OK, what’s the worst anime you’ve ever seen, and why was it so awful?
I’ll nominate an adult anime, “Kirei” from the Cool Devices series. Two tourist women are kidnaped, muchly raped and then killed by natives. The end. Oh, except two butterflies escape from the pit where they’re tossed to their doom, symbolizing that their souls are reunited. Big fucking deal, this anime sucked BIG TIME.
Technically, the worst anime is Pure Love, in which the creators experimented with using CGI game graphics to make the anime faster and cheaper. Did. Not. Work. Plus, extraneous character pop up, do things that make little or no sense, and then disappear. Sucky, sucky, sucky. “Secret of Green Tentacle” had the same problem.
Worst subtitling comes in “Naked Nuns” – the subtitles read as if they were translated by Babelfish.
I’m sure there are other really bad anime out there. Name names! Doesn’t have to be adult anime – that’s just what I’m mostly familiar with. With regular anime I’vje only watched the really good stuff – Cowboy Bebop, Spirited Away, Last Exile, that kinda thing.
Macross 7. The other Macross series, ars far as I’ve seen, are pretty good. This comes after the Robotech saga, so it’s not really classic anime. The storyline is just weird. One of the main characters wants to change the world with his singing, and goes into battle, piloting a fighter with a guitar, and he avoids actual fighting at any cost. The way the story is laid out is weird too. And yet for some reason I’m still watching it :smack: However, I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody unless they’re a Macross buff. And maybe not even then.
Hanaukyo Maids. It’s not that the show is bad. It isn’t. It’s not anything, really. A kid inherits his uncle’s mansion in the countryside, full of beautiful young maids. And he’s allergic to girls. Except for this one maid. That’s as close to a plot as the show gets. Each epsiode is just one wacked out adventure after another. Actually, adventure is too strong of a word. Happening, that’s it. And the series just…ends. Right when a plot starts to form.
And I know people will hate me for this but…Ghost in the Shell, the movie. It’s good to start out with, but after a few good action sequences and a bit of intrigue, the movie just peters out. There’s scenes five minutes long where characters are talking, and nothing is moving except their mouths. There’s no expression on their faces whatesoever. And at the end with Motoko and the Pupptermaster, I’m just screaming “Get it over with!”. Good idea, but it bored me to tears in places. (The series, on the otherhand, is an utter masterpiece, IMHO)
The Dragonball series. It is utter crap, and not just utter crap, but the same utter crap in every episode! Here’s a synopsis:
Big bad guy shows up, kicks everyone’s ass.
One person finds some kind of inner strength/amulet/new skill.
They then go back and kick the big bad guy’s ass in a big fight that takes fifteen minutes and averages three seconds per frame.
Granted, sometimes the storyline takes more than one episode to pan out, but it’s still the same freakin’ thing! And everything about it is bad! The voice acting is bad, the animation is bad, the stories are bad, I don’t see how this is so popular. From what I understand, it’s more of a children’s anime, yet in America it seems to have been adopted by the crowd that seem to insist that everything abut Japan is so much cooler and I just don’t get the beauty of anime. You know what I get the beauty of? Things that have beauty!
I think you may be thinkging of Dragonball Z. The manga was better; and the earlier Dragonball TV series was certainly much different, although aimed at an even younger audience. Z did have many good moments, though. I can hardly say its the worst.
Now, the actual worst one I can think of its “Neo Ranga”. I watched it. It made no sense. Giant monster that doesn’t get into huge fights. Interesting characters that never actually got to do anything. The voice over narrator kept saying things in total contradiction to the story that seemed to be developing. (“Girl YYY is the nice sister who loves everyone”… over the next three episodes she keeps muttering about having her pet giant monster kill everyone in Tokyo -What the hell was that about?) Worse yet, nothing ever really happened. After 2 disks I gave it up.
