Most Disappointing Anime of 2018

Obviously keep in mind this year I was especially avoidant of anything I disliked right away because of everything else going on. So, while things like Goblin Slayer and Franxxx won’t be here because they were just complete shit, this will be a list – as the title says – of the shows that disappointed me most this year rather than specifically the worst. No order, no number limit, just whatever I can recall enough to really say it genuinely disappointed me.

Oh, and here’s a bonus worst;

Worst Girl

Christa / Historia

Possibly one of the least consistent characters in the last several years of anime, Christa is easily the worst girl – as she is clearly aware – who ever lived, at least in 2018. It isn’t so much that she’s always bad, its that she is never the same person from scene to scene, or even WITHIN THE SAME ONE. The horrible inconsistency in how she is written makes her seem like someone with a serious personality disorder like D.I.D. because at any given time she goes from her Christa sweet angel personality to her Historia cunty personality to something inbetween and back to either one of those all within the span of a few minutes at times and without ANY explanation of why Historia is a cunt, Christa isn’t a cunt, and then somehow half the time as Historia she’s not a cunt. I make it sound like she literally has multiple personalities, but in the canon she doesn’t – it’s just a name she hid. It’s ridiculous and she is shit, and its the worst because she is kind of the most important character in the entire franchise now when it comes to the story and yet she’s the most poorly written and inconsistent thing in the entire show.

Also, she’s still just female Armin and Armin does a good enough job on his own being female Armin.

Anyway,

Mr. Tonegawa: Middle Management Blues

I was excited for more Kaiji-related stuff and a comedy about Tonegawa seemed prime for some great fun…but something about it just felt very boring. I only watched like the first two episodes but it just felt like a waste of time. I do intend on going back to it some day, but it seemed that it completely misunderstood how to parody Kaiji. It had a horrible narrator who not only had an awful voice for it but also did bad at delivering the lines like Gendo/MADAO was able to so perfectly in Kaiji which killed 90% of the humor (which was all HAHA GET IT ITS LIKE THE REAL SHOW BUT FUNNY THING INSTEAD), the writing felt lifeless, jokes went on for way too long – especially ones that started out unfunny in the first place, and it just missed the point of what it should have been. Maybe that changes later, like I said I didn’t outright hate it and a few things were funny, it just felt so goddamn boring and like it kept trying to parody things Kaiji was known for but by someone who only had Kaiji explained to them and never saw it themselves.

Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card

Hold on, I can explain! I love Cardcaptor Sakura and always have, it’s a really special series in so many ways and is also absolutely one of the most important shows in its genre, maybe the medium as a whole, and still stands out as the essential Mahou Shoujo and one that hides a lot of maturity and meaningful social commentary. Clear Card was pretty great too, but then it ends without actually ending. The story starts ramping up to the conclusion and then it just randomly stops entirely. They don’t hint at what happens, they don’t leave you with some “you figure it out for yourself”, its literally a full season BUILDING UP TO THIS THING and then it ends without even bothering with the thing at all. It’s hard to really explain what I mean because it’s not like some normal cliffhanger for a movie or new season (neither of which has been announced still by the way), it was just a random middle-of-the-story moment that it ends at. Honestly it might be the most disappointing thing of the year for that alone.

Golden Kamuy

Oh hey, a show about a badass dude and parts of Japan and its history that almost NEVER EVER HAVE COME UP AT ALL in the ENTIRE history of the medium. Most notably the Russo-Japanese war which I can’t recall a single time being mentioned in anime or manga, and less obscure but still rare, the Ainu people. The story sounded cool too, hunting for this gold, unraveling this conspiracy and mystery, and trying to survive against the crazy fucks who are after the same thing.

They decided to make it a comedy though and also fill it with a bunch of dumb food shit. The comedy was not funny. The comedy did not fit anything going on or the mood. The food shit was also comedy along with all the fucking terrible “haha its funny because it looks disgusting” facial expressions during the fucking terrible food comedy.

More importantly when I say comedy I mean – very literally – the same poop joke 800 times about how the dumb little bitch thinks miso is poop because its brown and poop is brown so you’re eating poop gross poopy poop eater HAHA! EPIC!

The show, the manga rather, is a perfect example of how – while demographic labels like shounen and seinen are not genres – a series being put into sale in the wrong demo leads to editors demanding a lot of bullshit that doesn’t belong to cater to that demo. This should never have been printed in a shounen manga, but it was and so along came the nonstop poop jokes, pointless 15 minute scenes about food, and other ‘hilarious’ content in what could have been a really cool show.

A Place Further than the Universe

I had extremely high hopes for this one and it started off fantastically. I’m a big fan of these outdoor-adventures shows with groups of cute girls (especially Encouragement of Climb which kind of set the sub-genre in motion) and this was one of the only ones that wasn’t a simple slice of life style story, but a huge actual adventure – a journey to, and within, Antarctica. It had a very unique feeling to it, sort of a mix of this most-main girl trying to find herself by doing something extraordinary and this other girl bringing this Totori-esque mood to things in chase of her long lost mother.

