TOP 10 MOST DISAPPOINTING AND WORST ANIME OF 2017

Usually I go with five, but this year even while having a massive amount of great shows the industry pumped out some REAL turds and a lot of shows that otherwise lead me down a path of quality that ended up immediately leaping off a cliff especially early in the year. So this time we’re gonna DOUBLE THE SIZE OF THAT SALT SHAKER, that’s right, we’re going for TWO SCOOPS worth of disappointing and shitty anime.

Ballroom e Youkoso

This is a rarity in that the reason this is so disappointing isn’t the quality of the show – at least I don’t think so, it actually seems like it could be great and that’s exactly why it’s such a big disappointment for me. I couldn’t stomach watching it – no exaggeration, no jokes, I seriously could not take the art it made me genuinely sick and very uncomfortable to look at. It’s not ugly, it’s a terrifying uncanny valley situation where everything looks totally fine except everyone has broken elongated necks. It doesn’t just look stupid or silly, it comes off as terrifying and it bothered me in too real and deep of a way to be able to ignore and watch the show anyway. For that reason alone it’s a disappointment – maybe not the show itself, but my experience with it and the fact I had to miss out on something probably pretty good that I was looking forward to.

I’ve seen some pages of the manga to check and it’s just as bad there – though honestly it’s much worse in motion, but I just really wish they had fixed this for the anime instead of stuck so true to the original. It’s fucking terrible and far beyond just some shitty meme posting about “dat neck”, it’s truly unsettling and shouldn’t have been done in the anime – just because the original creator has absolutely no grasp on how human beings look or move doesn’t mean it needs to be repeated in the adaptation. And really, it isn’t only the length that’s so bad, it’s when they constantly fucking have the neck twisted in ways that go beyond just breaking it but even having some kind of fucking joint inside it. It only becomes worse when it shows the vapid but huge smile on everyone’s face as they do these alien broken movements.

It’s fucking disgusting.

Keppeki Danshi! Aoyama-kun

Aoyama-kun started out really well, the first episode was hilarious and at the same time had some really cool moments and a great insert song. It even had Dio showing off his abs. Then it just falls apart thanks probably entirely due to directing; every single joke goes on way too long – I’m not talking 30 seconds too long, I’m talking 8 to 24 minutes too long when it should be a joke that ends in about 25 seconds to 3 minutes. Beyond that they just start repeating the same jokes (and continue making them too long). It ran out of content within 2 episodes, becoming a total one-trick pony with the same joke over and over, and is the perfect example of why there are so many short-length-episode shows out now…it’s just too bad Aoyama’s staff decided to go with 24 minutes instead.

Zestiria the X Season 2

I REALLY liked the first season of Zestiria the X – it took what was a pretty good game with loads of faults and issues and made right on everything it should have originally. The plot made more sense, the cast was much more fleshed out, Rose was still the main heroine as she is in the game but they also made a bigger focus on Alisha who was also an important supporting cast member, and they even worked in Berseria bits and pieces since the game was coming out soon and it’s directly related to this one. It was really damn cool, done very well, and instead of just an adaptation it was almost a full re-thinking that really paid off.

However, season 2 undoes a lot of that and even goes as far as ruining almost everything. Most notably and the easiest example would be how they thoroughly misunderstood and ruined Rose’s character by turning her into the OPPOSITE of what she was in the game (where she’s actually a very unique character for JRPGs) all because Sorey was also ruined. In the game and anime both, Rose is a professional assassin – not some Robin Hood type, she outright fucking murders people for money as long as she believes it’s the right thing to do and gets paid enough to do it. She’s a mercenary who leads the most notorious group of them in all the land and who has personally killed numerous targets and guards in her time. In the GAME Sorey learns this about her and while he talks to her about it a few times, he understands it’s not his place to stop her way of life and instead of trying to stop her he tries to learn more about her and why she does what she does/how she does it while not being taken by malevolence. In the ANIME he screams at her about how wrong it is and she cries and says she’s sorry and won’t do it again. Not only do they turn Sorey into a generic protagonist, they turn Rose into a typical weak-willed faggot generic party member who learns morals from the lead character and cries herself into being a good girl.

This is one example, but the point is the second season not only destroys the characters, it makes them into the most shitty generic people possible while also completely clashing with who they are in the game and even WHO THEY WERE IN SEASON 1. It starts having to make a lot of shit up as well, ultimately making a mess of the story.

Fukumenkei Noise

I reviewed this already. Starts off really great and lasts until halfway through when it becomes a fat pile of shit. It clearly has some inspiration from NANA and yet it goes the direction of being one of the most hollow childish things possible instead and even tops it off with a non-ending.

Inuyashiki

I was looking forward to this – it seemed like it was about an old man and a teen teaming up after getting powers and fighting bad dudes, instead they were fighting each other which I was a little disappointed by but was still okay with. Except you quickly realize this was created by the Gantz creator and then right around that same time the show starts being the most edgy thing that’s ever been made accompanied by horrible directing leading to 24 minute long torture-porn episodes and really dumb shit like 30 awful CG planes crashing into things. There’s nothing positive to say and in fact it may be one of the worst things in the entire medium to-date – at least you can say the creator is consistent.

