly we have no idea what’s happening. Capturing monsters? Sealing spirits? Gods and humanity going to war? Try as we might, the breakneck speed and endless flurry of lore shoved in our faces is just too much to grasp. And that’s all in the first episode! No wonder fans started a petition to get it redone.

It’s tragic that for all the strides the magical girl genre has taken to overturn conventions, there are shows like this that are content to indulge in all manner of stereotypes and clichés, to the extent that it’s almost sickening. The premise may present itself as wondrous and inspired by fairy tales, yet forcing ourselves to watch this obnoxiously inept bookworm travel to a fantasy world because, “insert stupid reason here”, proved to be more trouble that it was worth. If the animation was actually magical then maybe it would have been easier to stomach, but the longer the series went on, the more the character models began to melt!

It started with Oreimo, descended with Eromanga Sensei, and finally came to a head with this – the ultimate degenerate expression of incestuous eroticism through the art of Japanimation. Basically, this series is the one that pushed the “how can I legally do my sister” sub-genre way too far. While it features all the convoluted and forced pervy moments you would expect, what really drags this series into the gutter is how it combines all this unpleasantness without any likable side characters, as well as some truly abysmal quality! It’s kind of staggering how bad things got after it aired.

Just goes to show that high school drama doesn’t automatically equate to anime gold, there actually has to be a driving force behind the plot, otherwise there’s a chance it might meander into nothingness, like this horrible misstep. The greatest sin this series makes is that it never progresses. Seriously, for all the obstacles that are put in front of the cast, including the occasional vision of the future, there’s no evolution in regard to character, plot or anything else! Because apparently all you need to make an artistic slice of life is to have girls with shimmering eyes look into the camera? Tell that to everyone who slogged their way through it!

Wow, 2018 was a horrendous year for anime! Anyway, what in the flying fisticuffs did you bastards do to our boy?! Okay, so technically this isn’t the Hokuto Shinken master we’ve come to know and love, this is a different iteration focusing on a new, hulking mass of muscle that can make people explode, also conveniently named Kenshiro. Still doesn’t takeaway from how atrocious it is. Whatever joy could possibly be garnered from seeing these crazy combatants go at it is destroyed when you the CGI comes into play. Character models are poorly rendered, the fight scenes have no impact, there are Fist of the North Star video game cutscenes that are more compelling! The opening theme slaps tho.

Maybe it’s our fault for thinking the spiritual successor to Future Diary was going to be anything but a frustrating watch, but when the result is so poor that we’d rather watch Yuno’s yandere face on loop than another episode of Big Failure over here, you know something’s gone wrong. When a wish to bring peace results in catastrophe, generic anime dude bro must find a way to protect his sick sister while utilising his newfound powers…and also getting bunny girls pregnant by accidentally grabbing their ears. This thing is all over the place, sloppy at the best of times to the point where your one wish would be to undo the memory of it!

Pretty sure the creative team behind this mistake were trying to destroy the anime industry back in the day, on account that they were responsible for unleashing both this…as well as two other infamous contenders that we’ll get to later. All you need to know about this is…well…the CGI speaks for itself. It’s a bunch of cardboard cut-outs posing as characters taking on a random alien threat with some really, really shoddy animation. One that is way too pleased with itself as far as that ending twist goes.

You heard right. The ultimate insult to stem from the isekai apocalypse. We detested every single moment we had to watch Shin Wolford and his merry band of Ultimate “Go Screw Yourselves” Magicians be paraded on screen. Sure, the intro was harmless enough, it even caught us off guard with its fun premise, but the longer it went on, the hollower it became. Devoid of interesting characters, devoid of likability, devoid of anything close to resembling a believable romance (and that’s by harem genre standards too), but most of all, it’s due to just how infuriating the lead was. If you want to make him Magic Jesus, at least let it be compelling!

When a series’ terrible quality forces a public apology from the creators, you know you’re dealing with a special kind of animated turd. While we can see some fans enjoying a couple of episodes while highly inebriated, it’s impossible to wade through all twenty-six episodes of this poorly rendered, dismal excuse of a show. The sound mixing alone is enough to disregard it as a failure, and yet the longer you watch the worse it gets. You can barely grasp the plot due to how awful some of these frames are, to the point where something like a duel-revolver wielding samurai can’t save it from its own flaws.

This is a clusterfuck that has to be seen to be believed, and even then we’re still not sure what exactly we watched. A fever dream of a series that thinks it’s the deepest thing since Evangelion, all based around the notion that by holding hands with a special someone, you can trigger an alternate dimension, battle other superpowered hand holders, and work your way up to meeting God. Yeah, it’s as stupid as it sounds, especially with any lack of self-awareness, dizzying camerawork, as well as a visual style that doesn’t so much seamlessly merge 2D and CGI together, as they do drown one with the other and call it art! How did this get a sequel?!

Quickfire anime shorts, while easy to make, are actually pretty tricky to nail down. You have to stuff as much of the plot in as possible and execute it within a couple of minutes or it’ll come out a failure. Or, in the case of this piece of shit; a travesty that somehow succeeds in insulting Sherlock Holmes, vampires, comedy, short-form anime, and our intelligence all at once. Who in their right mind thought that watching a jackass, terribly rendered version of the famous detective upsetting Watson over and over would be even moderately entertaining? Yeah, they call him Hudson in this, but who cares?

If you ever wanted to see what the result would be if a series amped up its fanservice to gross proportions, feast your eyes. If you can, chances are the humongous assets of the characters are likely blocking your view. Basic rundown – the beta male of all beta males ends up roped into living with a bunch of incredibly busty women and…that’s about it. The excessive phallic imagery, zero characterisation and absence of any kind of plot strips this show of any kind of charm, to the point where you’ll have a newfound appreciation for other ecchi shows. Can’t believe I have to keep reiterating this but – if you want to make a hentai, just make hentai!

There are many shades to horror, with plenty of examples out there of how to successfully make shock value and excessive gore work in service to the greater story. Pupa doesn’t achieve any of this. In fact, it fails on all levels, with only a flimsy legacy left to stand on, one that can be summarised as “cannibal incest fun times.” When two siblings are infected with a virus that turns one into a man-eating monster and the other into a regenerator…you can see where its going. It’s unpleasant. It’s fetishized. And at only a couple of minutes per episode, there’s nothing here to make us care nor build any kind of suspense!

Ooh, this is a bad one. Really, really bad. Though what else can you expect from one of the Unholy Trinity of Abhorrent Anime, brought to us courtesy of Idea Factory. No surprise all three have ended up on this list, with this fantasy adventure going out of its way to show us how not to create a prologue. A tie-in to a video game of the same title, this OVA provides three scenarios that are apparently meant to introduce us to the world, the lead characters, and how they set out on their quests, but in actuality, it’s more akin to the misshapen lovechild of Slayers and Monster Rancher…if it was given a budget in the minus numbers!

Apparently Skelter Heaven and Generation of Chaos wasn’t enough of a punishment, since Idea Factory later subjected anime fans to this monstrosity. It’s kind of amazing that in the space of a single episode, they can get so much wrong. The visuals are bland and have no impact, the soundtrack is obnoxious, there’s no character to speak of aside from a bunch of high-pitched voices with differing hair styles. Even the death scenes, which the anime wants us to feel so invested in, equate to nothing more than someone getting their head cropped off in MS Paint. As an alien invasion story, a thriller, and an anime in general – it’s all one big dumpster fire.