You’ll note that I’ve put a question mark at the end of this article’s title. That’s because there is no such thing as an objectively worst anime. Different people are going to hate different things. Some highly-praised or popular shows will end up on someone’s list of unmentionables. I, for example, don’t think Dragon Ball Z is particularly good, but it is beloved by many people.
This list isn’t about those sorts of anime, however. No, this is a list of anime that often features on the blacklists of many anime forums and websites. I just felt that 99% of this site is me heaping praise on one of my favorite things, so there should be at least one list showing off how bad things can get.
From Bad to Worst
Before we start this little slog through the mud, know that I have left out any explicit adult titles from this list. The world of hentai has plenty of absolutely atrocious titles that really are trash, but I don’t even want to point people towards that sort of content. So these are regular, mainstream shows that happen to be examples of anime done wrong. That being said, almost all of these shows have defenders, and you might like some of them too. Hey, it’s fine – we all have a few duds in our collections.
Hanoka
This show tells the incredibly dull tale of a planet where alien creatures and humans battle. The aliens want the humans gone, and so on.
This is a short-form anime that has the “distinction” of being the first anime made using Adobe Flash. If you don’t know, that’s a rapid web animation package with a distinctively cheap look. As a result, Hanoka looks absolutely terrible. It’s not just that the actual art looks cheesy and cheap, it’s that they cut so many corners with the “animation”, eschewing the traditional frame-by-frame method in favor of an awkward asset-manipulation thing. It makes it look like something made with paper puppets.
The story and just about everything else about this show is junk. I don’t even want to write about it anymore, but if you have a stronger stomach than I do you can get through all 12 episodes in under 40 minutes. Less, if you skip the intro sequences.
Wonder Momo
The 2014 Wonder Momo (momo means “peach”) anime is based on a 1987 beat-‘em-up game with mild fan-service. It was a parody of other similar games and shows at the time. You play Momo, who attacks aliens with her kicks (which also exposes her underwear). She can build up power to become Wonder Momo, who then kicks slightly more butt.
The anime is another short-form show where our heroine is given powers by an alien with green skin. Now she can transform into Wonder Momo and defend the Earth! Since the anime is ostensibly also meant to be a parody, a lot of its weaknesses make sense. The problem is that it doesn’t play up the parody angle well enough, leading to a show that’s just, well, dumb. Momo is an unamusing moron and I guess keeping each episode to only a few minutes was one of the few good ideas implemented in this show. I certainly couldn’t stand to be in Momo’s presence for 20 minutes at a time.
Dark Cat
In the anime world direct to video isn’t the swear word it is in the West. In fact, OAVs, or original video animation, were often much better in terms of quality when compared to anime produced for broadcast. That doesn’t mean that there are no direct-to-video anime that aren’t utter garbage.
Dark Cat is probably the most notorious example. It has all the hallmarks of a trashy, tasteless hentai but without any actual sex or nudity. It tells a really weird and haphazard story of two cats that can change into humans. They have to deal with the mysterious vanishing of people across Japan, specifically a case that happens in the very school they attend.
What follows is a horrible attempt at horror, if there is such a thing. Dark Cat is gross, nonsensical, and ugly to look at. I have no idea why it was even made, but it now stands forever as one of the most notoriously bad titles to ever see the light of day.
Pupa
Pupa is another anime meant to be a horror masterpiece, but in trying to adapt the manga it is based on, the creators of the Pupa anime ended up getting into the anime history books for an entirely different reason. Once again, one big mistake is turning the source material into short form episodes. So instead of being a horror anime that builds tension over time, it comes across as a confusing mess with messed-up pacing and rather awful animation.
The story deals with a brother and a sister who are the survivors of an extremely abusive dad. After being completely abandoned they manage to get infected with a virus that turns the little sister into a voracious flesh eater and the brother into a human with regenerative powers. You can probably tell that this is basically an excuse to have one person horribly and painfully eat another person.