“Noir”, while certainly not the worst, has some awful cliches that make it very, very hard to take the series seriously. The main characters (well, Kirika and Chloe) run around doing some truly ridiculous things; they should get capped in five minutes. They win the fights because, apparently, they are immune to bullets. I remember one scene in episode 16 or so: about 10-15 Tong thugs with guns coming down the steps of a huge temple complex with another character hostage. Kirika (16 y.o. at most) waiting for them with a pistol. Chloe is waiting in the scrub off the side of the road: OK, not the worst set up I’ve seen. Somehow, though, Kirika manages not to get shot by the dozen or guys shooting at her very nearly point blank, despite taking no cover and advancing toward them slowly, firing nothing more than, at best, a .45 caliber pistol. And they certainly got a lot of shots off; it shows many of the thugs pointing and shooting at her repeatedly, yet mysteriously missing.
heres the setup:
(kirika)>>15 ft.>>at least a dozen goons with a hostage
Kai Doh Maru. Now it looks really good (same team that did Blood the Last Vampire, but it makes no sense at all. It plays like an episode of a long running series with no character development, and everybody’s got at least 2 different names, further confusing the issue. I’ve watched it twice now, and am still none the wiser.
Honestly I think I have avoided the truly bad stuff and I am excluding hentai from this because that’s just too easy.
For me, it doesn’t get any worse than the obtuse-for-obtusenesses sake Neon Geneisis Evangelion. Even without the nihilistic ending this series sucked.
I’ll preface this by saying I haven’t seen very many animes, but the one that stands out as the dumbest was one I saw recently while ducking into the anime room at Gen Con to have a rest for a few minutes.
I didn’t get the name of it, but it featured a young girl who was some kind of super-nurse (I think she flew around on a giant hypodermic needle) with some sort of furry animal as a sidekick. It seemed to me that she and her nemesis (another girl) spent half the “plot” (what there was of it) comparing their relative breast sizes. The nemesis had big ones, and the super-nurse didn’t.
What little else there was of the “plot” had something to do with the super-nurse (in alter ego form–she was some kind of girl pop star or singer or something) getting mad because she’d signed on to be a model at a computer show and they ended up dressing her in a dorky-looking computer suit while her nemesis (also in alter-ego form) got to wear the slinky sexy costume.
The dialog in this thing was so insipid it was funny.
I also think Dragon Ball Z stinks, but that’s only because I despise the art style. I’ve never been able to watch it long enough to know if I could stand the plot.
Nurse Witch Komugi. From what I’ve seen, I’m thinking it’s supposed to be a parody. Not that it succeeds at that either, but it does explain some of the more eregious stupidity.
Yeah, that’s the one! I didn’t think it was when I saw the title (I thought it was “Magical Nurse (something)” but then I realized that maybe there were different translations. Either way, that’s it.
“Secret of The Green Tenticles” is from a company named MMG. There first release “Sailor and the Seven Balls” was quite good, but I advise you to avoid “Star Ballz” and “Anime Fiction” at all costs.
Anybody who watches “Cool Devices” deserves what they get. :o
FLCL wierdness for weirdness sake, just plain incomprehensible.
I must be a closet soap opera fan because I’m really enjoying Evangelion (so far). The fan service is great too!
Oh, come on, Kirei was bad but some of the Cool Devices were pretty good. Frex, “Fallen Angel Rina” seemed to me to be an excellent treatment of the life of Debbie Reynolds, with a few more powerful dramatic moments, like the one where she kneels on the floor of a dirty movie theater and pees like a dog at the patrons’ command, and the bondage gangbang – things that may not have actually happened to Debbie Reynolds, but the theme of a once-successful celebrity brought low by financial mistakes on the part of her family and forced to take all sorts of gigs she wouldn’t have taken before, is still there. I could see Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera doing this one to great effect.
