Just like games, I didn’t watch much this year, so this is a little challenging to write just due to a lack of things to talk about but I’m going to try anyway.
Biggest Disappointment From Lockdowns
Appare-Ranman
This one I mean as “I was really looking forward to seeing more of this after the first episode or so but then it got basically cancelled for half the fucking year and so I never got to see more of it”. While it wasn’t amazing, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the first episode of this which is the only episode I ever saw. It brought me back to the 00 era of anime in a really good way, most notably reminding me a lot of something like Michiko and Hatchin, so losing out on that immediately kind of sucked. I forgot about it until looking back on the anime I watched this year, but even so at the time I was definitely interested in seeing where it was gonna take us and then it took us nowhere.
Runner-up: Gal & Dinosaur
Longest Delay In Anime History
Railgun T
I’m not gonna claim to have verified this fully, but to my knowledge and with some light research, nothing has had as much combined delay time after already starting. Some shows didn’t start for months or even years from when they were expected, but as far as something that started already and THEN started having delays and combining the overall length of all those delays nor even just “amount of times delayed” given this would get delays on top of it’s own delays, I can’t think of anything even close to this – especially not anything that is under like 100 episodes. Railgun T started in very early January and did not end until the very final days of September, basically October. It took a 25 episode show a long enough extra time you could fit an entirely different show just into the gaps and have it completed.
Making it even worse though was the way it was delayed; instead of being a “this will be a few months until we continue” it was just random and sporadic. The first delay was Ep.7 which was delayed by a week, airing 2 weeks after 6, and then the very next episode – episode 8 – was not aired for another month after that. But then 9-12 aired regularly week-to-week. Then another week long delay, putting episode 13 fourteen days after 12. Followed immediately by another fourteen day wait for episode 14, but then 15 came out regularly a week later. Then the big one – NINE FULL WEEKS, over 2 fucking months, before episode 16 which was the final delay.
So not only was the show delayed time-wise overall for essentially 3 and a half months – but it was delayed in the most incoherent shit manner possible with randomly placed missing episodes instead of just a “we are going to delay this until x months from now” like EVERY SINGLE OTHER THING FUCKING DID. This shit had to set some kind of record, the closest thing I can think of was the final episode of Blood Blockade Battlefront season 1 which was 2 or 3 months, but that was all in a row and still not as long.
Worst Art
I really hate to do this to my girl, but it’s not her fault Railgun T was something I despised so much. This was a hard choice between Railgun T due to thieving their own art by blatantly reusing assets and footage from S and just bad quality pretty regularly thrown in and the complete fuck-up of Tamayomi episode 4 which was not meant to be seen in the first place and was the still-in-production version of the episode which only Funimation ever presented as the real episode because Funimation is a garbage company in every possible way.
I couldn’t pick a literal mistake on the part of a western distributor – rather than the show actually looking that terrible – as the worst art of 2020 because the art in that version of the episode was just placeholder bullshit that was never meant to be shown to any viewer anywhere and Funimation fucked up or someone sent them the incomplete file due to them being in a production crunch or something. As far as I know a full VERIFIED explanation hasn’t been given, either way, this was NOT the actual episode…so I couldn’t really justify treating it as the worst art when ONLY Funimation showed that as the episode but the TV version the same week in Japan was totally normal. That’s not to say Tamayomi had good art ever though, the entire appeal was that all the promo art had these really detailed toned thighs and all the shininess you could want…and then it was a very bland generic lower-budget art style in the actual show, but nothing out of the ordinary, just on the lower end of what is regular.
On the other hand, nothing can justify Railgun T’s complete laziness and corner-cutting by reusing scenes, assets, etc from Railgun S. Sure, plenty of shows looked worse this year, but this looked mediocre most of the time, bad a lot of the time, but most importantly was not even original art because it was a bunch of rehashed bullshit from an old season making up almost all 4 of the first episodes. It’s ridiculous and unforgivable.
Biggest Disappointment
Railgun T
Sadly, the delays and the rehashed art weren’t the only problems with Railgun T. They WERE pretty fucking bad, but to pretend this shit show was ruined by the delays would be dishonest. Railgun T is just a bad anime, and it feels really bad to have to say that. I’ve talked about this already in somewhat of a slapdash “mini” review thrown into my “look back at spring 2020” post as well as an even earlier post looking back at the WINTER 2020 anime and even in the last 2 mentions in this post, so I’ll be shorter here. The series fails on pretty much every level; they rehashed assets from Railgun S – even some identical scenes that they just re-used entirely in that regard just with clothes and dialogue swapped out, this was especially true in the first 4 episodes. The quality of the art was pretty bad throughout. The story is absolute trash and also undermines the entire POINT of the series which is the chemistry and bonds between the 4 lead girls by just having the memories of all but Mikoto basically erased for the entire season, even that aside it was just uninteresting and dumb. Worse still, Mikoto basically isn’t a character in T – it’s just Shokuhou time and literal-who time the entire fucking time. I just hated everything about it and it was clearly not produced by the A-team…nor the B-team…maybe at best some sort of C-team of Koreans who couldn’t get on the B-team. Then to finally completely get me to drop it, they announced the second half (after an already shit first half, thanks to Kamachi) would NOT be an anime-original arc as they’ve traditionally done and instead be the arc that also made me drop the manga entirely; the “lets spend pages talking about raping Mikoto with dream cards” arc because they finally feel like cashing in on sexualizing the shit out of everyone rather than just Kuroko and adding in pointless characters like the ones from S who were barely relevant as main cast members now just to have them be sluts all the time. The story sucked and then the next half was going to suck even more. Just awful. Fuck Railgun T and any further seasons or volumes of manga after this point.
Runners-up: (there’s a lot of them, sadly) Deca-dence, Sing Yesterday For Me, Ikebukuro West Gate Park, Somali To Mori no Kamisama, Majo no Tabitabi.
24 Frames Per Second 