That’s not the worst idea for a horror show, of course, but trying to do it in episodes that have a four minute runtime is a bad, bad move.
School Days
This anime is based on a visual novel, which is not uncommon. What is this visual novel about? It’s a slice-of-life show that follows young Makoto Ito, who is infatuated with a girl he shares the train with. This develops into a weird awkward love triangle, and not in the funny way it does in good anime.
The show and characters are actually pretty messed up and the whole thing is sort of rotten. By all accounts, the game that it was originally based on was actually pretty good and sold plenty of copies, but the twisted and infuriating characters didn’t quite survive the trip to TV.
Green Green
I had the misfortune of having to watch the first episode of Green Green some years ago. It’s based on a hentai game, which means that you’d expect it to be raunchy. The show itself is not pornographic, but rather just adult-oriented. That’s not a problem in itself; I can appreciate some adult humor as much as the next person. The real problem with Green Green is that it has a pornography plot with all the pornography stripped out. People don’t watch pornography for the writing and Green Green is a great example of why.
If you must know, the story centers on two boarding schools – one all-male and the other all-female. The schools are thinking of merging into a single co-ed school. As you can imagine, this is a pretense to depict impossibly-horny boys trying to get with any girl they can in the most idiotic fashion possible. All the characters are hateful, none of them are funny, and, quite honestly, the sexual parts of the story that remain are just gross. Kill it with fire.
Final Fantasy Unlimited
I am a HUGE Final Fantasy fan. I own almost all the games, including plenty of the spinoffs. I own the soundtracks too, especially if it’s a record by the Black Mages. I even saw the premier of Final Fantasy: Spirits Within, despite the movie having 0% Final Fantasy in it and having nearly bankrupted Squaresoft.
So I was pretty excited when a Final Fantasy anime dropped on my lap. Finally, here was a show that would capture everything that made the games so great. Nope, not even close. The show has more Final Fantasy references than the motion picture, to be sure. However, it captures none of the spirit that makes something a Final Fantasy title.
Seriously, how hard can it be? Just have the epic fantasy plot. It’s melodramatic garbage, but that’s what we want! Make it beautiful; make the characters special and attractive. You people practically invented pretty-boy JRPGs, for goodness sake. Instead, we have this jumbled show with ugly characters that don’t really match the backgrounds. It’s boring, makes very little sense, and has no real reason to carry the Final Fantasy brand.
Bikini Warriors
I did not choose to watch Bikini Warriors. Instead, a friend who heard I was into anime picked up a copy of the show as a gift to me. I hope he never reads this, but I was unable to get through the first episode. Why? Because this is one of the most awful shows that I have ever watched.
The anime is derived from the original Bikini Warriors material which, as it happens, consists of a series of figures based on character designs by various artists. This is basically like someone taking a bunch of existing toys and crafting a story out of it. However, unlike the original Transformers cartoon, this did not result in a beloved and cherished classic. Instead we got an amazingly stupid show where four warriors in bikini armor get into all sorts of very stupid yet completely unfunny “sexy” troubles.
To be fair, the show does not take itself very seriously, but there’s a point where even being self-aware doesn’t excuse being poorly-written dreck.
Mars of Destruction
While many people would fight to defend some of the shows on this list, no one is going to defend Mars of Destruction. This show was released back in 2005 by the notorious Yoshiteru Satou. It follows four characters who must fight creatures known as “ancients” and who appear around Tokyo some time after a mission to Mars fails in a spectacular fashion.
On a technical level it’s hard to imagine someone making something as bad as this by accident. You get the feeling that the show is actually mocking your intelligence. The animation is awful, with the studio taking shortcuts to an extreme level. There isn’t even any original music in the soundtrack. Rather, they just used classical music in the public domain. The Foley is similarly awful.
To give you an idea of how bad this show is, at the time of this writing it ranked almost at number 10,000 on MyAnimeList. So, in other words, there are over 9000 shows people would rather watch than this 19-minute crapfest.