Mahoutsukai no Yome (Ancient Magus Bride)

Kino no Tabi : Retard Edition

I wrote up a post about the first episode and everything I said there never changed. This is such a sad thing too because Kino no Tabi’s original anime adaptation is a true fucking classic and it’s unmatched in the area of atmosphere. This one though has LITERALLY no atmosphere, no subtlety, looks like Love Live, and has the most Sesame Street morality tales for each episode’s story. What a fucking waste.

Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu: Sukeroku Futatabi-hen

The first season of Rakugo I absolutely fucking loved and it’s really something special and I seriously recommend it. It was wonderfully directed, told a beautifully bittersweet tale of two men with great love for one another (not gay YOI! love, but deep familial level bonds) and the disaster that made one of them fill with guilt over killing the most important person in teh world to him, had a great lovable cast, and even spent the time to show the viewer full Rakugo shows to get across such an important aspect of the story. It was so unique and was presented so wonderfully.

Season 2 is pretty much the exact opposite. I’m repeating myself from an older post about the season, but this lacks basically everything I loved from the original show and it’s also just a lazy rehash of plot ideas but thrown onto a different main character and with a lot of lazy cut corners (example: there are no legitimate Rakugo sequences), massive timeskips randomly every episode skipping out on very major important situations in the characters lives like the MARRIAGE OF THE TWO LEADS, Zura trying to kill their child, and a massive amount of genuinely forced drama that never ends (though each forced drama sequence ends about 30 seconds later!) and is never remotely believable or interesting at all.

Re:Creators

 

Great concept that could’ve been really fun and cool instead turned into the dumbest most convoluted, contrived, and just plain retarded shit possible as well as a harem. When will people stop wasting my boy Sawano on projects like this?

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Made in Abyss

This is another one I really can’t just “sum up” (luckily I reviewed it already) easily but at the same time I sort of can – it’s retarded edgy garbage for 13 year olds. I’m fine with “for 13 year olds”, nothing wrong with anime aimed at younger demographics many of them are fantastic, but the retarded and edgy parts are really what kills this show.

The biggest reason it’s here at the top spot is because it was seriously special at the start and deserved so much to be a modern classic, but they took all that potential and made it into the absolute biggest shitshow they could manage. Once Ozen shows up – not only because of her but from then on as well – the entire show does a nosedive into fucking stupidity, magical bullshit, le evil edgelord scientist villains, and massive plotholes that – no – the manga nor the next season will ever explain. Like almost everything about the Ozen arc of episodes and the hilariously contrived sequence of events that had to take place for this meat hunk to make it into this random storage room through multiple locked impossible-to-break-through places, an elevator that only works if someone inside the building moves it manually, and somehow knowing the little girl would need to wee and go the wrong way at the right time.

Nanachi and her fucking living-turd of a friend put the final nail in the coffin with incredible ease and with absolutely no hesitation along with easily the two most awful things about the show.

The fake death which is nonsensically written away and is only included for promotional material and viral marketing – and it worked, images of the lead girl bleeding out of her eyes and screaming in pain spread everywhere even outside of the anime community (it was even posted on fucking /pol/ regularly of all places) in an attempt to say OH MY GOD MAN YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS SHOW ITS FUCKING EPIC to try and get Berserk fans to watch because someone is bleeding so it must be mature. It served absolutely no story purpose, she took no lasting damage somehow from it when the show itself verifies multiple lifelong issues that should now be stuck with her (including not having a life!) and it was seriously thrown in for nothing beyond said marketing. And then the second worst thing – Mr. Eggmani-sorry, Mr. Edgemaniac – comes into play at the same time. I’m not explaining well because I just don’t fucking want to, I put in the effort to write a review explaining it all, responding to huge comments with huge replies, and I’m so fucking done with this show that I don’t even want to fucking talk about it anymore. It’s massively disappointing and went to such great lengths to take it’s potential and destroy it in the most embarrassing ways that it’s upsetting.

Season 2 is coming, I won’t be watching it. I wasn’t sure at first if I would continue giving it a chance or not but after all this time and thinking about it again – fuck no.

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Here’s a bonus because I couldn’t end this year without mentioning the most genuinely “what the fuck” experience I’ve had regarding anime maybe ever – I’m talking even more than Divine Gate (though I enjoyed that, the level of FUCKING WHAT was record-setting). Even more surprisingly the most confused I’ve ever been about something that exists on the internet and is actually consumed by a lot of people. I’ve got a long history with the net and the dirtiest shitholes of it, I’ve seen most things ranging from really fucked up gore to insane demon-trannies giving book readings at libraries about how it’s okay to be gay, like plenty of you probably have as well, but I’ve never seen something like this.

These are presumably accounts that go around taking other people’s already just “why does this exist” garbage “anime reaction” videos…and puts them all into the same one video. I’ve seen upwards of 12 going at the same time and they aren’t even in the same language half the time, nor are any of them actually talking to one another. It’s insane, and many of these have in the tens of thousands of views to HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS. You’d think all fake, but no, the comments are full of people really discussing the episode they just…”watched”. I just wanted to find an upload of the BBB&B OP and I learned of such a terrible thing. It’s even worse in video form than images can get across, just a cacophony of 4 languages and 20 people all talking at the same time while anime is playing in the background also all at the same time from every single video at once all slightly out of sync.

It is FUCKING MINDBLOWING and the best and worst part about it is that you KNOW retards are out there claiming they “watched” shows when they “saw” it like this. Maybe it’s just me, maybe I just need to watch more Rick and Morty to be intelligent enough to understand it.