And then there’s Slave Warrior Maya. Great SF story, has one of the most dramatic scenes ever show. Slave Warrior Maya is chained naked in Lord Garius’ dungeon, and when a friend and possible rescuer comes by to see her (Lord Garius’ dungeons apparently have an open-door policy) she’s been so overcome by the alien brain-thing that the bad guys have put inside her vagina that she can’t stop sucking on the giant cock that they’ve transformed her clitoris into. She actually turns to her friend and says “I can’t stop sucking” and returns her mouth to its previous activity.
My vote would go to Di Gi Charat (obviously my tastes in anime are slightly different than the OP’s). Having watched earlier shows by the company, I thought that this couldn’t be too bad. I mean, the mascot was cute, wasn’t it?
Ugh, the series was awful. The voices made you want to choke yourself to spare yourself the agony, the plot more or less went nowhere, and the producers decided that it’d be great fun to give every character a verbal tic that drove me insane. All the “background” characters were drawn as (literally) vaguely formed white blobs, making the show even more difficult to watch. Oh, and I felt all the jokes fell flat. I had to force myself to finish the entire episode.
Of course, from what I read, this show is extremely popular in Japan, which probably tells me that it just goes to show. Moreover, I caught clips from the English dub of the show, which, for whatever reason, was far easier on my ears than the Japanese version (I tend to watch subbed and dubbed shows interchangably, and don’t usually have a preference unless the dub just made a really big mess of things). But even awesome voices isn’t going to convince me to come anywhere near that… thing.
I’d have no problem nominating Project A-Ko, except that there’s a small part of my brain saying that it has to be a parody.
Synopsis: A spece battle. Then, Japanese schoolgirl A-Ko wakes up, late for school. Obligatory dressing scene. She runs at superspeed through the city to school, knocking a US agent (drawn as a bizarre apelike being) aside. At school, she has to shepherd her spoiled-brat little sister through class. Said sister has tantrums and a whine that would penetrate ten metres of granite. A-Ko somehow pisses off the Spoiled Bitch of the school, who shows up in increasingly-elaborate battle equipment to fight her, but is defeated every time by A-Ko’s Pure Strength. Eventually, aliens invade. By this point I had mostly tuned out, because Little Sister’s whine was like ice daggers through my skull.
Yes, the A-Ko series is meant to be a parody. And C-Ko isn’t A-Ko’s sister, she’s a classmate whom everyone seems to have a crush on, except for A-Ko who can barely stand her, so of course A-Ko is the only one who C-Ko has a crush on. (Even their names are a joke. Ko is Japanese for girl, so their names are literally Girl A, Girl B, and Girl C.)
Three of the worst anime I can think of right off the top of my head:
Golgo 13: The Professional: It’s an older anime with a dated, unattractive look and minimal plot. The hero is an emotionless um, assassin? detective? I forget. All I remember of the movie is it went like this: someone is messily murdered, Golgo has passionless sex. Someone else is messily murdered, Golgo has more passionless sex. Blood, sex, murder, sex = boring and not very sexy.
Angel Cop: More macho men and bloody violence, didn’t watch long enough to see if there was any sex.
Megami Paradise: Imagine Wonder Woman’s homeland populated with scantily clad anime babes and oodles of fan service. I think there was a sliver of a plot, but all I remember is the bouncing boobs.
I’m not against anime sex or violence, but I appreciate it better in a framework of plot, with actual characters, and a point.
I mistook the title to mean “Worst anime you’ve seen – and why (you saw them)”, and was hoping I’d finally get an explanation for why people are willing to sit through episode after episode of an anime series they don’t like! I can understand wanting to give something a fair shake, but it seems that many anime fans I know have endured hours and hours of their least-favorite series.
I personally sat through three episode of Blue Gender, but I had a reason. I was a member of a science-fiction/fantasy club in college that signed up with some American anime distributer that would send out loaner copies of anime videos if you agreed to fill out opinion cards about them. Those of us that showed up for the screening quickly realized that this series sucked, but we endured the whole tape so we could properly rip it to shreds. I remember we all had to turn the cards over and write on the back to fit in all our criticisms.