Things fall apart right when you realize this isn’t what it promised to be, and is in fact just a pointless nothing slice-of-life where nothing happens at all. It isn’t even in the sub-genre of outdoor adventure girls like Encouragement or Yuru Camp, it is just a high school girls SOL for almost the whole thing and not even better than average at being that. Once you get past the halfway point and notice they are still just going to school and rarely doing anything remotely related to this journey, you start to realize that the place ‘further than the universe’ is also further than what this show will bother with.

In the end, literally IN THE END ONLY, they finally do actually go and it lasts about 3 episodes total including the trip itself to get there. On top of that, when they do get there – as well as on the journey – any sense of realism or believability is thrown out the window by a bunch of broken insanely inaccurate physics and situations that simply couldn’t take place or would end up with 100% death rate at times but instead are shown as a fun little bump in the road. This was meant to be some sort of realistic-ish Space Brothers (though at least here they had any time spent in the promised place, while Space Bros never once has bros in space) style adventure with the training, preparation, and finally the journey itself set in the antarctic with this group of girls going with an expedition team…and instead it just turned out a generic high school club show where they did almost nothing at all and the whole expedition thing was basically irrelevant. It was a complete fucking waste of time and the sense of adventure died within the first 3 episodes.

Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory

This was probably the actual biggest disappointment for me alongside Clear Card as FMP is something I consider close to being a classic, especailly TSR (and even more especially the LN version before KyoAni turned a super-assassin guy into twin lesbian sisters who made out every scene they were in which mostly took place in a shower together). When I heard of a new season coming I was extremely excited especially because the first part of this was going to cover a big chunk that I knew nothing about where I stopped reading the light novels due to what came later (which shows up about halfway into the show) with a retarded forced in new love interest way-way-way too late to have something like that and other dumb bullshit.

It started off fucking cool too and features one of the best handled situations for totally forcing a story and its characters forward after this long of a story. It has so many characters die, so many places, groups, bases (including Mithril’s island HQ, be destroyed, and even the civilian school friends end up being nearly killed – especially the nerd friend girl who they magically save but has a giant thing stuck through her gut for awhile). On top of that, the truth of Sosuke finally gets revealed to everyone that didn’t already know he was a soldier. It forced EVERYTHING to be pushed forward right away and did it in this really intense fashion making a clear “things are moving ever onward regardless of how anyone feels about it”.

But then it turns into this story arc which begins with a full episode that doesn’t have a single cast member in it at all and is dedicated to introducing non-characters who end up the main cast for whats left of the show before being killed off anyway. They’re shitty characters, they have way too much focus, and even once Sosuke is re-introduced into the show he’s wasted on a real fucking lame fighting arena arc as if this is some sort of battle shounen.

I still very highly recommend FMP, Fumoffu after FMP (it can be lame if you don’t know the characters and such already), and FMP TSR – especially because TSR gives full closure to the entire story up to that point in full which luckily means IV can be ignored.

Koi wa Ameagari no You ni

I reviewed this already so my feelings are pretty clear. Fantastic show and then it ends with the entire last whole chunk of the series forgetting what the entire show was about and becoming some feel good story about “follow your dreams” when it was a fucking ROMANCE STORY and then you get this dumb bitch running in the sky because it’s meaningful or some shit.

Skilled Teaser Tagaki

This suffered from “every single episode is the same fucking thing” syndrome and it got tiring to bother watching the same joke again and again. I was hoping for something more along the lines of Tonari no Seki-kun where, sure, the ‘joke’ is the same in that Seki is being insane or doing some crazy shit somehow but it was full of variety and fun with a huge amount of creativity in how it was being done. Tagaki is just hey I looked you in the eyes isn’t that hot did i turn you on haha, hey i rubbed against you is your dick hard lol, hey im talking in a low slow voice is your peepee squirting ROFL!!!!

Hanebado

It just got really boring and EXTREMELY EDGY OUT OF NOWHERE like halfway in. Instead of being a sports anime about who SHOULD have been the lead but is instead sort of a supporting character who is a juicy actually fit without being gross and masculine girl with big tits and thighs its some shit about this other generic girl with dead raped-eyes whose mom cucked her and got a better blonder less Japanese daughter to replace her with after abandoning her as a fucking toddler because she lost a badminton game when she got a cold. Yes, that’s all true canon. You’d think the story would be her coming back from that and learning to love the sport through her teammates and playing for fun again, or at least be about her beating that girl…instead its just about her becoming some sort of crazy bitch who wants to make everyone hate badminton and its really stupid and uninteresting.

It literally just ends up being a show about a main character who progressively becomes a bigger more unlikable cunt to everyone around her every episode without her ever going the other direction at any point and without any REAL REASON for it at all which could have made it at least fairly unique.

And I’m kind of out of time for these posts, so that’s the end of that. I feel like that covered most of what it needed to anyway.