The three episodes we got were the middle three of the series so perhaps we missed some important backstory, but basically it was about a bunch of soldiers who went to some other planet to fight monsters. . .that looked like giant vulvas with legs and teeth. And I don’t mean they were kind of vulva-like, I mean they were anatomically correct. Their “weak spot” was obviously the clitoris.
Everything else was dull and unmemorable. Whatever the plot was it was boring, the characters were unlikeable, and the animation was pretty poor – there was such extensive use of still frames that a lot of it wasn’t “animated” at all. That all would have been bad enough. But mostly it was just seemingly endless scenes of the soldiers shooting giant vulva monsters in the clitoris. I suppose that sort of thing might appeal to some types, but I hope never to meet them.
Nitpick: “ko” is Japanese for “child”, not “girl”, but it is also an extremely common ending for female names. So that’s not quite a literal translation, although it’s close enough.
I’m sure I’ve seen worse but all I can really remember at this point is X
There are two factions one wants to kill all humans and turn the world over to nature the other um…doesn’t. They fight but the good dragons make shields so when they fight they don’t destroy the city around them. This however doesn’t really help because the good guys always always always get killed. Then the shield falls and the damage that happened during the fight carries over into the real world and all the buildings fall down. Now this sounds far more interesting then it is. And it’s repeated over and over again.
Now the main crux of the story is that one character (don’t remember his name) is ‘god’s avatar on earth’ and has to choose between the two sides. Instead he spends 90% of the movie whining about how he’s not involved and how he’s just trying to save his friends. I wanted to choke the guy. If a person is god’s avatar and something like the destruction of mankind is going on you can bet it involves you already! Then to really annoy me his best friend turns out to be his mirror that has to make the opposite decision that he does and has all of his powers. This boggles my mind you’d think god’s avatar’s decision would be a little more final then that. It also turns all the philosophy in the movie to crap. Why are the bad guys seemingly trying to seduce his best friend? If he’s going to have to choose the opposite anyway just lock the guy in the closet he has no choice if he becomes your ally or your enemy so why bother trying to seduce him? They throw a whole bunch of philosophy around just as a set up for another retarded fight.
You missed the most important part: detailed explanations of everyone’s stats.
Uh oh, the pointy haired guy only has 40,000 power! How will he ever defeat the bald green guy with 60,000 power? Ooh, I know! He’ll float up in the sky, get a constipated look on his face, and charge up 20,000 more power!
I saw most of the series. Solid enough, particulary for a mecha anime that resembles starship troopers on certain levels, but not as good towards the end. The last episode was a bit disappointing.
Anyway, the basic plot is this:
In the near future, earth is overrun by a kind of giant Bug called the Blue, which appears from out of nowhere. A space station is built to safety house the scientists and the military. Every so often, they send down troopers on raids, with big Mecha suits.
The series begins when a young adult male is woken from cyrogenic suspension after being frozen for 30 years or so(before the blue arrived) after being dianosed with a rare illness. Apparently this illness makes such people better pilots for the mechas, so the military is bringining them back to the space station to be revived. His particular retrival goes wrong, as the team is ambushed and has to trek across half of asia to find an orbital shuttle(this takes up about 13 episodes). After that, the series is mostly them waging a military campaign to wipe out the blue, with some plot twists and such.
I’m assuming from the end credit that there was supposed to be some sex and nudity as well, but Adult swim seems to have edited it out.
Outlanders.
Made no damned sense. I don’t see why the girl the random guy has a crush on can have an entire sword-fight in a towel, but it only falls off when he “accidentally” stumbles onto her afterwards. That, and I think it’s stupid that he can all of a sudden speak her incomprehensible language after she kisses him.
I’m going to put another vote in for the **Project A-Ko ** series. That said, I kind of like the idea of invasions from space being fought off simultaneously by Japanese high school students and the military. I mean, how many super-power animes take place in a high school? These kids will be instrumental in turning back any alien invaders we come across, I’m sure of it.
